Saving the miraculous Murray Hardyhead — Sustaining coordinated species-level recovery actions across three states

With funding from the Australian Government’s Saving Native Species Program, Nature Glenelg Trust and Millewa Pumping are leading a project to conserve one of Australia’s most threatened native freshwater fish, the miraculous Murray Hardyhead.

This amazing little fish can withstand water salinity twice as high as the ocean, and in many places serves as a crucial link in the food chain (moderating the abundance of prey like mosquito and midge larvae, while themselves feeding bigger critters like herons, cormorants and kingfishers).

Our project’s key objectives are to (1) monitor the viability of known wild populations, (2) develop backup strategies and contingency populations in case of emergency, and (3) create opportunities for reintroductions into suitable habitats.

To watch a short video about this species, please click on the video below:

Over the last six months since the video was released, our project team has been busy conducting and planning for some key activities.

Monitoring

Monitoring teams have been tracking the status of known populations across the Lower Lakes and the South Australian Riverland, north-west Victoria and the Kerang Lakes region. After a lack of detections for several years, the re-occurrence of Murray Hardyhead in two former strongholds in South Australia is good news! Continued presence in one Victorian wetland near Mildura and two near Kerang is also promising. Unfortunately, while we haven’t detected Murray Hardyhead in far west NSW and three wetlands in South Australia since flooding in 2024, we are hopeful a few survived at these sites, and we just haven’t found them yet.

Murray Hardyhead populations are monitored to inform management interventions such as supplemental environmental water or harvesting to establish new populations.

Contingency populations:

Small backup ‘surrogate’ populations persist in three smaller managed waterbodies in NSW, one in Victoria and two in South Australia. New ‘surrogate’ populations were recently established in three Victorian sites, including a farm dam near Bendigo and a dam on the Millewa-Mallee pipeline. A small population was also recently established at Monarto Zoo in South Australia. Our team is currently planning on introducing Murray Hardyhead into three to four new surrogate habitats across SA, VIC and NSW in the coming months.

Surrogate habitats are small, safe, manageable water bodies that house important backup or contingency populations, from which fish for wild reintroductions can be sourced.

Wild reintroductions:

Murray Hardyhead were reintroduced into Brickworks Billabong near Mildura in Autumn 2025.  The species was first successfully reintroduced to Brickworks Billabong in 2014 before dispersing during the 2016 floods. Our team is also planning for reintroductions into up to four South Australian Riverland wetlands in spring/summer 2025-26. We also plan to return Murray Hardyhead to a NSW wetland where increasing salinity is close to eradicating pest Carp. Fish for reintroductions will be sourced from known wild populations as well as surrogate sites.

Our team are preparing priority wetlands for the reintroduction of Murray Hardyhead via strategic deliveries of environmental water and habitat augmentation.

Project partners:

The recovery of this species involves numerous private, government and Traditional Owner partner entities from NSW, Victoria and South Australia, and is supported by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office, and the Victorian Environmental Water Holder, together with Millewa Pumping Company, NSW DPI Fisheries, South Australia Murraylands and Riverland Landscape Board, North Central Catchment Management Authority, Mallee Catchment Management Authority, the Murray-Darling Wetlands Working Group, the Hazel L Henry – Farmland Nature Refuges, Nature Foundation SA, NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water – Biodiversity Conservation and Science, and the Victorian Fisheries Authority. Contributing Traditional Owner groups include the First People of the Millewa-Mallee Aboriginal Corporation, the Barkandji Native Title Group Aboriginal Corporation, Barkindji Maraura Elders Environment Team, Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal Corporation, and the River Murray & Mallee Aboriginal Corporation.

This project is funded by the Federal Government’s Saving Native Species Program

This project is led by NGT, and coordinated by NGT and Millewa Pumping Company,
with many other collaborating organisations contributing to the project.