Red fins, blue eyes, can't lose

00:00 Eliza Herbert: Bush Heritage acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the places in which this podcast was recorded and in which we live, work and play. We recognise the enduring relationships they have with their lands and waters and pay our deepest respects to elders past and present.

00:18 Pippa Kern: I'm just walking across a big clay pan towards one of the springs. The ground is a kind of white chocolatey colour and you can hear it crunching under foot where it's dry. As I approach the spring, I can see the sun shimmering on the shallow water and the soil becomes a bit softer under foot, where it's in contact with water.

00:39 Eliza Herbert: That's freshwater ecologist Dr. Pippa Kern, on Edgbaston Reserve in Central Queensland. And she's describing what some scientists have called the most significant natural springs for global biodiversity in the Great Artesian Basin.

00:53 Pippa Kern: It's like a beautiful little garden in miniature and with lots of really tiny delicate plants and clear little pools of water. And as you peer into the spring, you can see little flashes of red fins and blue eyes as you catch glimpses of the fish swimming around.

01:16 Eliza Herbert: Water, deep in the mantle of the earth below, has travelled up to the surface of this arid, dry environment and in doing so has given rise to the evolution of more than two dozen species found nowhere else on the planet, one of which is the Red-finned Blue-eye. My name is Eliza Herbert, and on this episode of Big Sky Country, a podcast by Bush Heritage Australia, we're going deep into the Great Artesian Basin on a quest to save a little fish.

01:57 Pippa Kern: The Red-finned Blue-eye is three to three-and-a-half centimetres, which is probably about as long as a matchstick. The females can be, you know, just a little bit, you know, silvery and plain, some people might say, but the males are incredibly colourful and have these bright red fins that they flash around when they're trying to be territorial or show off to the females and the juveniles are really coloured as well.

02:20 Eliza Herbert: What's different about this fish than other fish? For starters, it's Australia's smallest freshwater fish. It is perilously close to extinction, and somehow it came to live in the middle of an incredibly dry, arid environment.

02:34 Pippa Kern: Edgbaston would have historically been a much wetter place and had maybe coastal or near coastal rivers and creeks that kind of ran across the property.

02:44 Eliza Herbert: The Red-Finn Blue-eyes are part of a group known as Blue-Eyes, and it is thought that their ancestors can be traced all the way back to Madagascar when it was part of the western side of India. Then around 90 million years ago, when the Gondwana supercontinent separated, these little fish went along for the ride and ended up in Australia in what is now known as Queensland.

03:06 Pippa Kern: And it's likely that as the continent dried out, these tiny little Red-fin Blue-eyes found refuge in the springs because they remained as wet environments when the rest of the water retreated. And then over time, they've evolved to have adaptations to allow them to live in these particular environments, and they've just persisted there through time.

03:25 Eliza Herbert: Throughout all this time, they went unnoticed by Western scientists. Until 1990, when about 7 populations of fish were found and documented in just a dozen springs on Edgbaston, which at the time was being run as an independent sheep and cattle station. When Bush Heritage purchased the reserve in 2008, only three populations remained.

03:46 Pippa Kern: And there were already impacts on some of those populations. So two of those three remaining populations subsequently went extinct, so we found ourselves with just one single population existing.

03:57 Eliza Herbert: When there's just one single population of a species left in the world, what do you do? Do you let it go extinct, or do you do everything you can to save it, including protecting the significant springs it calls home? To do that, we need to understand a little thing called the GAB, known formally as the Great Artesian Basin.

04:15 Pippa Kern: So Edgbaston and big parts of Queensland and parts of Northern Territory, South Australia sit on top of the Great Artesian Basin which is, you know, just this huge underground aquifer.

04:35 Eliza Herbert: so huge it could fill Sydney Harbour 130,000 times. Think of it like a vast underground water tank covering 1.7 million square kilometres from Cape York down to Dubbo, and then over west past Coober Pedy. It is one of the largest and deepest freshwater basins in the world.

04:51 Pippa Kern: You get these points where the pressure in the aquifer of the Great Artesian Basin is so intense it forces its way to the surface, and you get this upwelling of water and then that's where we get these springs occurring. 

05:12 Eliza Herbert: To gain a deeper insight into the country surrounding this part of the Great Artesian Basin, I spoke to Suzanne Thompson to hear some of her stories of the land. Suzanne Thompson is the Managing Director of YACHATDAC (The Yambanku Aboriginal Cultural Heritage and Tourism Development Aboriginal Corporation), which manages a 22 1/2 thousand acre property known as Turraburra, near Edgbaston.

