With golden to green bodies, bright red fins and distinctive black zig-zag lines on their flanks, aquarists have long recognized the rainbowfish from Running River in the Burdekin catchment of northern Queensland as unique. As part of our groups research into this and other enigmatic rainbowfish populations PU and MH discovered that another rainbowfish had been introduced upstream of where the native Running River Rainbowfish lives and was invading downstream! This would almost certainly result in extinction of this population through hybridisation. Live fish were brought into captivity for conservation purposes while we conducted detailed genetic work on various rainbowfish populations from northern Queensland. This work demonstrated that Running River Rainbowfish is different and efforts to compare these populations morphologically are moving forward with MH and GA.
PU established a crowd funding effort in conjunction with the Australia New Guinea Fishes Association to raise money for genetic testing of wild fish to ensure that all broodstock were pure fish. With help from LB, CA and JS breeders were matched to maximise genetic variability. Fish are being bred at University of Canberra, then shipped up to JS and DB at James Cook University to be grown out prior to release in spring 2016. PU, ML and JS conducted additional fieldwork to examine two tributaries to Running River which had the best potential as translocation sites and to bring back additional wild fish. Rainbowfish were not present in either creek and large waterfalls are present which would keep these populations isolated from the introduced rainbowfish.
This talk provides an overview of the efforts so far to save the Running River Rainbowfish and to inform ASFB members of where this collaborative conservation effort is heading next.