Lake Tuendae and the Last Native Fish
Near Zzyzx, California
The palm-fringed pond at the heart of Zzyzx is not natural. Around nineteen fifty-five, Curtis Howe Springer scooped out an artificial lake roughly one hundred thirty feet wide and four hundred sixty feet long, and gave it a name he said meant, where the waters come together. He called it Lake Tuendae.
Springer meant it as a scenic centerpiece, but it became something far more important. Today Lake Tuendae is one of the last strongholds of the Mohave tui chub, a small silvery fish that typically grows to about two to four inches long. It is the only fish truly native to the Mojave River basin, and it very nearly vanished.
Introduced species, especially a nonnative minnow, crowded it out of the river itself, and the chub was listed as endangered. The isolated ponds at Zzyzx became a lifeboat. Fish from Lake Tuendae and a nearby spring have served as the source population for attempts to reestablish the chub in more than a dozen other locations, though most of those efforts have failed.
That makes this modest, human-made pond, dug by a radio huckster to impress his guests, one of the most important pieces of habitat in the entire Mojave.
