This week we will take a look at the Central Mud Minnow (Umbra limi).
It's a temperate freshwater fish that ranges across the Mississippi river basin up to the US-Canadian border. Some isolated populations can be found in Montana and Texas. Commonly found in slow moving streams, creeks, drainage ditches, and ponds with abundant vegetation. Its natural diet consists of benthic invertebrates (ostracods, copepods, chironomids, gastropods) and occasionally small fishes. They are quick, able to bury themselves in the mud, and form shoals to avoid predation.
These fish only live a few years and stay small (6in/14cm) and spawn in mid-April with the higher temperatures stimulating spawning. Females can produce up to 2,500 eggs in one season. Mud minnows are able to survive in very acidic, poorly oxygenated waters by breathing air with a modified gas bladder. This also allows them to survive the winter in bodies of water where most fish cannot- by breathing air from bubbles under the ice.