Hendrickson's first samples in 1978 of the undescribed and amazingly diverse species of trout native to the Sierra Madre Occidental (SMO) of northwestern mainland Mexico (Sonora, Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Durango) immediately engaged his interest. In the 1990s he began inviting others to join him on collecting trips and the diverse group of Méxican and U.S. collaborators that now goes by the name "Truchas Mexicanas" quickly took shape. For more than 2 decades now, that group has worked toward improving knowledge of fishes, especially trout, throughout the SMO, collecting specimens needed to describe new species, of which there are clearly many in México.  It's been a slow process. Travel in this rugged and remote terrain is painfully slow, and trout are inherently difficult to describe (see Turner (2019) for an overview of the difficulties for cutthroat trout - most of the same issues apply here). Hendrickson's November 2019 presentation at the Desert Fishes Council provides a recent update on what is known of these fishes, and has nice illustrations of them. It reported results of conservation assessment analyses (add a filter on "Land Regions" and "Mesoamerica" to see just the Mexican species) done with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). More recent conservation-related publications are mentionec in the Conservation tab to the left). More recently, Joe Tomelleri was interviewed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Fish of the Week Podcast about our work on these species: Liebich, K., & Eroh, G. (n.d.). Fish of the Week: S4:E10—Truchas Mexicanas/Mexico’s native trout (S4:E10). Retrieved March 8, 2024, from https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/truchas-mexicanas-mexicos-native-trout/id1546630514?i=1000647887578.

Other menu links to the left lead to additional information, and our original, now very outdated web page (will open in a new tab), is still available, but we're in the process of moving that content and updating it here.