05:25 Suzanne Thompson: So, I would probably start by saying (greeting in Iningai language). So, it is a good day today and I say it's me, Suzanne. I am big sister and this is our Iningai country that I am speaking on, which is my ancestral Traditional Custodial roots and connection. And today we are going to walk and talk together. We are made up with Desert Uplands region and then we are in Barcaldine and that escarpment country. That's the Aramaic range area. So that would then be the coastline of what we would consider as the ancient inland sea, which then takes you out where we know the ocean bed for which is the black soil country. 

06:15 Eliza Herbert: While I might look at this landscape and see a beautiful vista full of life and home to many species, for Suzanne and her people, they see much more than me. They see a cultural landscape which they have been part of for millennia.

06:28 Suzanne Thompson: And there's a whole lot of other things that connect back which you know, it's something that I know only through ceremony. And only through that learning of ceremony and law, would you understand the complete story. But in the cultural landscape, Edgbaston and that area with Bush Heritage, you know, and we're so grateful that they, you know, have acquired that not just for the unique little fish that cruises around or the unique plants, but also the cultural significance for Aboriginal people.

06:56 Eliza Herbert: One of the sites at Tarraburra is a 200-metre-long story wall that runs along towering cliffs and features ancient paintings and etchings of megafauna, emu symbols and even a Plesiosaurus, which is an underwater dinosaur. When Suzanne tells me this, it strikes me that someone had to be there to have etched that dinosaur into the wall and her stories make me reflect on the changes this landscape has undergone both before and after settlers arrived.

07:22 Suzanne Thompson: So when I think of the landscape of what's Edgbaston and what provides all of these things then I think about that connection, you know, So what happened around that if we had this ancient inland sea and then when the sea started to sort of drop and fall down created the Great Artesian Basin because the land type came. I think we've got to really protect and preserve that and the water that goes down because I think for us to think that, you know, we can interfere with something that's so old and ancient and we can think that we can waste it and use it like we are. I think it's a bit cheeky.

8:01 Eliza Herbert: Some of the biggest changes occurring in this landscape have taken place over the last 200 years, when early settlers discovered that they could drill down and extract fresh water from the Great Artesian Basin. This water has sustained life and livelihoods in rural places, but ongoing aquifer drawdown also causes the water table to drop, impacting the health of artesian springs like those at Edgbaston. This is an issue that is beginning to be addressed today.

08:27 Pippa Kern: The government has implemented a bore capping program over the last 30-40 years, and we've actually seen a recovery. I mean aquifer pressure around Edgbaston and further afield. So that's really positive to see. So, it is definitely something that's on the mend but we need to be careful with management of the aquifers.

08:49 Eliza Herbert: But the biggest threat to our little fish protagonist is the introduction of invasive species. Animals like pigs and cane toads can cause damage to the springs, but the one that poses the most significant threat to the Red-finned Blue eye is another fish, the Gambusia, which was introduced into Australia in the 1920s for malaria control and has since become a hardy and noxious pest.

09:07 Pippa Kern: I guess it's kind of a story of the cane toad of the fish world where this Gambusia species was introduced into waterways around the world and in Australia as trial to try and control mosquitoes. Yeah, in hindsight, it probably wasn't such a great idea.

09:20 Eliza Herbert: To give you an idea of how invasive Gambusias are, let's go back to when Bush Heritage first acquired Edgbaston in 2009. An initial audit of the springs showed around 25 teeming with Gambusia and only four with Red-thinned Blue-eyes. Significantly, the springs with Red-thinned Blue-eyes were free of Gambusia.

09:48 Eliza Herbert: So, the team at Edgbaston made up of field staff, ecologists and volunteers got to work. They relocated the remaining population of Red-finned Blue-eyes to safe springs, fencing them to prevent Gambusia from re-entering. Then, to truly safeguard the population, Bush Heritage began a first of its kind program to breed the fish in captivity.

10:10 Pippa Kern: Captive breeding of Red-finned Blue-eyes at Edgbaston is something that Bush Heritage has been thinking about and working towards, probably for 5-6 years or so, just as a way to have a bit of a backup, should we have the worst happen and Mosquito fish (Gambusia) were to get into those last remaining populations.

10:29 Eliza Herbert: When Pippa started in 2018, the infrastructure for that captive breeding program was already in place.

10:36 Pippa Kern: We had three plastic tubs that were sunk into the ground and had holes in the side of them to allow water to flow out into the surrounding landscape so that we could kind of replicate the springs in the fact that there was a permanent pool of water and depending on the season and the time of day, the area outside of that, what we call the tail of the spring, that really shallow area could kind of extend and retract as it does naturally in the springs.

11:01 Eliza Herbert: They transported plants such as wreaths, grasses and algae into the springs to recreate natural vegetation, and then the big move began.

11:09 Pippa Kern: And almost straight away, those just became pretty well established and started breeding and yeah, got to a point where we were happy that they were established in those artificial springs.

