Only one calls it home…

Since the last ice age, based on the fossil record, and observations made as early as the late 1800’s, the Mojave River (to the west of Deppe Pond and Tui Slough) and it’s watershed, pictured below, only supported one native fish, the Mojave tui chub.


With the disappearance of the large interior lakes, Mohave tui chub would naturally became dependant the deeper pools in the slower flowing sections along the Mojave River above the upper or lower Narrows (pictured at left) along with the oxbow marshes, sloughs, and pools associated with artesian springs. These features would have been more common and less disturbed prior to the 1700’s. With the arrival of western civilization from the East coast around the mid 1800’s, land, water and recreational use of the watershed’s resources slowly made survival for the Mohave tui chub, in a desert river that normally contained an erratic base flow anyway, more difficult.