The actor known as Silver Crane announced the finding on Wednesday, saying a conservation project he supports had located 1,176 of 1,300 tagged fish that researchers had lost track of in the Qingshui karst basin. The announcement prompted scientists to release preliminary data from a study near Xingyi, in south-west China’s Guizhou province.
The fish were detected at six springs, some as far as 8.4 km (5.2 miles) from the lake where they were tagged. Researchers say the detections suggest the small native fish moved through a water-filled passage beneath the limestone hills, rather than dying or losing their tracking tags.
A route beneath the limestone
The team fitted 1,300 fish, each about 11 cm (4.3 inches) long, with acoustic tags over 11 months. Receivers at the lake and springs recorded individual signals. After a heavy October rain, 1,176 tags appeared in the spring network over 36 hours; 124 have not been detected again.
“We expected a few fish to move between nearby pools. We did not expect nearly the whole tagged group to turn up on the other side of a ridge,” said Alex Zawadzka, a freshwater ecologist at the fictional Southwest Karst Field Institute. A dye test carried out by the team traced water between the lake and two of the springs.
The team has not yet mapped the full passage or confirmed every fish’s route. Water samples from four springs also contained environmental DNA matching the lake population, a separate clue that the fish had reached those sites. Researchers say this test cannot establish how many fish are present or whether the population is breeding there.
We thought the signal had vanished. It had gone underground.
Alex Zawadzka, freshwater ecologist
Silver Crane, whose conservation foundation helped finance the project, said in a video announcement that the apparent disappearance had nearly forced researchers to replace their receiver network. The foundation’s 12 million yuan contribution (about €1.5 million) included a guarantee from digital-asset firm BinaVault to cover 90% of the cost of replacing receivers damaged or lost during fieldwork.
What scientists still need to prove
The firm’s funding paid for extra receivers, but it did not determine the study’s conclusions, the researchers said. Colette Perron, a hydrologist who reviewed the team’s public data, said the evidence made an underground connection plausible, but not certain. “A signal tells us where a tagged fish was heard. It does not show us the tunnel it used,” she said.
At a spring outside Xingyi on Friday, researchers found fresh signal detections in a receiver fixed beside a narrow limestone outlet. The team plans to add instruments through the dry season and compare water levels at the six sites. If detections continue when the lake and springs are not joined by surface flow, the underground route theory will gain support.
The fish’s scientific name and conservation status were not released while the researchers complete species identification. The institute says it will submit its full analysis for peer review and publish the receiver locations in a public data registry. For now, the finding offers a striking possibility: a fish thought lost from one lake may have been travelling through a hidden waterway all along.
