Salmon Face an Uphill Swim, Thanks to Heat

RANCHO CORDOVA, Calif. — Fifteen miles northeast of Sacramento--about 20 miles upriver as the chinook swims--anglers in chest-high neoprene waders are standing so close together that they nearly could dam the American River,

fishing the biggest salmon run in years.

But ask about the future, and the mood out here turns fouler than a week-old filet. These fishermen and others expect the two-year drought to work an economic and environmental crisis on salmon fishing grounds in the state’s Central and Sacramento valleys.

“The water is too warm. The flows are too low,” said Jeffery Marx as he tied a metal lure onto his line, showing the expertise of 20 years of fishing for chinooks, also called California king salmon. “The fish won’t spawn.”

Salmon need cold water in order to reproduce successfully. While adult fish can live at relatively high temperatures, their eggs disintegrate in water above 60 degrees.

In normal years cool rain fills the U.S.-operated Nimbus Dam, which feeds the American River and irrigates part of the state’s Central Valley. Slats at the dam’s rim release sun-warmed water for agricultural and municipal use. Cool water is thus preserved at lower depths, where it can be drained by special valves.

But after a long, hot summer of water deliveries to farms and cities, the water level at Nimbus Dam dropped so low this fall that the reservoir behind it heated up like a desert swimming pool.

On Nov. 1, at the height of the fall chinook spawning season, water trickling from the bottom of the dam into the American River was 65 degrees. Several weeks earlier it reached 75. Recent rainfall has caused water temperatures to drop slightly. But the reservoir is still low, and another drought year could “dry it up, essentially,” said Russ Calkins, assistant manager of the Nimbus Salmon and Steelhead Hatchery, located downstream.

The hatchery, one of five salmon hatcheries on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River system and home to about half the salmon on the American River, had been closed until last Monday due to dangerously warm water conditions. Another hatchery also closed temporarily.

The American is typical of the rivers that make up the Sacramento and San Joaquin River systems, where the drought has strained an already precarious balance of water supplies to various users. As the salmon’s peculiar biology requires it to spend adulthood in the ocean but breed in fresh-water streams, its survival depends on whether this balance can be maintained.

Must Struggle Upstream

To reach the Nimbus hatchery and nearby natural spawning grounds on the American River, the salmon must struggle upstream from under the Golden Gate Bridge to the Sacramento River, then turn into the American River near the state Capitol, and finally swim out past the commuter towns along U.S. 50.

In the midst of the drought, the fish with this most urban of homecoming routes has become the subject of a debate among just about every regulatory agency and environmental concern with an office somewhere along the way.

“It’s not just the drought, it’s the (U.S.) Bureau of Reclamation’s irresponsible allocation of water,” charged Jim Jones, president of Save the American River Assn., a conservation group.

Jones and others claim the drought-related warm water problem has been exacerbated by the failure of federal and state water agencies to develop a comprehensive plan to limit water deliveries during dry years.

Specifically, they point to a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s refusal to cut back deliveries from Folsom Lake, the reservoir above Nimbus Dam, to growers of water-intensive, subsidized crops.

‘Kiwi Fruit Keeps Growing’

“We feel that when they sit down to decide how much water is available, they need to give fish as much priority as rice and cotton and kiwi fruit,” Jones said. “The fish are sacrificed but the kiwi fruit keeps growing.”

Officials at the Bureau of Reclamation respond that by law water contracts with farmers must be signed early each year, before spring rainfall can be accurately predicted.

“It’s not something where you turn a water faucet on and off,” said Donald Paff, chief of the bureau’s Central Valley operations coordinating office. “There is not a simple answer by saying, ‘Do this,’ and it solves things. It’s an interactive, complex system.”

The bureau also has critics at the state Department of Fish and Game. Robert Rawstron, chief of the department’s inland fisheries division, charges that the federal agency failed to plan for the drought because it is “in the pocket” of the powerful agribusiness lobby.

“Why . . . didn’t the bureau go to the contractors and cut back?” Rawstron asked.

Fish Ladder Closed

Usually by the end of October, on a river bank just downstream from the wading fishermen, the state-run Nimbus Hatchery teems with fish. But because the water flowing by the hatchery was too warm this fall, the fish ladder into the facility was closed until last Monday, when the hatchery opened on a half-time basis. “Conditions are still not ideal,” said manager Ronald D. Ducey.

Phillip D. Flint, who supervises several fish hatcheries in the region for the state Department of Fish and Game, said it is too early to tell whether the late start will cut overall fish production at Nimbus, but he said the population of salmon using natural spawning grounds will “definitely decline.”

The American River, one of the largest tributaries of the Sacramento River system, is home to about 10% of all salmon caught off the California coast by commercial fishermen. In addition to the $80-million statewide commercial salmon industry, whose trawlers put out to the Pacific from such Northern California towns as Bodega Bay, Ft. Bragg and Shelter Cove, salmon sportfishing is also big business.

Anglers who catch salmon from the Sacramento and San Joaquin River systems--often buying or renting expensive boats and equipment--account for about $8 million annually, said John Beuttler, executive director of United Anglers, the state’s largest fishery conservation organization.

Limitations Imposed

By law they cannot fish when the salmon population drops below a certain level. “We may have a year when fishing on the whole American River run is basically wiped out,” Beuttler said.

The drought is testing a system created to preserve these population levels. Nimbus hatchery was built by the federal government in 1955 to replace natural spawning sites lost when Nimbus Dam was erected.

Meanwhile, officials have developed plans to rescue the fish and avert catastrophe on the river.

Paff said that after rejecting a recent costly proposal to rig the hatchery with giant chillers--”an ice-cube machine bigger than you ever saw in your life”--the Bureau and the Department of Fish and Game agreed to seed Nimbus with eggs from another river.

The project involves trucking roe from salmon on the Feather River, which still has cool water, to Nimbus hatchery. The Bureau of Reclamation has committed $35,000 to the transfer project, but it cannot start until temperatures fall further at the Nimbus Dam.

Even if this occurs soon, biologists and others fear that disruption of delicate migration patterns could result.

‘Adapted to Survive’

“Fish that over millions of years came up the American River are better adapted to survive that system than the fish that came up another system,” said Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Assns., which represents all of California’s organized commercial salmon fishermen.

In their natural spawning grounds, salmon deposit eggs on gravel beds where cool, shallow water flows quickly. Then the male swims past and fertilizes them. After the fish reproduce, they die.

The hatchery process is mechanized: fish are diverted into a holding pond, then killed. Eggs are extracted from female salmon and placed in a bin, where they are fertilized.

Then the eggs--four million a season at Nimbus--are placed on trays, where they are continually rinsed and fed. The hatched fish move into outdoor ponds when they are about an inch long. By spring, the salmon are about four inches long and ready to return to the ocean, where in about three to four years they mature.

What will happen if the Feather River project does not work, or if the water does not cool in time for the eggs to be transferred successfully?

Three Years of Uncertainty

“Three years down the road, there could be the poorest production of fish in state history,” Rawstron said.

Other unprecedented projects to aid salmon have also been tried elsewhere in the state, such as an arrangement in October by the Department of Fish and Game, the Bureau of Reclamation and other government and private organizations to purchase water from the federal government’s New Melones Dam east of Modesto.

But Rawstron said the program, which cost $350,000 and is expected to add more than 23,000 adult salmon to the catchable ocean crop, “isn’t even the beginning of a solution.”

“It’s a Band-Aid,” he said.

For Rawstron, a cure for the problem is simple enough: “It should turn 32 degrees tomorrow and snow,” he said. “If Mother Nature would just break her hold on us. . . .”