Plan to truck salmon smolts to San Pablo Bay didn’t work so well – 75,000 die in transit

From the Redding Record-Searchlight:

About 75,000 of 180,000 young fall-run Chinook salmon being hauled in tanker trucks from the Coleman National Fish Hatchery in Anderson to San Pablo Bay near Vallejo Monday died. “We are kind of in the stages of trying to figure out what went wrong,” Scott Hamelberg, the hatchery’s manager, said early Monday afternoon. “It’s part of the risk of trucking fish.”

About 41 percent of the smolts being trucked Monday died. Scientists plan to perform necropsies — animal autopsies — on some of the dead smolts to determine their cause of death, said Alexandra Pitts, spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Sacramento. “They are going to see what they can see in them, which can tell them a lot more of what happened,” she said.

It was likely a problem with the oxygen level in the fish’s water that caused their deaths, Hamelberg said. The 2,500-gallon truck carried about 100,000 fish. A second, smaller tanker truck got its load of the 6-month old fish to the bay unscathed, he taken such a drastic step, one that is jeopardizing the $150 million West Coast salmon industry.

Studies are in process, trying to determine what has gone wrong with the salmon runs this year. Lack of food in the ocean and water exports from the Delta have been blamed, but a concrete, definitive reason has yet to emerge. Climate change will bring warmer temperatures to the Sacramento River waters, further impacting the salmon which need cold water to survive. More information due out on this soon:

Reassessing how California’s water is managed is one of the recommendations to be released Thursday as part of a separate report by the National Wildlife Federation and the California-based Planning and Conservation League. The report, which relies in part on Yates’ study, illustrates how California’s fish, waterfowl and other species will struggle to survive over the next century as climate change alters their habitat. “We need to take a step back and look at how we’re going to manage water in a more comprehensive manner and save salmon,” said Mindy McIntyre, a water specialist at the Planning and Conservation League.

State scientists say climate change could lead to more winter flooding, summer droughts, warmer rivers and streams, and rising seas that will push salt water farther upstream from San Francisco Bay. Temperature spikes are particularly worrisome for cold water fish, such as salmon, steelhead and the state fish, the California golden trout, according to research compiled in the National Wildlife Federation report.

Read the full text of this article from the Redding Record-Searchlight by clicking here.

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