Welcome to the California Fisheries Blog

The California Sportfishing Protection Alliance is pleased to host the California Fisheries Blog. The focus will be on pelagic and anadromous fisheries. We will also cover environmental topics related to fisheries such as water supply, water quality, hatcheries, harvest, and habitats. Geographical coverage will be from the ocean to headwaters, including watersheds, streams, rivers, lakes, bays, ocean, and estuaries. Please note that posts on the blog represent the work and opinions of their authors, and do not necessarily reflect CSPA positions or policy.

Feeding Stripers Again

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Oroville hatchery steelhead smolts being released into the lower Feather River near Boyd’s Pump in early February. CDFW photo.

State and federal agencies have begun stocking over a million steelhead smolts from Central Valley hatcheries into the Sacramento River and its tributaries.1 Fishing reports in the SacBee and other sources note that the annual stocking provokes a strong striper bite in the river, one of the more popular fisheries in the Central Valley.  The yearling smolts are the perfect food for stripers.

Shasta, Oroville, and Folsom reservoir releases are each at about 3000 cfs, low for mid-winter.  As a result, along with the record warm weather, river and Delta water temperatures (Figures 1-4) have been in the preferred range for striped bass feeding (55-65°F).

The federal Coleman hatchery near Redding released its steelhead smolts in January during high flows, before the warm weather arrived and stripers began feeding in earnest.  But at Thermalito Afterbay on the Feather River, the state is stocking a quarter of a million steelhead and feeding bass. And the feds are will be stocking a half-million endangered winter-run salmon hatchery smolts near Redding in February and March.

The striped bass will soon decimate the Feather River steelhead and will be well positioned for the annual April hatchery salmon smolt stocking season in April.  In the meantime, the stripers attracted by massive chumming will be knocking off the wild juvenile salmon and steelhead heading for the ocean.

Why do hatcheries continue to waste so many of the over 20 million salmonid smolts raised each year to mitigate for all the dams on Central Valley rivers?  Smolts cost more than $1 each to raise.

Hatchery managers and their partners need to barge hatchery steelhead and fall-run salmon smolts to the Bay.  Barging smolts would likely increase adult returns sharply in coming years.  Both steelhead and salmon populations are relatively homogeneous genetically, which reduces concerns about the effects of straying.  Coleman smolts should be barged from near Hamilton City.  Oroville smolts should be barged from Verona.  Nimbus smolts should be barged from Discovery Park.

If releases of hatchery smolts into the rivers are to continue, water managers need to at least provide pulsed flows from Shasta Reservoir to help the fish succeed in reaching the Bay and ocean.  Shasta storage is 106% of average.  A 5% allocation to pulsed flows would amount to approximately 140,000 acre-feet, enough for seven days of an 10,000 cfs extra flow to the Sacramento River.  Pulsed flows would also reduce water temperatures.  Hatchery managers should also not  release smolts into the rivers during warm spells that stimulate striper feeding.

State hatcheries plan some trucking of salmon smolts to the Bay-Delta this year, as they have done in past years.  Trucked fish should also be barged or at least taken to the Golden Gate, not just to Rio Vista.

In addition to barging and trucking, and pulsed flows, hatchery managers need to accelerate a pilot program to stock hatchery salmon fry into lower river and Delta floodplain habitats for rearing closer to the Bay.  In these habitats, fry would grow faster than their hatchery counterparts and get to the ocean quicker.

Anglers should take advantage of the great striper fishery.  But let‘s at minimum give the salmonid smolts some chance of reaching the ocean, so we can also once again have great salmon and steelhead fisheries.

 

Figure 1.  Water temperature in early February 2018 in the Sacramento River at the mouth of the Feather River

Figure 2.  Water temperature in early February 2018 in the Sacramento River below the mouth of the American River near Sacramento.

Figure 3.  Water temperature in the lower Sacramento River upstream of the mouth of the Feather River at Wilkins Slough

Figure 4.  Water temperature in the lower Sacramento River in the Delta near Rio Vista.

Hatchery Salmon Are Trained to Be Dysfunctional

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Research has often shown that hatchery salmon perform less well than their wild counterparts.  The reason for this has often been attributed to genetic factors such as parent selection or to the lack of opportunity for Mother Nature to cull misfits.

