Several environmental groups are petitioning the federal government to add the Alabama shad to the U.S. Endangered Species List, saying the once-popular commercial fish has disappeared from 90% of its range and the populations that still exist have declined sharply.

“Alabama shad are on the brink of extinction, so they desperately need federal protection,” Will Harlan, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a news release.

The groups say the Alabama shad faces significant impacts from human activity, including dam construction, water pollution, oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico and warming waters due to climate change.

“These fish have fed and nourished us for millennia and they’ve been a key part of our country’s most vital and vibrant rivers, from the Mississippi to the Suwannee,” Harlan said. “We can’t let this fish go extinct on our watch.”

Alabama shad live in the Gulf of Mexico as adults, but swim upstream into rivers to spawn. The young fish then make their way down to the Gulf, before returning upstream to reproduce.

Alabama shad were first described in the late 1890s from specimens caught in the Black Warrior River in Tuscaloosa County, but have not been documented in that area since, according to the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

Historically, the shad was documented in rivers as far inland as Oklahoma, Iowa and West Virginia, but many of those rivers have been blocked or altered by manmade dams, limiting the range of the species.

According to the petition, the Alabama shad is now found only in 15 of the 75 rivers in their historic range, and that some of the surviving populations have dropped by as much as 98%, limited to only a few individuals.

The Fish and Wildlife Service in 2017 rejected a similar petition to list the Alabama shad as endangered, but the groups say new evidence had emerged further documenting the perils for the species.

The groups cite a 2021 study by the Alabama Division of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries that concluded the Alabama shad “could become extirpated from Alabama in the near future, which is a significant portion of its range.”

The Alabama study found no Alabama shad in the Mobile River system, only one individual in the Conecuh River, and only a handful in the Choctawhatchee River, which had been the second largest population in the state.

“Although [Alabama shad] was recently denied listing under the Endangered Species Act by the National Marine Fisheries Service due to lack of apparent range-wide extinction, our results indicate what was once considered the second largest population of [Alabama shad] from the Choctawhatchee River is on the verge of extirpation,” the report states.

In the Apalachicola River, populations of Alabama shad plummeted after a lock and dam, which used to open frequently, fell into disrepair and stopped being opened. The petition sites surveys estimating the drop in Alabama shad from this river system has plummeted from 123,000 to as few as 324 fish.

The Center for Biological Diversity filed the petition Tuesday along with Alabama Rivers Alliance, Healthy Gulf, American Whitewater, Cahaba Riverkeeper, Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, Coosa Riverkeeper, Forest Keeper, Healthy Ocean Coalition, Mobile Baykeeper and Pearl Riverkeeper.

“Alabama shad will completely disappear from their few remaining rivers without urgent protections under the Endangered Species Act,” Harlan said. “The health of our rivers and communities depends on the health of this fish.”