Rice Fields

[Mike McKenzie]

Some good results from using the obvious resources.

http://news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_...lasso?id=10493

As far as Frank's concern about the smolts making it past the twin tunnels goes... they will be fairly safe because they will flow out of the By-Pass into Cache Slough and on down the Sac. past Rio Vista. The Cross Channel Gates above Walnut Grove are the the Sac River salmon killers, in that they suck the smolts to their death in the Central Delta via the Moke and Middle River and on into Clifton Court if they last that long.

The real problem with the Yolo By-Pass raised smolts is when they come home to spawn. Both the Yolo By-Pass and the Colusa Basin are deadly salmon killers and have been for many years.. Not talked about much except in some circles...

Read Lloyd Carter's article about it here:

http://www.lloydgcarter.com/content/...lmon-imperiled

Mike

[Darian]

I saw an article in the SacBee on trapped Salmon in the by-passes. I got the impression that the rescue effort was limited due to lack of DFW staff to carry it out and there weren't many volunteers either.

After reading all of that, I wondered how Salmon straying into the by-passes got out and back into the river, upstream(???). Seems like there'd have to be some effort to limit straying into areas where the fish are unable to return to the side channels along the current levees. Maybe some modification to the entries to the weirs??? Well, maybe the UCD study will address all of this....

[Larry S]

Saw this in today's LA Times -
http://www.latimes.com/science/scien...#axzz2j3Dy74ag

Best,
Larry S

[Darian]

The article in the Times seems to make this study out to be concerned with whether fish who'll be raised or enter the floodplain will be able to flourish and exit the place and return to the river for outmigration, only.

Hmmm,.... Thinking out loud here, this scenario depends on flooding in the by-pass every year in the appropriate time frame/duration. Given the tendency to have a lot of dry winters around here, where's all of that water going to come from in very dry years?? Well, nice to know but....

Kinda seems like everything we do to solve problems complicates things more. For example, in one of the related articles in the Times, there's mention the DFW is recommending constructing a hatchery on the San Joaquin River below Friant Dam for Salmon production. The source of the eggs for this hatchery is supposedly the Feather River hatchery at Oroville. All of this dependent on whether a permanent source for water is available for the San Joaquin. So far, that doesn't seem at all certain.

[ycflyfisher]

I find this to be disturbing and I actually agree with Mike on this one albeit for different reasons. Mike this is not an intentional jab at you, but the link you provided should be looked at for what it is: an emotionally based, incredibly biased propaganda piece whose sole intent is to bash the powers that be/keepers of the public trust for this year’s collaborative decision to push the compliance point further upriver while painting the agencies involved as mismanaging the resource when in reality, they were collectively attempting to balance risk: what is a minimal amount of perceived risk (this year) vs. what could be an unacceptable amount of risk (next year if we have another mild winter season and even an even lower HGL on Shasta). I've got a problem with the advocation with placing the former over the latter pacticularly when it goes on to misidentify the actual problem (in the case of adult salmon returning to the bypasses) and advocates solutions based on said misdiagnosis of said problem.

The reality is SWRC are not that numerous and are all known to hold over in the thermal refugia habitat in the uppermost section of river and spawn well above the compliance point. The development of Chinook spawn isn’t impaired until water temps rise above~60 degrees and, if memory serves, the compliance temp is 56. So this notion that the SWRCB, DFW, NMFS, UBR, et al were endangering fish is an opinion for which there seems to be no basis in fact.


However like most propaganda pieces there are some half-truths included so that the total BS and the villianization dig sounds somewhat believable. In this case, the truth lies in the fact that adult salmonids do return to the Yolo and Y-S bypasses and in some years, they do so in problematic numbers. The mechanism which causes this to happen is by my understanding is totally misconstrued by the author of the link Mike provided. From my understanding this isn’t really a “straying and stranding” issue as this piece paints it to be. Half the population of SWRC may have ended up in the bypasses but they did NOT "stray" into the bypasses. Straying is a phenomenon that happens in low percentages. This is much more of a “failure to properly imprint” issue that is an issue almost exclusively associated with hatchery fish as far as the evirons in the SR-SJ watershed are concerned. We’ve seen similar issues from various SR-SJ hatcheries on numerous occasions.

