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Naturalists’ Discovery Leads To Sea Change

Editor’s Note: This article was originally printed as an April Fool’s joke. It is purely satire.

By Carol Rock

A fight that has been shaking the state from the Santa Clarita Valley to the Sacramento delta is taking a turn that has environmentalists celebrating and water purveyors scratching their heads.

Turns out that a tiny fish that stopped development is now thriving in a habitat once considered hostile.


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The U.S. Fish and Wildife Service announced today that it is removing the Unarmored Threespine Stickleback from the Endangered Species List.

“With the elevated levels of chloride in groundwater, the stickleback is repopulating the Santa Clara River in the Soledad Canyon and Piru Creek at alarming rates,” said Fred Hortensium, Chief Botanist for the service. “Apparently this is a salt-water fish that was misclassified. This hardly ever happens.”

Naturalists have found that a chloride level of 210 mg per liter is optimum for the survival and healthy propagation of the miniscule fish and must now be maintained. This shift changes the focus of a conflict that caused vocal face-offs between community members and the governor’s appointees during a meeting that had to be rescheduled because they thought Santa Clarita was near San Jose.

“Of course, we’ll have to schedule several more community meetings and conduct an expensive mailing campaign to alert customers to the change,” said Robert Dart, newly-hired State Water Czar. “Somebody has to pay for this. It might as well be our users.”

Thousands of local residents also disconnected their salt-based water softeners and sent them to landfills or left them in the riverbed beneath the Wiley Canyon bridge. The City is launching a campaign to provide replacement units at low- or no-cost to homeowners within two miles of the river.

With the removal of the fish from federal protection, the massive Newhall Ranch project can move forward, unencumbered.

“Not since the Maguire Daisy was reestablished in its habitat have we had this much cause for celebration,” said Theonius Marshall, spokesman for SCAPE, Santa Clarita Activists Preventing Extinction.

To commemorate the stickleback’s new status, St. Clare’s Catholic Church will re-name their weekly community dinner the Unarmored Blessed Trinity Fish Fry.

Editor’s Note: This story is 100 percent fabrbricated, because, well, it’s April Fool’s Day and we in the news room like to have fun. Hope you at least got a chortle out of it.

Naturalists’ Discovery Leads To Sea Change

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