Shade cloth and poisonous dust: how the red-finned blue-eye was brought back from the brink

Red-finned blue-eye numbers would plummet within a few seasons if conservation management were to stop in Queensland. Photograph: Calumn Hockey/Bush Heritage Australia

The red-finned blue-eye is no longer Australia’s rarest freshwater fish.

The last of its tiny kind – all but bullied to extinction by gambusia, an invasive fish that grows to twice the size and eight times the body mass – were a few years ago confined to a lone artesian spring in outback Queensland.