California Fisheries Q&A with Dan Bacher
Solano County, CA. Florence Low / California Department of Water Resources
Dan Bacher has been fishing and writing about fishing and fisheries conservation for more than 50 years. Angling is the great passion of his life – and while reporting on California’s fisheries is his career, he also views it as a personal responsibility. In today’s impoverished and skewed news environment, Dan stands out as a journalist with a deep dedication to the resource he covers. He doesn’t just lead his field: he is unique. The number of California journalists reporting on water and fisheries has dwindled drastically over the past two decades, and today there is no one covering the issues full-time other than Dan. His knowledge of his subjects is encyclopedic.
Today, Dan continues to report on fish and water for several publications, including the Daily Kos and the Stockton Record. He is also a board member of the California Water Impact Network and advises the group on fisheries policy. C-WIN caught up with Dan recently to discuss the status of California’s fisheries. The news, unhappily, is not good.
C-WIN
Dan, what’s the most important issue you’re covering right now?
Dan
The big story is the state of Central Valley and Delta native fish, including salmon, of course. They are currently at a crisis point – the worst ever. Several species – including some salmon runs – are at the literal point of extinction. One Delta fish is already extinct in its original habitat, and now we’re poised to lose several more.
C-WIN
What’s the extinct species?
Dan
The Sacramento perch. It’s really a remarkable fish, our only native sunfish. It’s a large fish that thrives in brackish water. Highly esteemed as a food fish, it was once widely distributed throughout the Delta and Central Valley marshes. For many decades, none have been reported by anglers in the Delta. But they aren’t extinct everywhere.
Sacramento perch were transplanted to Pyramid Lake and Crowley Lake before they disappeared from the Delta, and they’re doing quite well there. They seem to like the highly mineralized water of those Great Basin and eastern Sierra lakes. So that’s a bitter irony, really – a fish that evolved in the low elevation estuarine and wetland habitats of the Delta is now extinct there and is found in fishable numbers only in high desert environments.
C-WIN
When the subject of beleaguered Delta fish is raised, the species that probably jumps to mind for most people is the Delta smelt. How are they doing?
Dan
It really couldn’t get much worse. They’re emblematic of the general tragedy of the Delta as a whole. Delta smelt, of course, are a keystone species for the Delta ecosystem. They’re endemic – they live entirely within the Delta, and don’t venture either upriver or out to sea. And not so long ago, they were the most common fish in the Delta. When I was a kid growing up in Sacramento and fishing for striped bass, they were everywhere in the Delta. They were the primary forage fish for stripers and every other large predatory Delta fish.
Then in 1967, the State Water Project started up its huge pumps near Tracy, and that marked the beginning of the end for the Delta smelt. Those pumps have the power to literally reverse the seaward flow of water through the Delta. The smelt were either macerated by the pumps or died because so much freshwater was sent south that the brackish conditions the smelt need got saltier due to seawater intrusion. State indexes show the smelt with a large population in 1970, then steady declines through the seventies and eighties. They showed an uptick in the 1990s and early 2000s because environmentalists were able to obtain higher through-Delta flows for those years.
But in 2003, we started seeing extremely high diversions again, primarily to meet the demand for a trendy new export crop – almonds. And as almond plantings expanded, agricultural water demands increased tremendously, because almonds are a thirsty crop. We had record exports for years – up to more than six million acre-feet annually, which is simply unsustainable. It just destroyed the Delta smelt – and subsequently, the Delta, because the smelt is an indicator species. As the Delta smelt goes, so goes the Delta ecosystem.
There’s no clearer proof of this than the midwater trawl surveys conducted by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. In the last few years, the numbers recorded have gone from a few to zero. Nothing. They’re functionally extinct now. What was once the most common fish in the Delta has completely disappeared – or at least, their numbers are so small that they don’t constitute a breeding population. They’re aquarium fish now.
C-WIN
And as you say, it’s not just Delta smelt. It’s an entire suite of estuarine species that are on the verge of collapse, correct?