Recent research indicates that poor performance of hatchery fish may stem more from the their environmental experiences than from their genetics.  Some older theories that suggested that hatchery fish were just raised dumb now have gained a new following.  New research from Canada suggests that atypical food and feeding combined with overcrowding in hatcheries weakens inherent genetic abilities to cope with the natural environment.

In California’s Central Valley, we have added the burden of releasing hatchery smolts late in the natural emigration season outside of peak flow periods, into warmer waters that are full of other fish that want to eat them.  When the salmon from the hatcheries get hungry,  there is no flood of fresh food pellets.  Their new environment results in starvation, thermal stress, and much higher vulnerability to predation.  Still, hatchery fish make up 70-90% of California’s salmon runs, because Valley habitats no longer support historic levels of wild salmon production.

In recent posts, I have advocated raising hatchery fry in Valley floodplain habitats.  UC Davis studies have shown high rates of growth of hatchery fry raised in flooded rice fields during the winter.  New planning efforts call for more flooded Valley habitats, including rice fields, but these efforts focus primarily on wild juvenile salmon.  There has been no testing to date of the performance of hatchery fry that rear under controlled floodplain conditions.  In light of the recent Canadian research, the ability of floodplain-reared hatchery fish to survive, and the degree to which they stray, warrant evaluation.

Measures to Save the Delta and Delta Smelt

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The key to saving the Bay-Delta Estuary and its native fish community is keeping the Low Salinity Zone (LSZ) and its brackish water out of the Delta, especially the south Delta where the federal and state project pumps are located.  The native fish of the estuary, both in the Bay and Delta, depend on potency or productivity of the LSZ.  Much research has shown that low Delta freshwater outflow allows the LSZ to move into the Delta, to the detriment of overall ecological productivity and of the survival and production of native fish (and most pelagic species and their food supply).  Allowing the LSZ to move into the Delta allows the export of the LSZ from the south Delta, to the detriment of native fish and their critical habitats.  Increased salinity also harms agricultural and municipal water supplies.

Keeping the LSZ out of the Delta means keeping salinity (as measured by electrical conductivity or EC) below 500 EC.  The 500 EC level is sometimes called the “salt front” or the upstream head of the LSZ.  Another measure of the LSZ is X2, the heart of the LSZ, approximately 3800 EC.  The State Board has defined the Emmaton gage on the Sacramento River channel and Jersey Point gage on the San Joaquin River channel as the western edge of the Delta in terms of Delta agriculture and set wet year standards of a maximum 500 EC for the spring to fall irrigation season.  These standards have kept the LSZ out of the Delta in summer of wet years to the benefit of Delta agriculture and native fishes (and non-native striped bass).  However, the standard is also needed in the non-irrigation season when high Delta exports often occur.

Suggested measures to save the Delta:

  1. Do not allow south Delta exports to exceed a minimum (often prescribed as 1500 cfs) when Jersey Point and Emmaton gages exceed 500 EC.
  2. Place barriers on False River and Dutch Slough channels when their gages may exceed 500 EC.
  3. Open the Delta Cross Channel (DCC) to maintain a balanced EC at the Jersey Point and Emmaton gages and ensure positive outflow from the Delta at Jersey Point (often referred to as a positive QWEST). Closure of the DCC when EC rises at Jersey Point is detrimental to the LSZ when south Delta exports exceed 1500 cfs.
  4. Restrict Old and Middle River (OMR) negative flows to protect salmon and smelt from export facilities when these fish are in the interior Delta under freshwater conditions per biological opinions.
  5. Install or construct a permanent Head of Old River Barrier to keep San Joaquin salmon out of the south Delta in winter-spring under all export conditions.
  6. Increase San Joaquin River flows in the February-June time period.
  7. Keep Delta outflow at 8000-10,000 cfs in the fall after wet years to keep salt out of the Delta.

