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Hatchery program breeds delta smelt

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 7, 2008 at 6:48 am

From the Redding Searchlight:

A tiny fish at the heart of the big Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta water controversy is being bred at a north state hatchery.

The delta smelt — the 3-inch long subject of lawsuits over water supplies, bellwether of delta health and recipient of federal species protection — is part of a pilot program at Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery, a small hatchery on the Sacramento River near the base of Shasta Dam.

There hatchery workers are employing techniques on the finger-long fish that long have been used for retrieving sperm and eggs from salmon, said Scott Hamelberg, project leader for the Coleman National Fish Hatchery Complex, which includes Livingston Stone. “What they have done here is pretty incredible,” he said.

A crash in the number of delta smelt during the last five years led the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the University of California at Davis to start work on the pilot program, which is aimed at developing a system to breed the small fish, which was listed by the federal government as a threatened species in 1993. “There is a great concern about the numbers of these fish left in the environment,” Hamelberg said.

But that doesn’t mean these fish will be going wild.

Currently there is no plan to reintroduce the 20,000 smelt raised at Livingston Stone into the delta, said John Rueth, assistant hatchery manager. Rather, they are being kept as a safety net in case the ongoing population crash causes extinction of the species in the wild. “They’ll be held primarily as a back-up population,” he said.