The Jordan Tourists Rarely See 4: The Sirhan Cyprinid

Azraq Oasis (see January 17 post; photos at the Picasa URL in the Header) used to be a 1250 ha permanent, freshwater marsh way out in the Jordanian desert (the "Badia") that in winter swelled to 12,000 ha or more. It has a huge, not-quite flat catchment basin, so that the annual rain--there's usually only one, in winter, and it's a deluge, but only occurs in a small and random part of the basin--fills a shallow aquifer. Also, a creek (Wadi Rajil) runs in from Syria, bringing more water in winter, so that the aquifer was recharged enough annually to produce two springs that actually flowed all year. Villages grew up since ancient times around each of these springs, which are a few km apart. Nabateans built water control structures to raise the water level and make sort of a boat launch, later Romans built a castle, Byzantines built other structures, and Ottoman Turks controlled it for awhile, until T.E. Lawrence "of Arabia" lived in the old castle while rallying the Arabs to defeat Turkey in WW I. Then the new Jordan government starting pumping water all the way to Amman through a 48" diameter pipe, some 500 illegal wells were dug or drilled for date palms and other farms, the Syrians dammed off Wadi Rajil, and the marsh went dry in 1990 for the first time ever. This was part of my study. The government claimed that it went dry because of the Gulf War in Kuwait, when the 1.4 million immigrants who fled the war forced the government to increase its pumping rate for Amman's water and sewage. But the case didn't hold water (!). Meanwhile, a small cyprinid fish endemic to the marsh (Aphanius sirhani , family Cyprinodontidae, after the Sirhan tribe of Bedouin that still roam that part of Jordan and Saudi Aribia in search of pasture for their sheep and camels), went extinct. Or so they thought. Turns out a fish biologist at the Jordan University had a few in an aquarium. Plus, in a 2001 survey, biologists found a handful still living at Azraq. International donors provided funds to pump some of the water from the aquifer back into the marsh, re-flooding about 30 ha. Just when I arrived to begin studying wetlands and terrestrial ecosystem in 2002, they returned the Sirhan fish to the marsh, and now it has a thriving, though small and still threatened, population. Successful reintroduction to the wild will depend on removing the alien Tilapia Sarotherodon galileus, maintaining pumping into the marsh, and eliminating the illegal wells.