Eureka!

I decided to go out to my sites this weekend one last time just for the heck of it. To my utter delight I finally saw a small school of unarmored threespine stickleback! They were in a large pond at White Rock Lake Campground which is part of the Soledad Canyon site. I counted 25 of them. I also collected some mystery fish from the Santa Clara: Bouquet site (with a fishing license of course) and I identified them as convict cichlids (pictured above). After some research I discovered these fish are horribly good at reproducing and consuming anything they can. There were over a thousand of them and they seemed to be thriving. It would be impossible to colonize a UTS population in this site with these fish present. They were most likely introduced by a person who bought them at a fish store then dumped them at the site when they no longer wanted them.