Florida sand darters weren’t supposed to be in Georgia.

The slender, 3-inch-long fish with almost see-through bodies and a tendency to bury themselves up to their eyes in sand on stream bottoms are known from Gulf Coast drainages in northwest Florida and south Alabama. But Florida sand darters had never been found in Georgia.

Until June 2013. During a Georgia River Network trip on the Flint River near Newton, retired ichthyologist Dr. Camm Swift told DNR’s Dr. Brett Albanese he had just caught and released sand darters at a nearby sandbar. With help from DNR and other trip-goers, the scientists collected and photographed more of the darters.

Coloration and scale counts suggested they were Florida sand darters, a species described in 1975. Work by Mansfield University geneticist Greg Moyer and a grant from The Environmental Resources Network, friends group of DNR’s Wildlife Conservation Section, confirmed the identification, revealing a close relationship between the Flint fish and sand darters in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle.

How sand darters made it to the Flint River – did anglers introduce them as bait? – or whether they have been in the system and simply eluded detection is a mystery.

Albanese and Swift recorded the darters at only three of 15 sites surveyed on the Flint between Albany and Bainbridge. However, UGA graduate student Christine Fallon discovered more last year while snorkeling Ichauway-Nochaway Creek as part of her work at The Jones Center at Ichauway.

The sand darter’s behavior – part of their scientific name Ammocrypta comes from Greek root words for “sand” and “concealed” – and the deep, rocky habitats of the Flint and its tributaries could help explain why the species was not documented before. As Albanese said, it’s hard to find a fish buried in sand in a deep, rocky river. The difficulty of catching these fish for bait and additional records in Florida’s Apalachicola drainage – the Flint helps form the Apalachicola – also support the hypothesis that Florida sand darters are native to Georgia.

“Most people would think that our fish fauna is completely known, but there are still exciting discoveries to make,” said Albanese, a program manager with the Wildlife Conservation Section.

The correlations are here! The GA Standards for Excellence have been fully correlated for both the terrestrial and aquatic guides and now can be access on our new database. In this database you can search correlations by subject, grade level, activity, and even standard. You can find this new database here.

Stay tuned as we continue to update the database and add the GA Early Childhood standards for Growing UP WILD activities.