The Leon Springs pupfish, Cyprinodon bovinus , is federally listed as endangered and currently confined to spring-fed pools on the Diamond Y Spring Preserve in Pecos County, Texas, USA. A refuge population is maintained by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Dexter, New Mexico, USA because of ongoing threats from hybridization with the introduced congener, the sheepshead minnow, C. variegatus. To inform continued conservation an...

Phaeodactylum tricornutum , a diatom identified as having superior survival and growth rates during South Texas winters compared to various commercially cultivated species, was assessed for its potential as a nutritional supplement for Crassostrea virginica spat. Oysters were collected from the Laguna Madre (Corpus Christi, TX, USA) and spawned to produce the spat used in this study. Spat were subject to five feeding treatment...

The presence of cryptic species can hinder effective conservation planning and implementation, as has been the case for speciose groups of freshwater fishes that are difficult to differentiate due to conserved morphologies. The West Texas shiner Notropis megalops and the Texas shiner Notropis amabilis are a cryptic pair of leuciscids (minnows) that co‐occur in spring‐fed tributaries of the Rio Grande in Texas and Mexico. Both...

Sequencing reduced‐representation libraries of restriction site‐associated DNA ( RAD seq) to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms ( SNP s) is quickly becoming a standard methodology for molecular ecologists. Because of the scale of RAD seq data sets, putative loci cannot be assessed individually, making the process of filtering noise and correctly identifying biologically meaningful signal more difficult. Artefacts introdu...

The Leon Springs pupfish ( Cyprinodon bovinus ) is an endangered species currently restricted to a single desert spring and a separate captive habitat in southwestern North America. Following establishment of the captive population from wild stock in 1976, the wild population has undergone natural population size fluctuations, intentional culling to purge genetic contamination from an invasive congener ( Cyprinodon variegatus...