Posts Tagged California Department of Fish and Wildlife

May 19 2015

Drought-Stricken California Organizes Unprecedented Effort to Truck Hatchery Salmon to SF Bay

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Copyright © 2015 Seafoodnews.com

SEAFOODNEWS.COM [KCRA] May 19, 2015

What do you do when you have 30 million young salmon ready for their big journeys downstream, but drought and development have dried your riverbeds to sauna rocks? In California this year, you give the fish a ride.

State and federal wildlife agencies in California are deploying what they say is the biggest fish-lift in the state’s history through this month, rolling out convoys of tanker trucks to transport a generation of hatchery salmon downstream to the San Francisco Bay. California is locked in its driest four-year stretch on record, making the river routes that the salmon normally take to the Pacific Ocean too warm and too shallow for them to survive.

“It’s huge. This is a massive effort statewide on multiple systems,” said Stafford Lehr, chief of fisheries for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which since February has been rolling out four to eight 35,000-gallon tanker trucks filled with baby salmon on their freeway-drive to freedom.

“We’re going to unprecedented drought,” Lehr said. “We’re forced to extreme measures.”

Drought and heavy use of water by farms and cities have devastated key native fish in California. Last year, for example, 95 percent of the state’s winter-run of Chinook salmon died. The fish is vital for California’s fishing industries and for the food chain of wildlife.

For the first time, all five big government hatcheries in California’s Central Valley for fall-run Chinook California salmon – a species of concern under the federal Endangered Species Act – are going to truck their young, release-ready salmon down to the Bay, rather than release them into rivers to make the trip themselves.

And California’s wild native fish should pack a sandwich and something to read; they’ll be spending a lot of the summer on the road too.

“Bone dry. Bone dry,” said fish biologist Don Portz of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, who is six years into an effort to restore the southernmost salmon stream in the U.S., the Central Valley’s San Joaquin River.

Drought, a dam and heavy use of the river’s water for irrigation have dried 60 miles of the San Joaquin. For the young salmon, whose life cycle for millions of years has involved travel from the river back and forth to the San Francisco Bay, that now means a 1 1/2-hour ride down California Highway 99 in a pickup-mounted fish tank.

“You give them that taxi ride down, they make it to the ocean, and come back” in a few years for trapping and a taxi ride back up to spawning grounds, Portz said.

The rolling fish rescues occurring up and down the West Coast haven’t always gone smoothly. In January, Oregon authorities charged a trucker with drunken driving after he hit a pole and flipped 11,000 juvenile salmon out on the roadway, where they died.

For some of California’s native fish, the rescue from drought often is by bucket, not truck.

Near the town of Lagunitas, in Northern California’s Marin County, watershed biologist Preston Brown stood ankle-high in a coastal tributary, searching for endangered California coastal Coho salmon and other, native fish. Decades ago, so many coho salmon filled the water that the noise of their jumping kept people in nearby houses up at night. On this day, Brown and his team find none.

Starting in June, months earlier than usual because of the drought, Brown and others with local environment group Salmon Protection and Watershed Network, will search the waterway. In cooperation with wildlife agencies, they will try to rescue coho and other fish stuck in drying pools of water 4- or 5 inches deep.

Sometimes, Brown said, the bucket brigades get there too late for the stranded salmon. “If they survived the raccoons” and other predators, “they dried up and died,” Brown said.

Lehr, the fisheries chief, expects some individual steelhead trout in Southern California will get truck rides two or three times this summer, as parts of rivers and creeks disappear.

As a last resort, when some rivers have no pools of water left to shelter fish, wildlife officials will remove survivors to a hatchery to wait out the drought. Two such isolated native species from dried-up waterways have been living in government hatcheries since last year, snacking on flies that rangers catch in bug-zappers for them, Lehr said, and waiting for wetter times.


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Mar 14 2015

Updating the Master Plan for Marine Protected Areas

California-Department-of-Fish-and-Wildlife-300x395

statewide-mpa-networkCalifornia’s MPA network

This year, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) is updating the 2008 Master Plan for Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). The updated 2015 Master Plan will be a guidance document that shifts the focus from designing and siting California’s MPA network to setting a statewide framework for MPA management. CDFW will welcome input on the updated 2015 Master Plan through a public process which starts at the Aug. 2015 meeting of the California Fish and Game Commission.

California is home to the largest scientifically designed network of MPAs in the United States. This accomplishment was the result of the State Legislature passing the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA), which required CDFW to redesign California’s system of MPAs through a highly participatory and stakeholder-driven MPA design and siting process that spanned eight years and four coastal regions.

The MLPA also required CDFW to develop a “master plan” to guide the adoption and implementation of MPAs. This master plan framework guided the incremental development of alternative MPA proposals in the first MLPA planning region on the central coast. Following the adoption of the central coast MPAs, the Master Plan for MPAs was approved as a living document by the California Fish and Game Commission in February 2008. The 2008 Master Plan then guided the development of alternative MPA proposals in the north central, south, and north coast regions.

CDFW anticipates taking a 4-step approach to update the Master Plan by the end of the year. This approach includes:

1. Working with Tribal governments over the next couple of months
2. Presenting a first draft to the Fish and Game Commission at their August 2015 meeting
3. Providing an update at the October 2015 Commission meeting, and
4. Presenting a final draft to the Commission for consideration of approval at their December 2015 meeting

For more information about the Master Plan for Marine Protected Areas and California’s network of MPAs, please visit the California Marine Protected Area website.


Read the original post: https://cdfwmarine.wordpress.com

Nov 20 2013

State, squid industry getting together

Capitol Weekly
Recently, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) closed the commercial fishery for market squid Loligo (Doryteuthis) opalescens. The closure came a month earlier than the year before.

This was the fourth straight year that the squid fishery closed early; the season typically extends all year, from April 1 to March 31. The difference this year – unlike the past – was that the Department collaborated with the squid industry on day-to-day management, including the closure date.

Squid fishermen and seafood processors, working with the Department, tracked catches daily from season start in April. They determined that the season’s harvest limit of 118,000 short tons of market squid would be reached early because squid began spawning far earlier than normal  in Southern California in 2013, a fact documented by industry-sponsored squid research.

Read the full article here.