The northern leatherside chub (''Lepidomeda copei'') is a

cyprinid Cyprinidae is a family of freshwater fish commonly called the carp or minnow family. It includes the carps, the true minnows, and relatives like the barbs and barbels. Cyprinidae is the largest and most diverse fish family and the largest verte ...

fish Fish are aquatic, craniate, gill-bearing animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish as well as various extinct related groups. Approximately 95% of li ...

of western North America. This is a small fish, reported at up to 15 cm (6 in) in length, but more typically half that. The tapered body is covered with very small scales over a skin with a leathery texture, inspiring the common name. Overall color is bluish dorsally and silver ventrally; males are distinguished by patches of orange-red color on the

axil A leaf ( : leaves) is any of the principal appendages of a vascular plant stem, usually borne laterally aboveground and specialized for photosynthesis. Leaves are collectively called foliage, as in "autumn foliage", while the leaves, st ...

s of the paired fins, at the base of the anal fin, and along the lower lobe of the tail, as well as golden-red specks at the upper end of the gill opening, and between eye and upper jaw. Unlike most other minnows, both dorsal and anal fins have eight rays. Its habitat is cooler creeks and rivers with moderate currents, where the adults congregate in pools or riffles, while the young favor quiet areas with brush near the shore. Northern leatherside chubs range from the upper

Snake River The Snake River is a major river of the greater Pacific Northwest region in the United States. At long, it is the largest tributary of the Columbia River, in turn, the largest North American river that empties into the Pacific Ocean. The Snake ...

system in

Idaho Idaho ( ) is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. To the north, it shares a small portion of the Canada–United States border with the province of British Columbia. It borders the states of Montana and Wyom ...

and

Wyoming Wyoming () is a U.S. state, state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is bordered by Montana to the north and northwest, South Dakota and Nebraska to the east, Idaho to the west, Utah to the south ...

, where they were probably introduced as angling bait fish, south to the

Sevier River The Sevier River (pronounced "severe") is a -long river in the Great Basin of southwestern Utah in the United States. Originating west of Bryce Canyon National Park, the river flows north through a chain of high farming valleys and steep canyons ...

Utah Utah ( , ) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. Utah is a landlocked U.S. state bordered to its east by Colorado, to its northeast by Wyoming, to its north by Idaho, to its south by Arizona, and to it ...

, being commonly found in the rivers draining into the

Great Salt Lake The Great Salt Lake is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere and the eighth-largest terminal lake in the world. It lies in the northern part of the U.S. state of Utah and has a substantial impact upon the local climate, particula ...

and

Utah Lake Utah Lake is a shallow freshwater lake in the center of Utah County, Utah, United States. It lies in Utah Valley, surrounded by the Provo- Orem metropolitan area. The lake's only river outlet, the Jordan River, is a tributary of the Great Salt ...

. They have been introduced into the

Colorado River The Colorado River ( es, Río Colorado) is one of the principal rivers (along with the Rio Grande) in the Southwestern United States and northern Mexico. The river drains an expansive, arid drainage basin, watershed that encompasses parts of ...

system, such as

Strawberry Reservoir Strawberry Reservoir is a large reservoir in the U.S. state of Utah. It is Utah's most popular fishery, receiving over 1.5 million angling hours annually and is part of the Blue Ribbon Fisheries program. Game fish in the reservoir include sterili ...

and

Price River The Price River is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed October 30, 2020 southeastward flowing river in Carbon, Utah and Emery counties in eastern Utah. It is a tributary to ...

in Utah. Although it is still to be determined whether the fish introduced to these sites are Northern leatherside chubs or the Southern leatherside chub. This chub has been extensively used as

fishing bait Fishing bait is any substance used to attract and catch fish, e.g. on a fishing hook. Bait items are both selected from and placed within the environment to achieve enhanced prey capture success. Traditionally, fishing baits are natural fish foo ...

. Originally named ''Squalius copei'' and later placed in ''Gila'', this chub was separated into a

monotypic In biology, a monotypic taxon is a taxonomic group (taxon) that contains only one immediately subordinate taxon. A monotypic species is one that does not include subspecies or smaller, infraspecific taxa. In the case of genera, the term "unispec ...

genus in 1945. This placement was eventually verified using

mtDNA Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA or mDNA) is the DNA located in mitochondria, cellular organelles within eukaryotic cells that convert chemical energy from food into a form that cells can use, such as adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Mitochondrial DNA ...

12S rRNA

sequence In mathematics, a sequence is an enumerated collection of objects in which repetitions are allowed and order matters. Like a set, it contains members (also called ''elements'', or ''terms''). The number of elements (possibly infinite) is calle ...

data. It seems a fairly close relative of the spinedaces (genus ''Lepidomeda'') and the spikedaces (genus ''

Meda Meda may refer to: Places * Meda de Mouros, a parish in Tábua Municipality, Portugal * Medas, a parish in Gondomar Municipality, Portugal * Meda-Ela, Sri Lanka * Međa (Leskovac), village in the municipality of Leskovac, Serbia * Meda, Lombardy ...

''), but the

phylogeny A phylogenetic tree (also phylogeny or evolutionary tree Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA.) is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological spec ...

and indeed the validity of the proposed "plagopterin"

clade A clade (), also known as a monophyletic group or natural group, is a group of organisms that are monophyletic – that is, composed of a common ancestor and all its lineal descendants – on a phylogenetic tree. Rather than the English term, ...

is insufficiently resolved (Simons & Mayden 1997), and Fishbase now classifies it as a species of ''Lepidomeda'' as well as splitting the leatherside chubs into northern and southern species.

References

* * * (1997): Phylogenetic Relationships of the Creek Chubs and the Spine-Fins: an Enigmatic Group of North American Cyprinid Fishes (Actinopterygii: Cyprinidae). ''Cladistics'' 13(3): 187–205. (HTML abstract) * (1987): ''Fishes of the Great Basin'': 173–175. University of Nevada Press, Reno. * Johnson, J. B., Dowling, T. E., & Belk, M. C. (2004). Neglected taxonomy of rare desert fishes: congruent evidence for two species of leatherside chub. Systematic Biology, 53(6), 841–855. * Page, L. M., Espinosa-Pérez, H., Findley, L. T., Gilbert, C. R., Lea, R. N., Mandrak, N. E., ... & Nelson, J. S. (2013). Common and scientific names of fishes from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. American Fisheries Society, Special Publication, 34. {{Taxonbar, from=Q577678 Chubs (fish) Chub, Leatherside Freshwater fish of the United States Fish described in 1881 Lepidomeda