Northern California river receives endangered salmon for first time in 80 years
(FOX40.COM) — For the first time in 80 years, a Northern California river welcomed an endangered species of salmon to its waters.
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Currently, spring-run and winter-run Chinook Salmon are listed at the state and federal level as “threatened” and “endangered,” which means they are considered at critical risk of extinction. Since the 1940s, the winter-run Chinook salmon have been blocked from accessing the McCloud River area in California because of the Shasta and Keswick dams.
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Because of the restriction, the California Department of Water Resources, Winnemem Wintu Tribe, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Association Fisheries Service said they partnered together to “save the salmon” and help the fish mitigate to areas of the McCloud River.
“Salmon are what’s called an ecological keystone species,” said DWR environmental scientist Theo Claire. “Without salmon, our rivers starve. Salmon bring marine-derived nutrients from the ocean back up to our freshwater ecosystems. The salmon marine-derived nutrients allow the forests that we see around us to grow.”
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Claire stressed the importance of creating a pathway for the salmon to enter local rivers.
“Generally, there is a scientific consensus that if we are going to prevent the extinction of salmon in California, we need to start getting fish above dams,” Claire said.
The new pilot project involves installing a floating structure that spans the width of the river called the Juvenile Salmon Collection System at the point where the McCloud River meets Shasta Reservoir, according to DWR. The collection system is designed to safely catch juvenile winter-run Chinook salmon as they emigrate out of the upper river, before they get stuck in the vast reservoir.
CDFW and the Winnemem Wintu Tribe recently placed eggs into the river and incubators on the side of the river, according to DWR. The newborn Chinook salmon are caught by California officials, studied, and released into different areas of the rivers to be funneled into the ecosystem.
“This is kind of a unique system in that no one’s ever really tried this before in terms of collecting fish at the head of the reservoir,” said DWR senior engineer, Randy Beckwith. “It’s a passive system so it doesn’t have any pumps on it to create any velocity. We have to manipulate the system itself to try to get velocity into the trap. And then we’re using fish behavior – fish want to move downstream with the flow.”
Up to hundreds of Chinook Salmon are reportedly caught each day and to “make sure extinction doesn’t become a reality,” DWR scientists said efforts like the Juvenile Salmon Collection System are necessary.
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