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While dinosaurs and the dodo often dominate our imagination of extinction, a quiet crisis is unfolding today—hundreds of species worldwide are disappearing. Over the past decade alone, several species have vanished, and many more now hover on the brink of extinction.
In the United States, the threat is no less dire. Ohio alone lists 132 species as endangered and 44 as threatened, the latter at risk of sliding into endangered status soon. Even more alarming is that since European settlement Ohio has lost 20 species to extinction, including six mollusks, two birds, one beetle, and three fish. The most recent loss is the Scioto madtom, a small catfish last seen in the 1950s; its official extinction confirmation in 2023 added another chapter to Ohio’s list of vanished wildlife.
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The Scioto madtom (Noturus megalops) was a diminutive catfish of the Ictaluridae family, rarely exceeding 2 inches in length. An omnivorous bottom feeder, it relied on its whisker-like barbels to locate plants and invertebrates in the shallow riffles where it resided. Although named after the Scioto River, the species was never recorded there; it was confined to Trautman’s Riffle, a shallow segment of Big Darby Creek—a major tributary of the Scioto River.
Ichthyologist Milton Trautman and colleague Walter Cunningham first captured the fish in 1943, collecting a handful over the next two years. After a 12‑year lull, a brief resurgence in 1957 was the last time any specimen was seen, and exhaustive surveys since then have yielded no further sightings. In total, only 18 Scioto madtoms were ever collected before their disappearance. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) listed the species as endangered in 1975, but the lack of subsequent sightings made a recovery plan untenable. With no evidence of population recovery in subsequent decades, the USFWS officially declared the Scioto madtom extinct in October 2023.
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While the exact cause of the Scioto madtom’s extinction remains unconfirmed, USFWS experts point to siltation as a major driver. Sediment buildup from dams and runoff, coupled with industrial effluents and agricultural runoff, likely rendered Big Darby Creek unsuitable for the species. The introduction of the northern madtom—a closely related catfish first recorded in 1957, the same year the Scioto madtom vanished—may have also intensified competition. The cumulative alterations to the stream’s hydrology and water quality over the past seven decades almost certainly sealed the species’ fate.
Beyond the loss of a single fish, the disappearance of the Scioto madtom underscores the broader challenges of conserving cryptic, habitat‑specific species. The catfish was nocturnal, only observed between September and December, and its daytime and summer behaviors remained a mystery. Its limited distribution to a single riffle and its unexplained low numbers raise unanswered questions that will now remain forever unanswered.
