The University of Arizona Press

January 13, 2025

This month, we’re highlighting a few of our open access books on our Open Arizona platform. These books are available to read for free!

In its earliest iteration funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, titles published in Open Arizona explored the histories and experiences of Indigenous and Latino groups in the southwestern United States, foundational areas of the Press’s long publishing history. In June 2022, thanks to a grant from the NEH, the Press was able to expand offerings in Open Arizona by adding twenty backlist titles in archaeology to the platform. These titles expand our understandings of the ancient Southwest and demonstrate the University of Arizona Press’s long-standing excellence in the field of archaeology. In Spring 2023, the Press published its first simultaneous print and open-access frontlist title.

In covering fishes in arid lands west of the Mississippi Valley, Battle Against Extinction, edited by W. L. Minckley and James E. Deacon, contributors provide a species-by-species appraisal of their status and potential for recovery, bringing together in one volume nearly all of the scattered literature on western fishes to produce a monumental work in conservation biology. They also ponder ethical considerations related to the issue, ask why conservation efforts have not proceeded at a proper pace, and suggest how native fish protection relates to other aspects of biodiversity planetwide. Their insights will allow scientific and public agencies to evaluate future management of these animal populations and will offer additional guidance for those active in water rights and conservation biology. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

Discovering the Fishes of Western North America
The Fauna

There are approximately 810 species of native fishes breeding in fresh waters of North America north of (but including) the Río Grande de Santiago and Río Pánuco basins of south­ern Mexico (see contributions in D.S. Lee et al. 1980, 1983; and Hocutt and Wiley 1986). Excluding transcontinental forms, about 170 species occur west of the Rocky Mountain axis, compared with 600 in waters draining east from that divide. Only about 40 species (ca. 5% of the total fauna) occur both east and west of the continental divide; 28 ( 70%) of these live far to the north, attaining trans­continental distributions by passing through estuaries or coastal seas. Evolution of the de­pauperate western fauna has been tied to a long history of disruptive geologic and clima­tic events, all of which substantially reduced the diversity, availability, and reliability of aquatic habitats (G. R. Smith 198 r b; Minck­ley et al. 1986).

The modern western ichthyofauna is further characterized by many endemic subfaunas, most of which also result from geologic and climatic disruptions of aquatic habitats (R. R. Miller 1959; G. R. Smith 1978). The smallest of these are single endemic species restricted to springs, streams, or individual lakes of en­dorheic intermontane basins. Larger, more complex aquatic systems often have two or more subfaunas represented, reflecting the fact that modern river drainages commonly comprise two or more original sub-basins brought together by geologic events (McPhail and Lindsey 1986; Minckley et al. 1986; M. L Smith and Miller 1986). For example, the upper Colorado River watershed has a subfauna distinct from that in its lower part (Gila River basin), while distinctive “middle” Colorado River fishes (R. R. Miller 1959; R. R. Miller and Hubbs 1960) are associated with another, formerly independent, system separated prehistorically from both the upper and lower parts.

At the largest scale, major drainage basins have few fish species in common, and those which do usually share species that: (1) can travel through seawater, (2) occupy montane tributaries subject to interbasin stream piracy, or (3) are confined to areas of high latitude but low relief, where divides between basins are weakly developed. All these factors aided and abetted the splendid isolation of western fishes, not only from related species in other parts of the continent but just as frequently from sister taxa within the region.

Discovery and Description: Geography and Chronology

Naturalists working before 1800 described only 20 (13.2 %) of the 151 western American fish species recognized by Lee et al. (1980) in their Atlas of Freshwater Fishes of the United States and Canada. Most were circumpolar in distribution and important for food or com­merce, caught from the great coastal fisheries that were then (as now) exploited in subarctic seas. Most have type localities in Europe or the Soviet Union. About 30% of them were named by Linnaeus (1758), the father of modern taxonomy, in Systema Na­turae, and 40% by Linnaeus’s colleague Johann Julius Walbaum (1792), who edited Peter Ar­tedi’s Genera Piscium: Ichthyologiae Pars III and added descriptive footnotes. A handful of other authors described the remainder.

From 1801 to 1850, sixteen more taxa (10.6%) were named. A few were from the northwestern United States, but most (75°/o) were again collected farther north in associa­tion with the British Hudson’s Bay Company and expeditions to locate the fabled North­west Passage (Dymond 1964), a fictitious waterway purportedly connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and thus providing a prime trade route to the Orient. The search for this passage was fueled by dreams of historical fame, for the first navigation of such a route would achieve a reward of twenty thousand pounds sterling offered by Great Britain. John Richardson described nine fish species in his Fauna Boreali-Americana (1836) after serving as a naval surgeon and naturalist with Sir John Franklin on two separate searches for the passage. Fortunately, Richardson did not participate in Franklin’s third expedition, which disappeared with all hands in 1843. Nearly fifty additional expeditions searched for them, but never a trace was found.