What are they doing down there? Further musings about the mysterious blind catfishes under San Antonio, Texas

Authors: Dean Hendrickson

Year: 2023

Abstract

Satan eurystomus (Widemouth Blindcat) and Trogloanis pattersoni (Toothless Blindcat) were finally proposed by US Fish & Wildlife (USFWS) for listing as Endangered on Aug. 22, 2023, with public comments accepted through October 23, 2023 (http://www.regulations.gov - search for rulemaking FWS-R2-ES-2023-0069). This proposal is likely to be controversial, given that the 2.6 million humans in the San Antonio metro area are mostly ignorant of the existence of these catfishes living a few hundred meters under their feet, but they are mostly very much aware that all of the water they consume comes from the aquifer in which the blindcats live. Mortality through entrainment in water wells is clearly a huge impact on both species. The listing proposal explores the very limited historical information about the species and threats to it, but compared to most every other species ever proposed for listing, these are far more difficult to study, and consequently very little is known about their basic biology. All wells are privately owned and almost no sampling of them has been allowed for decades. The resultant paucity of basic knowledge about the situation will clearly affect the decision-making process that will follow the comment period. This presentation will summarize the historical information used in the listing proposal, present diverse hypotheses about the life histories of both species and how they likely interact, explore how exploration of such hypotheses might shed further light on the decision-making process, and how the aquifer’s much broader biodiversity could facilitate decision-making in ways beneficial to both the species and the humans living above them, if systematic biological sampling could be implemented in the future.