“Subterranean rivers are magical, otherworldly places,” says Danté Fenolio, the vice president of the Center for Conservation and Research at San Antonio Zoo in Texas. A cave specialist, Fenolio heads deep underground to document the strange species there—like the Ozark cavefish, a sightless, ghostly, two-inch-long fish that lives only in the limestone cave systems of the Springfield Plateau in the Ozarks of Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. Pollution of the groundwaters these fish call home poses great risk to the sensitive creatures, who are federally listed as threatened. Fenolio studies them in northwestern Arkansas, which boasts the best-known population, and in other locations. Even as he pieces together their mysterious lives in the wild, he wants to learn to breed them in captivity, too, in case of emergency. Thanks to a new partnership with an Indigenous group in Oklahoma, in late winter and early spring he hopes to collect the Ozark cavefish that flooding events spit out into streams on Native lands and bring them to his lab for breeding—the next step in ensuring their future.
Southern Agenda