California Salmon Hit by Drought
A second disastrous drought year for endangered California salmon - Endangered native salmon suffered a second straight disastrous year in California's drought, with all but 3 percent of the latest generation dying in too-shallow, too-hot rivers, federal officials said Monday.
Drought pushes endangered California salmon to the brink
Chinook salmon were already endangered in California's Sacramento River, but the record drought parching the western United States has brought the iconic fish even closer to extinction. Chinook, also known as king salmon, need very cold water for their eggs to develop.
If everything goes right, the young salmon hatch and eventually make their way downstream toward the ocean, before later returning to the rivers to spawn and die. But the migration has dropped off in recent years.
There were 4.4 million juvenile Chinook in 2009 – half the number of four years earlier.
Last year, the number of juveniles passing by the dam in Red Bluff, at the northern end of California's Central Valley, was just 411,000.
To date, only 217,000 juveniles have been counted passing through Red Bluff in 2015, versus 280,000 over the same period last year.
The Sacramento Chinook, designated an endangered species in 1994, have been struggling for years, for a number of reasons, but the drought has only exacerbated the problems. Access to the historical spawning habitat of winter-run Chinook salmon on the Sacramento is cut off by the Shasta and Keswick dams, built in the 1940s.
Heat Killing Columbia River Spawning Salmon
A summer of unusual heat in the Pacific Northwest is threatening to kill at least a quarter million sockeye salmon swimming up the Columbia River to spawn.
Large numbers of the fish have already perished due to prolonged heat above 100 degrees this summer, which have combined with low flows on the Columbia to create conditions that stress the sockeye and make them more susceptible to disease.
The unusual warmth came as the Columbia saw the third-highest number of sockeye returning from the Pacific to spawn since 1960.
“Right now it's grim for adult sockeye," said Russ Kiefer of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. "They're running out of energy reserves, and we're getting a lot of reports of fish dead and dying.”
With water temperatures in the waterway hitting the mid-70s, which is life-threatening to the fish, officials began releasing cold water from several reservoirs upstream in an attempt to prevent further fatalities.
“We’ve never had mortalities at this scale,” said Oregon Dept. of Fish and Wildlife fisheries manager John North.
Both Oregon and Washington have halted sports fishing in areas affected by the warmth.
