Most important, if we continue at the rate we're going, maybe in August or September we'll see real problems. It will be like 1980, where everything dried up and we saw a lot of shallow areas in lakes. Right now, any creature that gets trapped in a stream section or pool less than four feet deep, they're not going to last long in this kind of heat. Lake O.C. Fisher near San Angelo is one such reservoir to suffer this type of fish kill recently. According to TPW biologists, rough fish, such as carp, began dying above the lake in the North Concho River and as levels of dissolved oxygen decreased, the fish kill spread to game fish in the main lake, including white bass.
Officials anticipate harsher impacts on smaller water bodies.
As we get less and less water volume with the same populations of fish, conditions become crowded with more gills in the water fighting for oxygen and things could go sour real fast. In fact, reservoir levels all along the Rio Grande are perilously low. These major reservoirs supply the water needs of irrigation and municipalities in the Rio Grande Valley and fish and wildlife resources downstream to the estuaries. Amistad Reservoir 's downstream counterpart, Falcon Reservoir , is 90 percent empty. Farther north in the Panhandle, the Canadian River north of Amarillo has no flow now compared to previous years and has dried to pools.