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Over the last three weeks, ecologist Rae McNeish and her students have watched as a flowing river has abruptly dwindled to a dry riverbed. While conducting biological surveys along the Kern River in Bakersfield, they have seen water retreat into stagnant pools and then vanish, leaving stretches of bare sand and cracked mud. They have found some fish flopping helplessly along the banks, and masses of dead fish scattered on the riverbed by the hundreds. “We’re all very surprised at how quickly things changed,” said McNeish, an associate professor of…