First Noticed by Naturalists…

In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, following the Gold Rush, naturalists began to study the fish of the Great Basin and Mojave watersheds of Utah, Nevada, Arizona and California. By the mid-1930’s, over 13 varieties of minnow-like fish had been caught, preserved and described.

Since these newly described fish were in the same taxonomic family with carp, minnows, and a common sports fish in Europe called chub, which they resembled, that name stuck. However, the Paiute Indians, indigenous to the Great Basin landscape on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, called the fish the “tuipag^I”. A major food source of this people group, the fish’s name became known as the “Tui Chub” in honor of the Paiute.

With the invention of genetic techniques in the late 1980’s, the Tui Chub of the Great Basin and Mojave have been classified into 13+ different subspecies. The Mohave tui chub (Siphateles bicolor mohavensis) is but one of those, the only native fish to Mojave River valley of the Mojave River watershed.