On a recent warm night, a batter cracked a hit deep into the lush outfield at Grand Junction’s downtown baseball field, and fans of the city’s new team erupted in joy. Their screams welcomed two players sprinting across home plate. Emblazoned on the young men’s crisp navy caps was the image of an imposing fish with a distinctive hump.
“Go, Suckers!” yelled a guy in the stands, lifting up his beer.
The Razorback Suckers isn’t just a quirky team name. It’s a statement about what matters to this community. The Grand Valley, on the high-desert edge of Colorado’s Western Slope, is deep in a fight to keep this endangered fish alive. Razorbacks roamed the Colorado River for an estimated 5 million years before humans almost fished them out of existence and destroyed much of their habitat.
Now it’s up to today’s humans to save them.
And on a recent morning, hundreds of people gathered on the rocky banks of the Colorado River in Palisade for a joyous razorback release.
Teacher Patrick Steele, who leads the school’s razorback program, addressed the crowd waiting in the blinding sun.
“If you guys are ready to roll, come up!” he said.
Steele’s students, who raised these razorbacks all school year, helped direct locals into two long lines leading to the olive-green water. They were here for a local tradition: to kiss each fish before it’s released. Standing in the river, Steele held up a glistening, green and yellow razorback – its suctioning mouth opened and closed between wide eyes on a blobby head. Little kids squealed, and adults closed their eyes with a grimace as they planted a smooch on the razorbacks.
“Well, it was very slimy,” said Phoenix Hadley, a local mom, before starting to laugh. “I think I might have kissed its eyeball. I’m not sure.”
She gave the razorback more of a quick peck, as did high schooler Violet Gray.
“It’s like somebody maybe put some baby oil on their lips,” she said.
Gray and her classmates tended to these fish as they grew from inch-long babies to hardy foot-long juveniles. She’s excited for them and maybe just a little sad to see them go.
“We just cared for ’em every day. And so it’s kind of hard not to feel like a kinship to ’em, because humans are pack animals,” she said, smiling.
These fish started their lives at the nearby federal hatchery in Grand Junction in a cavernous, warehouse-like space. Mike Gross, fish culturist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, showed off clear cylinders, filled with cool water and clusters of what look like tapioca pearls in the bottom.
“Altogether, we are looking at, if I remember the number correctly, 417,600 eggs incubating currently in front of us,” he said, rattling off the stat with ease.
Under the microscope, the eggs looked more like quinoa, trembling with life. Gross expected them to blossom into tiny fish in less than a week. Workers then move them into tanks that swirl with a current, mimicking life in the turbulent Colorado River. The Ouray National Fish Hatchery Grand Valley Unit releases about 10,000 fish across the West every year.
Even though razorbacks survived for an estimated 5 million years, they almost went extinct a few decades ago. By the late 1980s, “we’re talking tens of fish left,” he said. In 1991, razorback suckers were declared federally endangered.
Gross sees them as a vital vacuum.
“They’ll slurp up the dead fish, they’ll slurp up the algae, the detritus, the bugs,” he said. “They’re out there constantly cleaning.”
They also move needed nutrients through the water. Gross explained that losing razorbacks would hurt the whole Colorado River system. So far, however, federal recovery efforts have brought them back from the brink.
“To be able to be part of, knock on wood, their recovery for the long term, that’s an incredible life goal,” he said. “It doesn’t get any better than that in the conservation world.”
Back on the sun-baked banks of the river, Palisade High School senior Beckett Carlton was helping grab thrashing, soon-to-be-released fish from a federal fish trailer – sort of like a giant tank on wheels.
“It’s like watching your kid go to graduation, I feel like,” Carlton said.
Just like high school graduation, he doesn’t really know what lies ahead for them. According to federal data from 2021, an estimated 8,300 released razorbacks had survived at least one winter in the wild – and indications are that some were even breeding.
It’s some much-needed good news in a time of a lot of darkness.
“The world we live in is terrifying, and I think that hopelessness is the prevailing feeling among many people, especially of the younger generation,” Carlton said.
He reflected on the historic drought gripping the region as he looked around at the hundreds of neighbors here to support these native fish, and he watched his classmates place the last of these hand-raised razorbacks into the dwindling Colorado. It’s where Carlton likes to swim during his school lunch hour, but he doesn’t know if future teens here will be able to do the same.
“I think looking at the river right now, it’s low, but it’s there,” he said. And I think as long as the river’s there, I think there’s hope.”
There’s hope for the Colorado River and hope for the razorback sucker. But both need people to act to save them.
To read more stories from Colorado Public Radio, visit www.cpr.org.
