An amazing ecosystem engineer in Southwest Virginia

We study a fish called the Blue had job, which is this beautiful little minnow who builds mound nest due to construction life. Picking up pebbles from your mouth and drop in them one at a time or a few at a time until they make a mound that could be 10 thousand pebbles. And exponents. We call them ecosystem engineers because by building this nest, they provide habitat that is suitable for some of the other species, can support the population. Other kinds of fish as well. These mounds can sometimes be the only clean, suitable spawning habitat. So for somebody smaller fish, if they don't have that blue hedgehog Lester spot on, then those populations. Whether fishes looking for a space that has sufficient oxygen and safe from predators. For us to understand why the eggs are distributed widely and distributed unless we also have to understand what the physical environment inside of them looks like and how it varies within their nest. And so we have engineers who do hydraulics, studying the movement of oxygen and the flow of water through the math. And we will have to then take their nest and essentially turn it inside out so that we can show what is happening within this otherwise cone, three-dimensional cone. Well, for these BU head shops, homeowners, they are a lot of the species that depend on the buoy. We had sharp or survivor or not. So the only refuge for them to be able to survive in places like this is the blue hedgehog. So there lies the importance of this species. We study.