Desperate times call for desperate measures. For the millions of California salmon that have no way to make it to the San Francisco Bay to spawn this year, these are desperate times, and desperate measures mean hitching a ride on the trucks rolled out by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Officials say the ongoing taxi lift of hatchery salmon is the biggest ever in the history of California, which is hard-pressed by a four-year drought as heavy water use by major cities and farm have dried out the state's water sources. For millions of years, young salmon have travelled the course of the San Joaquin River to the bay to spawn. But with 60 miles of the river dried up entirely, the salmon are changing their route to Highway 99.
All five government hatcheries in the Central Valley are collecting all the baby Chinook salmon, a California native considered a species of concern under the Endangered Species Act, and loading them up in fish tanks mounted on tanker trucks to transport them down to the bay, where they will be released and spawn to come back to the river a year after. Four to eight tanker trucks that can carry 35,000 gallons of baby salmon have been giving the fish a free one-and-a-half-hour-long ride since February, says Stafford Lehr, chief of fisheries at the department.
"It's huge," he tells the Associated Press. "This is a massive effort statewide on multiple systems. We're going to unprecedented drought. We're forced to extreme measures."
This is not the first time environment agencies have resorted to placing the fish in trucks for land-based travel to the ocean, and not all fish lift instances have gone smoothly. Earlier this year, an Oregon man driving a truck that was supposed to transport 11,000 baby salmon to the sea was charged with drunk driving after he hit the truck on a pole and spilled the fish into the road, where they died.
But there is simply no other way for the salmon to make their way to the ocean this year. What little remains of the freshwater network is often too warm and too shallow for the fish to safely make their way to the bay. Watershed biologist Preston Brown, who works with the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network in Lagunitas to rescue Coho salmon by the bucket, says the salmon either dried up or were caught by raccoons and other predators.
Fish that are not successfully transported to the bay are placed in a man-made hatchery instead, says Lehr. Two unspecified species, he says, are currently living in government hatcheries, as they wait for the rivers to run anew.
Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services | Flickr
