What Should Your State Fish Be? Improving Public Awareness of Endemic Fishes in the United States
The United States boasts an exceptionally diverse fauna of freshwater fishes, with many unique and regionally endemic species. Unfortunately, range reduction and extinction of endemic species, combined with the introduction and spread of nonnative species, is homogenizing these unique regional faunas (Rahel 2000). Given the relative obscurity of nongame fishes to the vast majority of the public, increasing exposure is essential to broad public support of freshwater biodiversity conservation (Harrison and Stiassny 1999; Monroe et al. 2009).