More Bad News: Counting The Fish (tell Will Durst!)

"Watching fisheries that God nurtured over tens of thousands of years being virtually destroyed in less than two decades while DWR, the Bureau and the State Board continue their embrace of denial is surely one of the most wretched and despicable spectacles we have ever witnessed."

Bill Jennings

When I hear Will Durst doing those ads for the unions that want to build the dams and the peripheral canal I cringe. Will is a paid voice for those ads. I'm not sure if he understands all of the issues with what he is talking about.

He ought to talk to my buddy Dan.

Here's numbers from an article from outdoor writer Dan Bacher one of the best and most hard assed outdoor writers around. He's a bulldog.

Not so much a "10 best places to camp to watch a full moon" type guy. Not that there's anything wrong with that you understand. In fact I'd love a few tips for some full moon camping in 09!

But I digress.

Read more at the link above that will take you to a page from the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. Also look to Water 4 Fish for some good information.

I pulled out the numbers of the fish counts in the Delta that Dan used. Please refer to his complete article for more. When you hear "old timers" talk about the good old days of catching giant fish all day long in the Delta, you know they aren't all lying. Since then lots and lots of water is pumped out of the Delta and heads south. When those pumps run fish die. That's a simple and easy to understand fact.

American Shad
2008: 271 (record low)
2007: 533
2003: 9360

Threadfin Shad
2008: 450
2007: 3177

Sacramento Splittail
2008: ZERO
2007: 1

Striped Bass
2008: 220
2007: 82
1971: 9500

Longfin Smelt
2008: 113
2007: 13
1998: 6654

The cause? Well many things, but how about keep it simple stupid. Remove water, fish die. Add water to the delta, where it will flush out pollution and allows the system to naturally clean itself, and fish live.

And what's up with that in the last few years? Come on take a wild guess?

Did someone say record water exports?! Ohh you there you're a winner! Here's some more numbers.

Dan writes:

State and federal fishery biologists have pinpointed three major causes of the fishery decline - increased water exports, toxics and invasive species. More recently, increases in ammonia releases through sewage treatment plants have been cited by scientists as a possible factor.


Record water export levels occurred in:
2003 (6.3 million acre feet)
2004 (6.1 MAF)
2005 (6.5 MAF)
and 2006 (6.3 MAF)

Exports averaged 4.6 MAF annually between 1990 and 1999 and increased to an average of 6 MAF between 2000 and 2007, a rise of almost 30 percent.

So now what?

Well lots of people are working to keep the fish alive.

Understand this isn't a bunch of fishermen crying like little babies about a few bad fishing days. These outdoors men and women see it first hand. They know the rivers and Delta in California are barely able to sustain any life at all. It isn't maybe going to, or might happen in the future, this is now.

The Delta is a deadzone for fish. In a crazy effort to try to keep the salmon population alive even the hatchery raised salmon can't be put into the Sacramento river and be allowed to naturally swim south to the bay. There isn't any food for them there.

They get trucked from up north and put into pens in the bay to feed. When they are big enough they are then released. If they tried to make it all they way down the Sacramento they would starve to death.

Dan ends his editorial like this.

The crisis in Delta fisheries will not be solved by changing the agency's name - or taking more water out of the Delta through the peripheral canal proposed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Department of Water Resources, Senator Diane Feinstein and the Nature Conservancy as a "solution" to the Delta's problems.

The canal and more dams that Schwarzenegger and Mike Chrisman, Resources Secretary, are campaigning for will only exacerbate the imperiled status of these fish populations, driving them over the precipice of extinction.

The only way the Resources Agency can live up to its new "natural" name is to abandon the mad campaign for a peripheral canal and more dams, mandate water conservation by corporate agribusiness, adopt tough agricultural water pollution standards and require the retirement of toxic selenium-filled soil in the Westlands Water District.

Makes sense to me.

Help out and get info here.

Send friends this blog posting if you want to by using the email link at the very top next to the title of the post.

Thanks.