ENDANGERED OR NOT, the Conasauga logperch is plainly not much to look at although it is kind of neat that Rome’s own aquarium (the Rome Floyd ECO River Education Center in Ridge Ferry Park) has a colony of about 20 to look at. It gets to maybe five inches in length and seems like a baby eel though classified as being of the darter species.

This tiny captive local colony is part of the protection efforts to keep it around should some bad thing occur in its small, 30-mile home stretch of the Conasauga River.

The Coosa River and its tributaries are already home to the largest known American population of a variety of rare aquatic life forms, nearly all of them of the smallish, hard-to-spot variety excepting only the reintroduced sturgeon now quietly growing to an impossible-to-miss size.

Given the fragility of these native populations, and the comparative newness of the public’s education facility for all things river, it might be interesting to consider whether a long-range goal might not be keeping and protecting more species like the Conasauga logperch in order to assure their survival no matter who may spill what into the rivers in the future.