Los Angeles Times

Warming California rivers are killing fish, threatenin­g industry

- By Daisy Nguyen Nguyen writes for the Associated Press.

SAN FRANCISCO — Baby salmon are dying by the thousands in one California river, and an entire run of endangered salmon could be wiped out in another. Fishermen who make their living off adult salmon, once they enter the Pacific Ocean, are sounding the alarm as blistering heat waves and extended drought in the U.S. West raise water temperatur­es and imperil fish from Idaho to California.

Hundreds of thousands of young salmon are dying in Northern California’s Klamath River as low water levels brought about by drought allow a parasite to thrive, devastatin­g a Native American tribe whose diet and traditions are tied to the fish. And wildlife officials said the Sacramento River is facing a “near-complete loss” of young Chinook salmon due to abnormally warm water.

A crash in one year’s class of young salmon can have lasting effects on the total population and shorten or stop the fishing season, a growing concern as climate change continues to make the West hotter and drier. That could be devastatin­g to the commercial salmon fishing industry, which in California alone is worth $1.4 billion.

The plummeting catch has already led to skyrocketi­ng retail prices for salmon, hurting customers who say they can no longer afford the $35 per pound of fish, said Mike Hudson, who has spent the last 25 years catching and selling salmon at farmers markets in Berkeley.

Hudson said he has considered retiring and selling his 40-foot boat because “it’s going to get worse from here.”

Winter-run Chinook salmon are born in the Sacramento River, traverse hundreds of miles to the Pacific, where they normally spend three years before returning to their birthplace to mate and lay their eggs between April and August. Unlike the fall-run Chinook that survive almost entirely due to hatchery breeding programs, the winter run is still largely reared in the wild.

Federal fisheries officials predicted in May that more than 80% of baby salmon could die because of warmer water in the Sacramento River. Now, state wildlife officials say that number could be higher amid a rapidly depleting pool of cool water in Lake Shasta. California’s largest reservoir is filled to only about 35% capacity, federal water managers said this week.

“The pain we’re going to feel is a few years from now, when there will be no naturally spawned salmon out in the ocean,” said John McManus, president of the Golden State Salmon Assn., which represents the fishing industry.

When Lake Shasta was formed in the 1940s, it blocked access to the cool mountain streams where fish traditiona­lly spawned. To ensure their survival, the U.S. government is required to maintain river temperatur­es below 56 degrees Fahrenheit in spawning habitat because salmon eggs generally can’t survive in warmer water.

The warm water is starting to affect older fish too. Scientists have seen some adult fish dying before they can lay their eggs.

“An extreme set of cascading climate events is pushing us into this crisis situation,” said Jordan Traverso, a spokeswoma­n for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The West has been grappling with a historic drought and recent heat waves worsened by climate change, putting a strain on waterways and reservoirs that sustain millions of people and wildlife.

As a result, the state has been trucking millions of salmon raised at hatcheries to the ocean each year, bypassing the perilous downstream journey. State and federal hatcheries take other extraordin­ary measures to preserve the decimated salmon stocks, such as maintainin­g a genetic bank to prevent inbreeding at hatcheries and releasing them at crucial life stages.

Fishermen and environmen­tal groups blame water agencies for diverting too much water too soon to farms, which could lead to severe salmon die-off and drive the species closer to extinction.

“We know that climate change is going to make years like this more common, and what the agencies should be doing is managing for the worst-case scenario,” said Sam Mace, a director of Save Our Wild Salmon, a coalition working to restore wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest.

“We need some real changes in how rivers are managed if they’re going to survive,” she said.

On the Klamath River near the Oregon state line, California wildlife officials decided not to release more than 1 million young Chinook salmon into the wild and instead drove them to hatcheries that could host them until river conditions improve.

Much is riding on this class of salmon because it could be the first to return to the river if plans to remove four of six dams on the Klamath and restore fish access to the upper river go according to plan.

Across the West, officials are struggling with similar concerns over fish population­s.

In Idaho, officials recognized that endangered sockeye salmon wouldn’t make their upstream migration through hundreds of miles of warm water to their spawning habitat, so they flooded the Snake River with cool water, then trapped and trucked the fish to hatcheries.

And environmen­talists went to court this month in Portland, Ore., to try to force dam operators on the Snake and Columbia rivers to release more water at dams blocking migrating salmon, arguing that the effects of climate change were further threatenin­g fish already on the verge of extinction.

Low water levels are also affecting recreation­al fishing. Officials in Wyoming, Colorado, Montana and California are asking anglers to fish during the coolest parts of the day to minimize the effect on fish stressed from low oxygen levels in warm water.

 ?? Travis VanZant Associated Press ?? WILDLIFE OFFICIALS said the Sacramento River is facing a “near-complete loss” of young Chinook salmon due to abnormally warm water, which could devastate California’s $1.4-billion commercial salmon industry.
Travis VanZant Associated Press WILDLIFE OFFICIALS said the Sacramento River is facing a “near-complete loss” of young Chinook salmon due to abnormally warm water, which could devastate California’s $1.4-billion commercial salmon industry.

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