Susan J. Tweit is a scientist who evolved into an award-winning writer and radio commentator. She is the author of five books for adults, including Barren, Wild, & Worthless: Living in the Chihuahuan Desert, personal stories about the history and natural history of Southern New Mexico, The Great Southwest Nature Factbook, a browser's guide to nature in the Southwest, from A to Z, and Seasons in the Desert: A Naturalist's Notebook, from Chronicle books. She has also written two children's books, Meet the Wild Southwest: Land of Hoodoos & Gila Monsters (Alaska Northwest Books) and City Foxes, a picture book which was named one of the Outstanding Science Books for Children for 1998.
Her "Wild Lives" radio commentaries are heard three times weekly on KRWG-FM, Southern New Mexico public radio, and her columns run in the Las Cruces Sun News. Susan's essays and stories have appeared in Harrowsmith Country Life, New Mexico, Sierra, Cricket, Bloomsbury Review, and other magazines. She is the co-founder of Las Cruces' wildly popular - and fun - Border Book Festival. She is currently living in Colorado with her husband, Richard Cabe, and dog, Perdida Imelda.
Susan is a popular public speaker and leader of workshops. Her stories of our natural and human history have captivated a wide variety of audiences, including school classes, workshops, banquets, and professional meetings. As Bloomsbury Review put it, she brings the precision of a scientist and the passion of a poet, and is able to refocus readers' vision and ignite their imaginations.
Susan has a new web site! She invites you to come visit. Her books are available there, at local bookstores, or on-line through http://BarnesandNoble.com and http://Amazon.com (search by author for Susan Tweit).
Emory's "trout" were actually Chihuahua chub, a kind of fish unique to the Mimbres River and the once-connected Lago de Guzman basin in northern Mexico. (The Mimbres boasts no native trout species.)
When Chihuahua chub were first collected in 1851, the notes accompanying the fish mistakenly recorded the collection location as "Rio Mimbres, tributary of the Gila," so the little fish were given the genus name Gila, commemorating the Gila River. However, the Mimbres is not a tributary of the Gila, nor are Chihuahua chub found in the Gila River. So much for scientific accuracy!
The little fish with the mistaken scientific name were very nearly never seen again. Beginning in the late 1800s, mining, ranching, and irrigated farming wrought huge changes on the Río Mimbres. Over the past century, the river's normal flow shrunk to a shadow of its former self, some portions dried up altogether, and the dense woodland that once shaded its waters has nearly disappeared. Devastating floods have periodically scoured its channel bare. Chihuahua chub, the signature fish of the Mimbres, seemed to have vanished. Then in the summer of 1975, Bill Rogers, a high school teacher, rediscovered them in the Mimbres River.
Chihuahua chub are important far beyond their size. These diminutive fish adults grow to between 3 and 4 inches long, are a bellwether species, a miner's canary telling us about the health of the whole Mimbres Valley ecosystem.
The conditions that Chihuahua chub require in order to flourish are those of a healthy river system. Like trout, Chihuahua chub need a river with clear, cool water, with riverside vegetation shading the water and providing habitat for insects and other food, and a river bed with deep pools for hunting and sandy stretches for spawning. Chihuahua chub even look like small trout. Their backs and sides are brassy green; their belly is whitish, and they blush with orange during spawning season.
Unlike trout, Chihuahua chub can survive in small desert rivers such as the Mimbres. But even these unique fish cannot survive the effects of a denuded watershed, of river bed bulldozing and channelization, dewatering for irrigation, and the demise of the tangle of woodland that once kept the riveršs water a clement temperature and supplied insect food.
Fortunately for Chihuahua chub, the New Mexico Nature Conservancy took an interest in their plight and purchased a section of the upper Mimbres River containing the sole remaining population of these diminuitive native fish. Why care about Chihuahua chub? Because their fate is tied to the fate of the ecosystem in which they evolved, and that ecosystem is also home to humans. In a very real sense, Chihuahua chubs are like miner's canaries; if they die out, we are in trouble as well.