Rio de Dios

Grocery Lists and Suckermouths

32 “are akin to the flashfloods of the Southwestern deserts, which turn previously bone dry washes and river beds into a sea of raging torrents that sweeps away all in its path. The imminent arrival of these muddy floods in the chaparral is sometimes announced by a roaring sound, with the volume and quality of an approaching fast freight train.And there is no more time to escape than to move off the railroad tracks” (Quinn and Keeley, 2006). Staying with the iron horse image for a moment, in Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear there is a compelling image of a collapsing railroad bridge resulting from the river’s 1938 flood (Davis, 1998, pages 17 and 70), and another of a rowboat traversing Echo Park. This flood was minor compared with one in 1861-62, when the floodplain was a vast lake covering much of the coastal area of Los Angeles and a good portion of Orange County.According to Davis, one could have rowed from the Civic Center to Newport Beach along the alignment of what is now the Interstate 5. Los Angeles is a desert, but at times a powerfully wet one. grocery lisTs and suckermouThs It is becoming clear by now that the channelization and hardscaping of the river transmogrified it into an aquatic freeway—a cement-lined ditch that stretches like a half-hose, replacing the historic river riparian corridor. Inventories confirm this. From antelope to Zigadamus lilies (also called death camas), most native species could not survive. Just to note a few of the less conspicuous absences,a series of snail species plus the clam Anodonta (the California floater) 33 vanished.So too did half of the native fish fauna,replaced by more ecologically tolerant exotics. What has been lost? The California floater could live to be 100 years old and also was used by Native Americans as a food, tool, and decoration. But briefly in its development cycle it harmlessly attaches to the fins of native fish before returning to the sand to live out its life. If there are no fish, the clams cannot survive, and according to Camm Swift, “The only native species still in the Los Angeles River drainage are the Santa Ana sucker (Catostomus santaanae), Santa Ana speckled dace (Rhinichthys osculus), and the arroyo chub (Gila orcuttii).”All three occur together only in Big Tujunga Wash above Hansen Dam to about the BigTujunga Dam upstream (Swift et al.,1993). Rainbow trout, at least partly naturally reproducing, occur here as well but are probably mixed with hatchery stocks.Arroyo chub occur in a few other places such as above Pacoima Reservoir and in the Sepulveda flood control basin.The unarmored threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus williamsoni), both the migratory and non-parasitic species of lampreys (Lampetra spp.), the steelhead trout (Onchorynchos mykiss, related to salmon), as well as at least one species of freshwater shrimp have all been gone since the 1930s or ’40s (Swift, pers. comm.). Nature as open tomb indeed. What has come instead? Mutts and goldfish, same as anywhere. The exotics just in Big Tujunga alone include bluegill, green sunfish, threadfin shad,fathead minnow, red shiner, mosquito fish, black bullhead, and, yes, goldfish. In the main river in the Griffith Park area one can find carp, tilapia (Oreochromis sp.), and apparently, since the early 1990s, a species of “pleco,” referring to the aquarists’ shorthand 34 for Plectostomus. However, the taxon is actually Pterygoplichthys cf. disjunctivus according to the authority on these loricariids (suckermouth armored catfishes),a voracious organism endemic to South America and adjacent Central America (fide Jonathan Armbruster, Auburn University). They survive the winter by staying in the warm outflows of the Tillman Water Treatment Plant (Swift, pers. comm.). In reservoirs/lakes associated with the lower river it is extremely likely that predictable non-natives such as the redear sunfish, channel catfish, and black crappie occur, and there are a few estuarine invaders like striped mullet, California killifish, topsmelt, staghorn sculpin, and a couple of gobies that could be anticipated in the lowest reaches of the river.“Make it New,” the Modernists demanded of all art, but for people in my field, we plead,“Bring back the Originals.” Similarly, although 341 species of birds have been reported historically and collectively from the tributaries and the main course of the LosAngeles River itself (Garrett, 1993), most passerines now are concentrated in patches of successional riparian habitat...