Salmon running down I-5

Salmon running down I-5

March 26, 2015


Dave Lunsford doesn’t usually wake up for work at 1 a.m., but then Thursday was not a typical day for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife technician.

By 3 a.m. Lunsford was loading his tanker truck with about 140,000 fingerling Chinook salmon to haul from Coleman National Fish Hatchery in Anderson to Rio Vista in the Bay Area.

The fish and the truck drivers were on a schedule dictated by the moon and Mother Nature, said Scott Hamelberg, project leader at the hatchery.

“The tide tables dictate when we dump the fish down there in Rio Vista,” Hamelberg said.

The fish are dumped from the trucks into net pens in the water. Following the tides, boats haul the pens farther downstream to a spot where the fish held for a time to become acclimated and then released.

The young salmon are usually released from Coleman into nearby Battle Creek, so they can make their way into the Sacramento River and downstream, eventually reaching the Pacific Ocean.

But for the second year in a row, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service officials who operate the hatchery have decided the drought has left conditions in the river too perilous for the young salmon.

The young salmon, called smolts, are about 3 inches long. During a normal, wet winter the river would be running higher and faster, and the water would be more muddy — all conditions that help the little fish hide from bigger fish and birds that can eat them.

But the drought has produced conditions in the Sacramento River and Delta detrimental to the salmon. Trucking the young fish also increases the likelihood they won’t return to the Anderson hatchery when they swim back upstream as adults to spawn in three years, fish and wildlife officials said.

But under the current drought conditions, it is very likely the hatchery would not get enough adults back to meet its egg needs in three years when the salmon return to the river to spawn, officials said.

“It’s just unfortunate that for the second year in a row that we are hauling a significant portion of the fish to the west Delta because of poor in-river conditions,” Hamelberg said.

During the next six weeks the wildlife service plans to haul about 12 million young fall-run Chinook salmon to three different sites in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta: Rio Vista, Mare Island and San Pablo Bay.

Also citing low and warm water conditions caused by the drought, the federal agency last month tripled the number of endangered winter-run Chinook salmon released into the river from the Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery near Shasta Dam.

This isn’t the first time the agency has hauled salmon for multiple years due to drought.

Steve Martarano, a Fish and Wildlife spokesman, said salmon were trucked three years in a row back in 1990-92 because of a drought. Also, from 2008-11, the agency shipped 1.3 million salmon annually, he said.