Dan
It’s pelagic [open water] species generally. Striped bass, longfin smelt, splittail – virtually all the Bay/Delta’s pelagics. The graphs say it all. Delta smelt, of course, have declined by 100%. Striped bass have declined by 99.7%. Longfin smelt, by 99.96%. The only species that hasn’t experienced an absolute catastrophe is American shad, which declined by “only” 67.9% – and that’s hardly a stellar success story. What’s particularly galling is the way state agencies – including the California Department of Fish and Wildlife – skew these numbers for public consumption.
For example, this year CDFW proclaimed that they recorded “70% more” longfin smelt in their index trawls than they did last year. But that means nothing – it was a 70% increase from almost zero. That doesn’t prove a thing. It’s certainly not a trend – going from virtually no fish to almost no fish. And because the entire system is so stressed, the fish that do remain are not in optimal condition. It wasn’t all that long ago when people would limit out on big stripers – 20 pounds or more. Now the fish are averaging 18 to 22 inches or so. There aren’t many big fish left. There simply isn’t enough food for them.
C-WIN
Back to salmon. We know all four runs of Central Valley Chinook salmon are on the ropes. How would you characterize the degree of the disaster? And is it really too late to do anything about it?
Dan
California salmon are incredibly resilient. Conditions that would kill, say, Atlantic salmon are tolerable to them. They have historically adapted to warmer temperatures and to the periodic drying-out of tributaries. You really have to screw up an ecosystem to wipe out California Chinook salmon. That said, we’ve really screwed up the Central Valley ecosystem, and our salmon are in freefall. Sacramento River fall-run chinook were the mainstay of the fishery. Not too long ago, hundreds of thousands of adult spawners would return each year. This year (2024), the fall-run forecast is for 213,000 adult fish on the ocean, and even that seems unduly optimistic to me. And this is the fourth year since 2008 that we’ve seen a complete closure of the salmon season. Stretches of the Sacramento and American Rivers where I used to see thousands of spawning fish are now empty. I remember I fished the American in 2002, and there were 150,000 salmon in the lower river. Then the massive uptick in water exports happened in 2003, and by 2005, the run numbers were declining.
Furthermore, that’s just the fall-run. The spring-run and winter-run – which are listed as endangered fish – have totally collapsed. The spring-run was once more abundant than the fall-run, and they were very large, strong fish. When the spring-run was listed in 2003, the total adult return to the Sacramento River was 1,479 fish. Last year, only 106 returned to the Upper Sacramento tributaries, and only 100 returned to Butte Creek, their primary stronghold. It was the lowest return on record – and more than 90% of those fish died due to warm and low water.
Finally, most of the fish that do return aren’t wild fish – they’re hatchery fish, and they bypass the natural spawning areas and beeline to the hatcheries. That’s also a problem. Wild salmon are genetically more diverse, tougher, and more resilient than hatchery fish. We need them to ensure the basic integrity of the species.
CWIN
And the primary culprit in these declines is water diversion?
Dan
Correct. When you divert up to 6 million acre feet a year, when you prioritize your releases from the major dams to accommodate agriculture above all else, you deprive spawning salmon the cold water they need to survive, you deprive eggs and fry the cold water they need to emerge from the redds and grow, and you deprive smolts of the cold water flows they need to transit downriver and out to sea.
Our salmon are facing multiple problems, and we’ll have to implement multiple solutions to really secure their future. That could involve everything from dam removal to invasive species control, better hatchery management, establishing conservation hatcheries for endangered runs – even trucking-and-hauling adult spawners to high quality spawning grounds above dams and other barriers, and likewise transporting downstream migrating smolts for release below the dams. But one thing is paramount: more cold high quality water when the fish require it. Diversions by the big water projects are the primary reason salmon have crashed, although pollution and changing ocean conditions also factor into the dramatic decline. If we’re going to restore them, we must give them the water they need.
From my perspective, the most maddening thing is the fact that this has been known for a long time, but both the federal and state agencies concerned with water and fisheries have dissembled, dragged their feet, and just generally bent over backward to accommodate corporate agriculture in their seizure of our public trust water and the destruction of our fisheries. And this has happened through multiple administrations of both parties. Until we address this basic – “corruption” is the word that most applies – nothing will change.