The June Sucker's Long Way Back

For most of its existence, the June Sucker was a fish so numerous that people did not think about it. The Timpanogos Ute built their calendar partly around its spawning runs. Settlers fished it out of Utah Lake by the wagonload.

Nobody counted the fish because nobody needed to. There seemed to be no end to them. By the nineteen-eighties, there were fewer than one thousand June Suckers left.

The fish is found naturally in only one place on earth, Utah Lake and the Provo River. When scientists added it to the endangered species list in April nineteen eighty-six, the population was in free fall from a combination of habitat destruction, the diversion of the Provo River from its natural delta into a channelized ditch, and the introduction of carp into the lake. Carp, imported by settlers in the nineteenth century as a food source, turned out to be extraordinarily destructive: they root up the lake bottom, destroying the aquatic vegetation that suckers need, and they compete aggressively for food.

At their peak, carp made up ninety percent of Utah Lake's fish biomass. The recovery effort took decades. The June Sucker Recovery Implementation Program eventually removed twenty-nine million pounds of carp from the lake.

Engineers restored the Provo River delta, reconnecting the river with the lake and recreating the marshy spawning habitat the suckers require. In February twenty-twenty-one, the US Fish and Wildlife Service reclassified the June Sucker from endangered to threatened, a distinction that matters enormously to the scientists who spent thirty-five years earning it.