Now this makes sense, and I feel much better. Apparently the California Roach is a Native FISH! Not a avocado eating surfing variety of insect.
I guess that might have been a good thing for the reporter to mention in her article about why the return of beavers in Sonoma was a good thing.. But she got it from the Sonoma Ecology Blog and they really didn’t clarify as I’m sure they assumed everybody already knew.
Naturalists are soo weird,
It’s a chunky little bottom feeding fish whose mouth points down as it cleans up the creek floor of algae and unlucky insects or small crustaceans. I guess beaver really do make habitat for them. It is very hardy and can survive well in our weird ephemeral streams and cluster in small warm pools in the dry summer when everything else does poorly, It also turns into very good eating for larger fish like the green sunfish.
I’m sure it never asked to be named after a despised insect. Who on earth decided it would be good to call it a roach anyway? I look forward to many more such discoveries about animals that beavers help. Lik
e the California maggots, for instance which turn out to be really small shore birds that clean the creek banks of dragonflies. Or Pacific leeches, which are actually small carnivorous flies that attach themselves to rocks in beaver pools and become important food for salmon.
SHEESH!
