U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials want comments from the public on a draft plan for a road to recovery for the small stream fish, the laurel dace.
The laurel dace, which occupies waters in the Tennessee River Basin in Tennessee, was listed as endangered in 2011. It is found in three Cumberland Plateau creek systems in Bledsoe, Rhea and Sequatchie counties. Historically, the dace was found in seven streams but now it is found in only six.
“The draft plan for laurel dace provides a road to recovery that the Service and its partners can take together,” wildlife service southeast regional director Cindy Dohnmer said in a news release. “We are working closely with Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, Natural Resources Conservation Service and Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute on several recovery efforts to benefit this fish, such as surveys and improvements to stream crossings.”
Threats to the laurel dace include land use activities that affect silt levels, temperature or hydrologic processes of these small tributaries; invasive species including sunfishes, basses or hemlock woolly adelgid; naturally small population size and geographic range, and climate change.
The goal for this recovery plan is to conserve and recover populations of laurel dace to the point that listing under the Endangered Species Act is no longer necessary. In the dace’s draft recovery plan, actions are described for the species’ conservation. Criteria are established for downlisting the fish to threatened and delisting it, and a timeframe and cost are estimated for achieving recovery actions.
Although the estimated cost and time period required for downlisting laurel dace to threatened status cannot be determined as yet, the service estimates that the initial five years of implementing this recovery plan will cost $1,225,000.