Tag: Delta smelt
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Fish domination of avian food webs
By Christine Parisek & Jon Walter . . . Food webs are the backbones of ecosystems: they chart the flow of energy through ecosystems in terms of who eats whom, and their structure helps determine whether an ecosystem will be stable over time. While food web studies often focus on relationships within a particular habitat…
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California Water under a Trump Administration, Part 2 of 2
By Karrigan Börk Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series of blogs that examines how the incoming Trump Administration may—or may not—be able to change how water is managed in California. The first blog covered three issues: the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), updates of the Bay-Delta Water Quality Plans, and major infrastructure projects. The…
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The Delta Smelt Controversy in Sociological Perspective
By Caleb Scoville The Delta Smelt is a small, endangered fish that lives exclusively in the heart of the state’s water distribution system, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. At times, regulations to protect smelt affect conveyance of water to 35 million Californians and the state’s multi-billion-dollar agricultural industry. As Peter Moyle put it in a 2022 post,…
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New science or just spin: science charade in the Delta
By Karrigan Bork, Andrew L. Rypel, and Peter Moyle Science-based decision making is key to improved conservation management and a legal mandate in the US Endangered Species Act. Thus supporters of federal efforts to increase water exports from the Central Valley Project (CVP) and State Water Project (SWP) have claimed that these efforts are based…
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Q & A on survival of California’s delta smelt
Four years of severe drought and decades of huge water diversions appears to have pushed delta smelt to the point of no return. State biologists netted only a single smelt last month in trawl of 40 sites in San Francisco Estuary, the species’ only home. The record-low catch came less than a month after UC…
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Prepare for extinction of delta smelt
By Peter Moyle I saw my first delta smelt in 1972, during my first fall as an assistant professor at UC Davis. I was on a California Department of Fish and Wildlife trawl survey to learn about the fishes of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The survey then targeted young striped bass, but the trawl towed…
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The ESA, fish and me
“Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed.” — President Richard Nixon upon signing the Endangered Species Act on Dec. 28, 1973 By Peter Moyle The Endangered Species Act turns 40 this week, and I…
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Large delta smelt population found south of Delta
UC Davis scientists have found large populations of the federally protected delta smelt growing extraordinarily large in three Southern California reservoirs, hundreds of miles from its native waters. The smelt presumably colonized the lakes after being pumped from the Delta though the California Aqueduct. The find, reported today (April 1) in the journal Pelagic Papers,…
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Water to the sea isn’t wasted
By Jeffrey Mount In December of 2010 we had a remarkable set of storms. Relentless rain and snowfall hit both southern and northern California. The news reports about these events followed a predictable pattern, including the inevitable articles that bemoan floodwaters as “wasted” because they discharge to the sea. This generalization about floodwaters or any…