Aquatic ecologist researches fish resilience in severe drought

Growing up in San Antonio, Texas State University alum Lauren Chappell would occasionally drive west with her family on US Highway 90, crossing the Nueces River in areas where scant pools of water dotted an otherwise dry ribbon of dry rock and gravel.

Those memories proved to be formative for Chappell, who in May completed her master’s degree in Aquatic Resources-Aquatic Biology with a thesis on fish populations in the Nueces, Frio and Sabinal rivers.

For the thesis–“Hydrology and geology as structuring mechanisms of semi-arid fish communities”– Chappell sampled fish communities on the three rivers and found that fish in downstream isolated pools of the Nueces were surviving better than expected, even during a drought.