11:19 Eliza Herbert: But that wasn't enough. While all this was happening, there was still the Gambusia to contend with, and the control program to clean out other springs was underway. Then, in 2020, once the Red-finned Blue-eye populations were self-sustaining, the little fish were ready to be released back into the wild for the first time.

11:40 Pippa Kern: I'm just going to put some water in this bag before we catch any fish. This will just be so we can transport them safely. And once we have the right number of fish from the three captive ponds, we placed them carefully into the car and drove over to the new site, which is probably only maybe a kilometer away and then we popped those little bags of fish into the pond to let the temperature equilibrate like you might do when you're transferring new fish into your fish tank at home. Alright, so the water temperature in the bags is now the same as in the spring. So, we're going to let these fish go into the new habitat. OK. Something like that. And then once I was comfortable that there wasn't going to be any thermal stress when we released the fish, I just gently untied the bags and opened them and we were all really excited to see them just swim out and start to explore their new habitat. One, two, three, four, five, six.

12:58 Eliza Herbert: About a month later, Pippa went back to check on the fish and was delighted to find that they had started reproducing. It gave her hope that they had settled into their new home and that this program could continue.

13:10 Pippa Kern: And I was really happy and really surprised to see that they'd already started reproducing and there was maybe at least 40 or 50 tiny baby Red-finned Blue-eyes swimming around in there.

13:20 Eliza Herbert: Protecting this species isn't something Bush Heritage does alone. One of the partners working closely with Bush Heritage at Edgbaston is the Australian and New Guinea Fishes Association, or ANGFA, made-up of volunteers and enthusiasts like Grahame Finsen, ANGFA’s Queensland President.

13:36 Graeme Finsen: I know that other people describe all of us as fish nerds and fish nuts, etcetera. However, I prefer the term ANGFAnauts. ANGFA is a little bit different to all the other clubs and associations out there, particularly fish clubs. Fish are important to us, the members, but we're not just interested in them solely and our members include fish people, aquatic plant people, terrestrial plant people, turtle people, bug people, snail people and shrimp people.

14:03 Eliza Herbert: They are all shaping the story of what the future holds for this landscape.

14:08 Suzanne Thompson: I'm a grandmother. Now I want to know that and I'm to all the listeners out there, you're all going to have that responsibility at some point to hand some sort of knowledge to the next generation with your indigenous and non-indigenous. That's just that's just the order of things.

14:23 Eliza Herbert: This brings us back to our big question. When there's just one single population of a species left in the world, what do you do? Do you let it go extinct, or do you do everything you can to save it?

14:35 Suzanne Thompson: So, what is that that we actually are going to be passing on to the next generation? Are we going to be passing on to them a world that has nothing? That doesn't have these cool little, you know, Red-finned Blue-eye fish?

14:48 Graeme Finsen: If we decide not to save the Red-finned Blue-eye, when and what do we decide is worth saving. At Edgbaston, there's an entire ecosystem of interconnected animals and plants. And what happens if we lose just one element out of that? Does this mean instead of losing just one little teeny tiny fish, we stand to lose all the biodiversity and other creatures that live out there?

15:09 Pippa Kern: We're having such a big loss of species globally, but particularly in Australia, and I think when we have the capacity to save one of those species, we have an obligation to do so, especially if we're working in the conservancy sector and it's really hard to turn the curve on the declines of the species. And if we've got a relatively simple problem like we do with the Red-finned Blue-eye, where if we can exclude one pest animal, we should be able to save a species, then I think, yeah, we have an obligation to be able to do that.

15:40 Eliza Herbert: So, it looks like the answer is simple. You do everything you can to save it.

Big Sky Country is a podcast by Bush Heritage Australia, a conservation not-for-profit, that buys and manages land and partners with Aboriginal people to protect our irreplaceable landscapes and magnificent native species. To learn more about our work, sign up to our newsletter or follow us on social media through the links in the show’ web page. Thanks to Ellie Grounds and Craig Fitzsimmons from ABC Queensland for sharing audio from the field. The Red-finned Blue-Eye Project has received funding support from the Queensland Government's Community Sustainability Action Grant program. Since recording this episode, Pippa has continued on to her next step in her conservation journey and is now a wildlife ecologist with AWC in the Kimberley. We wish her all the best.

Special thanks to Suzanne Thompson for sharing her time and stories of the country with us, and thanks to Graham Finsen and the Australian and New Guinea Fishes Association for all the work that they do in this vital space. This episode was produced by Kate Thorburn and myself, Eliza Herbert, with advice from Liz Keane. The theme music is “Invertebrate City” by the Orbweavers and audio was mixed and mastered by Mitch Ansell.