Student recognized for effort to save fish species from extinction in Colorado River

Micah Feller walks into the greenhouse at West Career & Technical Academy and begins his daily routine.

The high school senior is meticulous in logging the weight of the hundreds of bonytail chub, an endangered fish species he’s helping raise so they can be released back into the Colorado River Basin. He checks the pH level of the water in the large tanks where the fish live, monitors their health, checks for unusual activity and feeds them.

“Conservation is important because it’s preserving a part of our own world,” Feller said. “If we lost a bunch of these species our future generations … wouldn’t be able to grow and see all this diversity happening.”

Feller’s efforts in conservation will be honored tonight with the “Environmental Helper of Year” award at the first High School Heroes show. The program, hosted by the Sun and Las Vegas Weekly, honors the remarkable acts of heroism, generosity, selflessness and community commitment among Southern Nevada youths.

Reid Marlowe, the greenhouse teacher at West Career & Technical Academy, was looking for a project students could tackle when they returned to school in 2020 following COVID-19 closures. The result: raising the endangered species.

Most of Marlowe’s 200 students are involved with the project, but there are eight students — led by Feller — who are dedicated to the project and who handle the fish and aquaculture system everyday, he said.

The class works with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife to bring back endangered fish species to the Colorado River.

“The bonytail chub is important to the ecosystem (because) they are a native species of the Colorado River,” Feller said. “Their population has been degraded to a point where they don’t have any sustaining populations in the wild.”

The aquaculture system has grown into two 350-gallon tubs for 300 bonytail chub, the most endangered of the large river fish in the Colorado Basin Watershed and native to Las Vegas.

“We have to balance the needs of human society that’s living in the desert southwest,” Marlowe said. “We need water in Las Vegas and in all the states … of the Colorado River for irrigation … but there are serious impacts.”

The school received the aquaculture system in the 2022-2023 school year and started raising bonytail chub the following year, Feller said. During the first few weeks of school, students cleaned the aquaculture system, cycled water through the system to flush out garbage, and established beneficial bacteria. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service brought the fish from Willow Beach Hatchery.

Aaron Frater, assistant project leader at Willow Beach Hatchery, worked with ecological services at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Las Vegas to create a public outreach and display permit to have an aquaculture system at West Career & Technical Academy.

“Most people don’t know anything about (bonytail chub),” Frater said. “Giving kids a chance to actually work hands-on with them makes them a little bit more invested in endangered species.”

Frater and Marlowe worked to modify the aquaculture system to use city water to filter out the chlorine and chloramine to just use activated carbon, Frater said. There is also a reservoir tank of treated public water to make up for evaporation or when they do daily water changes.

The tanks have window panels that drain water into a barrel that goes into a bead filtration system to get rid of toxic particles and get recycled back into the aquaculture system, Feller said. When the fish are ready to be released back into the Colorado River, they are taken to the Willow Beach hatchery.

The tanks remain covered to limit algae growth, Feller said. Five millimeters are taken from the tanks everyday to test pH, ammonia, nitrate and nitrite levels, which are tracked on a spreadsheet. The temperature of the tanks is also noted on the spreadsheet.

Additionally, each fish is measured, Feller said. The goal is to get them to 20 grams each, but so far the heaviest has been 11 grams.

The species was on the brink of extinction, but the department started a broodstock, fish being used to spawn more fish, in the 1980s to save them, Frater said. The fish being raised at the school have had a 99% survival rate.

“Being able to even see this fish, or have this fish in a classroom, is almost a miracle,” Frater said.

The bonytail chub that were picked up from the school were brought to the hatchery, Frater said. The fish are tagged and measured before being released. The hatchery is expected to release up to 3,000 bonytail chub into the Colorado River in January.

“It’s such a cool thing to be able to actually look at these endangered species of fish,” Feller said. “Not just (to) read about them in a document or a news site.”

The river is a lot colder now, Feller said. It used to be a running rapid river with warm water that was the perfect environment for fish, but since the construction of dams, the water is colder and slower.

“It’s a bit of a conundrum,” Feller said. “Dams are pretty much required for the power generation, but … a possible solution would be to not rely as much on (dams) for power and rely more on our solar farms … to access that energy and help produce more energy so that dams are less needed.”

Another issue that affects the bonytail chub’s survival in the river is that they struggle to survive against predatory nonnative fish like striped-bass and flathead catfish, Frater said. But the need to include more native fish species in the river is a generational thing.

“Fish that are endemic to the river have trouble because they did not evolve for hundreds or thousands of millions of years to live in 55-degree river with dams,” Marlowe said. “The Colorado River is a very different river than it was 100 years ago.”

The project at West Tech has also benefited the fish and wildlife service, Frater said. It allowed the Youth Conservation Corps, an employment program that the U.S. Forest and Fish and Wildlife services offers to high school students to learn more about environmental stewardship, to be implemented at the Willow Beach Hatchery, where students were able to work at the hatchery over the summer.

“We’re stuck with the same biologists from the ’80s and ’90s,” Frater said. “We need some fresh minds … and what we could possibly do to save the species and actually have it successfully reproducing in the wild again.”

Along with the aquaculture system, there is a display tank with three of the endangered fish species of the Colorado River, Feller said. The display tank raises awareness about endangered species in the river and includes the Colorado pikeminnow, razorback sucker and bonytail chub.

The school is only allowed to raise bonytail chub, but it would be interesting for there to be different tanks with other endangered fish species for students to learn the differences between the species, Feller said. For instance, in one tank there would be bonytail chub and in another razorback sucker.

“We’ve shown the Department of Fish and Wildlife that we are responsible,” Feller said. “We can do this project.”

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