SAN ANTONIO -- They've got no eyes, no pigment and they're pretty tiny. Still, the two blind catfish Dean Hendrickson discovered last year about 150 miles west of San Antonio are special.
"They're just fascinating critters," Hendrickson said.
Hendrickson is the Curator of Ichthyology, the study of fish, at the University of Texas at Austin. He's spent a decade traveling to Mexico to seek out and research these fish.
Hendrickson says the two now housed at the San Antonio Zoo are the first ever discovered in Texas. "That means there are connections, caves filled with water that connect the aquifers between Mexico and the US," Hendrickson said.
They're called Mexican blindcats, and Hendrickson kept them at his lab before moving them to the San Antonio Zoo.
The zoo's Vice President of conservation and research, Dante Fenolio, is a big reason why those fish are now in San Antonio. He and his team study all kinds of subterranean creatures in shipping containers specifically re-designed for this type of research.
"A lot of the folks that were involved in the project looking for the fish are friends and colleagues aside from this, it's neat to see friends and colleagues succeed like this and just to be included is spectacular," Fenolio said.
He's been studying animals that live in caves and aquifers for 20 plus years. "Anytime you have a species of fish so specifically adapted to an environment, I find them interesting," Fenolio said.
Not only are they interesting, Fenolio said the blindcats can be important indicators of the health of our groundwater.
"There's no better way to determine the quality of groundwater than to look at the biological communities living in the ground water," he said. "If a contaminant comes and goes, you might miss it with water tests, but the animals that live there, they didn't miss it."
The zoo has yet to determine when or even if these fish will be put on display.