Winter-run Chinook salmon numbers are at the lowest they've ever been. But scientists say it's not because of high temperatures or the historic drought. Instead, they say, it's their diet.
They’ve been pushed to the brink of extinction by dams, drought, extreme heat and even the flare of wildfires, but now California’s endangered winter-run Chinook salmon appear to be facing an entirely new threat — their own ravenous hunger for anchovies.
Now, with government agencies and Native American tribes fearing the collapse of the winter-run Chinook, scientists are embarking on a campaign to determine why the anchovy population has exploded off the California coast, and why winter-run Chinook are seemingly ignoring all other prey.As dams and global warming push endangered California salmon to the brink, a rescue plan is taking shape — and a tribe pushes for recovering their sacred fish.
State, federal and UC Davis researchers quickly treated the swirling salmon fry with thiamine — infusing the water in their tanks with the vitamin; the salmon soon recovered.“We thought initially it was just a one-year thing, maybe the way we thought of COVID,” said Rachel Johnson, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and UC Davis. “I was cautiously optimistic that the ocean was going to rearrange itself back to normal. And we just haven’t seen that.
“Some of the diet data we have from the ‘50s and ‘70s and ‘80s show that salmon that were caught off of Central California would typically have herring, crab and krill in the winter, early-spring diets. Then juvenile rockfish would become a bigger component in the spring and early summer. And it wasn’t really until August and September that anchovies and sardines were the dominant prey item,” Mantua said.Like an onion, the lenses accumulate layer upon layer over a salmon’s lifetime.
Those cool headwaters, however, have long since been blocked by dams, and the fish have been forced to lay their eggs in Central Valley waters in the heat of summer, causing many eggs to die. Today, the winter-run Chinook survive only through the intervention of government hatcheries and periodic releases of cold water from the same dams that block their passage upstream.
To give the endangered fish a better shot at survival, state and federal officials have been studying ways ofupriver from dams, such as the McCloud River, upstream of Shasta Lake.
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