Example:  Water Year 2018

This new water year with its record November (wet) and December (dry) is a good example of what is wrong with the Delta.  Despite high reservoir levels for the beginning of a new water year1, Delta outflow was allowed to fall to 5000-7000 cfs in late November (Figure 1) as Delta exports literally sucked the freshwater bubble out of the Delta.  Exports averagedover 10,000 cfs from mid-November to mid–December, a time of year when there are no Delta controls.  The LSZ encroached at Emmaton (Figure 2), Blind Point (Figure 3), False River (Figure 4) on the west side of the Delta, Dutch Slough (Figure 5), and even showed up at the Rock Slough intake of the Contra Costa Water District in the south Delta (Figure 6).  See Figure 7 for the gage locations.

In conclusion, maintaining the 10,000 cfs Delta outflow necessary to keep the salt out of the Delta this past fall would have cost approximately 250,000 acre-ft of water from either the 18,000,000 acre-ft in storage or 1,500,000 acre-ft of Delta exports.  Doing so would have gone a long way toward protecting the past year’s production of winter-run smolts and pre-spawn Delta smelt that were both concentrated in the Delta.

Figure 1. Daily average Delta outflow for 11/7/17 to 1/4/18. Note each box-cell in chart represents approximately 7000 acre-ft of water. Maintaining a target 10,000 cfs to keep salt out of the Delta would have required an additional approximately 250,000 acre-ft of storage releases or export reduction.

Figure 2. The LSZ has encroached into the Sacramento River channel of the western Delta increasingly this water year. The limit should be 500 EC.

Figure 3. The LSZ has encroached into the San Joaquin River channel of the western Delta increasingly this water year. The limit should be 500 EC.

Figure 4. The LSZ has encroached into the central Delta via the False River channel from the western Delta increasingly this water year. The limit should be 500 EC.

Figure 5. The LSZ has encroached into the central and south Delta via the Dutch Slough channel of the western Delta increasingly this water year. The limit should be 500 EC.

Figure 6. The LSZ has encroached into the central and south Delta as seen at the Rock Slough gage of the south Delta increasingly this water year. The limit should be 500 EC.

Figure 7. Location of gages in above figures.

  1. As of December 1, Sacramento watershed reservoirs were 109% of average, and San Joaquin reservoirs were 150% of average. ↩

Delta Smelt: End of 2017

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In a recent post, I summarized the population dynamics of Delta smelt using the Summer Townet Index and Fall Midwater Trawl index relationships.  Since then, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife updated the Fall Midwater Trawl Index for 2017.  In turn, I update the relationships in Figures 1 and 2 below.  As I predicted in another post last fall, there was no uptick in the 2017 index, despite it being a wet year.  News articles on the subject suggest “no easy answers.”  To me it is obvious that the water project managers went out of their way to short smelt in 2017.  The prognosis for Delta smelt remains grim.

Figure 1. Log vs Log plot of fall FMWT Index of Delta smelt as related to the prior summer STN Index of abundance for that year. Blue years are wet water years (Oct-Sept). Green years are normal water years. Red years are dry and critical water years. Year types are as determined by the California Department of Water Resources for the Sacramento River runoff to the Bay-Delta Estuary (http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/iodir/WSIHIST).

Figure 2. Log vs Log plot of fall FMWT Index of Delta smelt (recruits) vs previous fall index (spawners). Blue years are wet water years. Green years are normal water years. Red years are dry and critical water years. Year types are as determined by the California Department of Water Resources for the Sacramento River runoff to the Bay-Delta Estuary (http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/iodir/WSIHIST).

 

How do we increase salmon runs in 2018 and beyond?

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Over the past few months, I wrote posts on the status of specific runs of salmon in rivers throughout the Central Valley. In this post, I describe the overall status of salmon runs and the general actions to take to increase both escapement and fish available for commercial and sport harvest.

It was just over a decade ago that there were nearly one million adult salmon ascending the rivers of the Central Valley (Figure 1). At the same time, there were a millions more Central Valley salmon being harvested each year in sport and commercial fisheries along the coast and rivers of the Central Valley. Improvements in salmon management in the decade of the 1990s by the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, CALFED, and other programs had paid off handsomely with strong runs from 1999 to 2005. New and upgraded hatcheries, along with trucking hatchery smolts to the Bay, significantly increased harvest and escapement to spawning rivers.

Figure 1. Central Valley salmon runs from 1975 to 2016 including fall, late fall, winter, and spring runs. Source of data: CDFW GrandTab.

