DACE IN A TRICKLE

      I was walking along a hardly-used road in the wooded Welsh Mountains of eastern Lancaster County one afternoon in early June to enjoy nature.  I casually looked into a shallow trickle of clear water flowing by that road and saw a motion that looked like a small fish.  I thought no fish could live in that one-foot-across rivulet, but I looked at the spot where I saw the movement with an eight power pair of binoculars.  Immediately, I was treated to good looks of three male and one larger, chubbier female black-nosed dace cavorting in that trickle.  The slimmer, two-and-a-half-inch males had orange front fins and a deep-yellow stripe above and below a black bar on each side of each male.  The female only had a black stripe on each of her flanks.  I knew then that the cavorting in the clear shallows was the little fish spawning eggs.

     I thought those dace got into that tiny trickle when it was bigger after pouring rain.  And they might get trapped if a drought occurs and the trickle dries.  But they could escape downstream during another heavy or prolonged rain.

     Male black-nosed dace are pretty during the June breeding season.  And the bodies of both genders are streamlined for life in currents.  Small schools of them face upstream and undulate from side to side to hold their place in the water as they watch for invertebrates { their food}to come along in the current.

     There would be no other kinds of fish present in that tiny trickle.  Nor any other kinds of predators, except purple grackles, to eat the miniscule, young fish when they hatch in that trickle.  They should do well in that little rivulet, except for a possible drought.  Fish in that small a run of water risks drying and dying in a drought.                       

     Though dace regularly live year around in small, flowing waterways, I was surprised they would attempt to spawn in the little trickle I visited that afternoon.  Most life forms are adaptable and push to make do in less than ideal habitats.  And so it was with those spawning black-nosed dace in a running trickle of clear water.   

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