By 2008-2009, escapement had fallen by over 90% to a mere 70,000 spawners of the four races of salmon.  Fishery harvests were greatly restricted by 2008.  The winter run, the most threatened of the four runs fell from 17,296 to 827 spawners in just five years.  Drier years from 2001-2005, poor ocean conditions in 2004-2005, record-high Delta water diversions, and the 2007-2009 drought were contributing factors in the declines.  Impacts to coastal communities and the fishing industries were severe.

Extraordinary recovery measures included closing fisheries and trucking most of the hatchery smolt production to the Bay or Delta.  Federal salmon biological opinions (2009, 2011) limited winter-spring water-project exports from the Delta.  Hundreds of millions of new dollars were spent on habitat and fish passage improvements in the Valley to increase salmon survival and turn around the declines in runs.  A look at Figure 1 indicates that these efforts proved effective in limiting run declines from the 2012-2015 drought compared to the 1987-1992 and 2007-2009 droughts.

However, the prognosis for the future is again bleak, especially for wild, naturally produced salmon.  The consequences of the 2012-2015 drought  have not fully played out.  Once again, projected runs are low, and harvests are likely to be restricted.  Actions are needed to minimize long-term effects and to help bring about recovery of wild salmon productivity and fisheries in general.

Actions for 2018:

  1. Reduce harvest: Sadly but necessarily, the Pacific Fisheries Management Council and states are likely to take this first step of– restricting the 2018 harvest in the ocean and rivers to protect wild runs.
  2. Improve spawning, rearing, and migrating conditions: Sadly, this past year’s rearing and migrating conditions in the Sacramento River were unnecessarily compromised.   Water temperature at Red Bluff reached above the 56oF prescribed in the biological opinion and Basin Plan.  The higher temperatures resulted from low Shasta Reservoir releases (less than 5000 cfs – Figure 2) despite a virtually full Shasta Reservoir.  The low flow and higher water temperatures likely affected salmon egg incubation, rearing, and emigration-immigration success.  Reservoir releases will be necessary to meet flow and temperature targets in all Central Valley rivers and the Delta.
  3. Limit Delta exports: Delta exports this past spring reached unprecedented highs not seen in recent decades, resulting in high salmon salvage rates at the Delta fish facilities (Figure 3).1 With high water supplies from this past wet water year 2017, there will be high exports again unless there are some constraints.  If anything, winter-spring exports should be reduced to allow salmon to recover.  April-May exports should be reduced, like they were in the 1990’s and 2000’s, to 1500 cfs.

Near term actions over the coming year:

  1. Transport hatchery smolts to Bay: The transport of millions of fall-run smolts from state hatcheries on the Feather, American, and Mokelumne rivers to the Bay provides higher rates of escapement and contributions to the fishery and low rates of straying.  Barge transport to the Bay offers potentially lower rates of predation and straying for federal hatcheries near Redding.
  2. Raise hatchery fry in natural habitats: Recent research indicates that rearing hatchery fry in more natural habitat conditions increases growth rates, survival, and contributions to escapement and fisheries.  Raising hatchery fry in rice fields is one potential approach.
  3. Restore habitats damaged by recent record high flows in salmon spawning and rearing reaches of the Central Valley rivers and floodplains: In nearly every river, habitats were damaged by the winter 2017 floods, requiring extraordinary repairs and maintenance to ready them again to produce salmon.
  4. Take further actions to enhance flows and water temperatures to enhance salmon survival throughout the Central Valley: Actions may include higher base flows, flow pulses, or simply meeting existing target flow and temperature goals.

In conclusion, managers should take immediate actions to minimize the damage to salmon runs from the recent drought and floods, using this past year’s abundant water supply.  They should avoid efforts to exploit the abundant water in storage for small benefits to water supply at the expense of salmon recovery, and should make every effort to use the water in storage for salmon recovery.

Figure 2. Upper Sacramento River flows and water temperatures in May 2017. The target water temperature for Red Bluff is 56oF. Source of data: USBR.

Figure 3. Export rate and young salmon salvage at South Delta federal and state export facilities in May 2017. The target export rate limit for May should be 1500 cfs. Source of data: USBR.