When we had the O. Mykiss releases on the Feather in November to get the O. Mykiss out of the raceways to make room for the newly hatched, free-swimming Chinook fry in said raceways, it wasn’t unsual for:

1- The fish to not be mature enough to undergo the smoltification process and end up harboring or residualizing somewhere in the system.

2- The fish not encountering the proper environmental conditions in the late fall to trigger outmigration which lead to the same harboring issue.

That was problematic because the two most common spots (we know of) where those hatchery fish elected to harbor was either an en mass migration right back into the Feather hatchery or the lower Yuba. The fish that harbored in the Yuba imprinted on the Yuba and if they elected to outmigrate, they returned to the Yuba as adults. On the surface, that might look like a “straying issue” to anglers who were catching clipped fish in the Yuba, but it’s really a case of the fish imprinting on the Yuba as opposed to the Feather and simply returning to the river where they actually hit smoltification.

Most of those issues went away when the Feather facility went to February releases of O. Mykiss. A greater percentage of the fish are mature enough to smolt and conditions that promote outmigration are more prevalent in Feb. All SR-SJ hatcheries have had similar issues with Chinook. And despite the “solution” suggested in the link Mike provided, building more efficient weirs/ screens on the bypasses to keep big adult fish out is probably a solution that will NOT work because it utterly fails to acknowledge let alone address the real root cause of the problem in favor of bashing agencies.

The real root cause as I see it and has been explained to me, is that when executing a coordinated release of 40M+ hatchery fish, from numerous hatcheries, you’re going to have millions of released fish that simply are not mature enough to smolt and outmigrate. Those fish are going to attempt to find refugia where they can put on enough growth so they can smolt and outmigrate. If and when they return as adults, they’re not going to attempt to return to their respective rivers of hatchery origin, they’re going to attempt to return to the locations where they smolted and imprinted. So the real solution as I see it isn’t constructing barriers specifically located on the bypasses that effectively keep a few hundred big adult fish out, but trying to keep tens of millions of tiny little fish out places where we don’t want them to go. The bypasses are a small percentage of those places on a very long list. Doing some really intensive size grading prior to release to insure that a greater percentage of released fish are mature enough to smolt and are released under conditions that promote outmigration would also help. Now if we were producing sane numbers of fish, the latter might be feasible. But we’re not producing sane numbers of fish, but tens of millions of fish. And neither of those “solutions” are really solutions, but are just potential actions that minimize the imprinting problem. The reality as I see it is this “problem” is just part of the proverbial cost of doing business when we collectively accepted mitigation facilities that produce tens of millions of hatchery fish as a viable solution to the declining abundance problem. It isn’t working, and this “failure to imprint” issue is just one example of the myriad of ways in which it’s failing.

That said, I’m seeing the concept of intentionally raising fish in rice fields where they exhibit huge growth rates compared to the hatchery environs as being disturbing for two reasons. Most in this thread seem to be under the impression that the fish would be released from the rice field site to downmigrate through the bypasses. If rice fields are attempted as a strategy, the fish might be grown there, but will be released in locations where it’s assumed they will imprint and attempt to return to as adults. You don’t want that to be some farmer’s rice field.

The first potential problem I see is putting the fish in an unnatural, “simulated floodplain” where they exhibit explosive growth (~90mm in 40 days) by feeding on dense clouds of Daphnia runs the risk of a large percentage of those fish actually imprinting on rice fields even if relocated to some riverine environs located near a hatchery where they may imprint. I’d expect numbers of adult fish that attempt to return to the bypasses to go off the hook. I can’t prove that, but I’d bet big it happens to some degree.

I’m seeing this as a potential “solution” that removes the bottleneck in hatchery production (limited raceway space for fish that hit the free swimming stage) that can allow hatchery production to increase to even more insane levels, with more collective buying into the fraudulent concept that a lack of recruitment is the root cause to the declining salmonid abundance problem. I think the authors recognize the potential for that to happen, and that some will view a method that allows not only the production of even more, but “bigger and better” hatchery frankenfish will be viewed by some as a viable solution. This is the only statement repeated verbatim in the document and I think with good reason:

“Although this study suggests that agricultural landscapes can function as rearing habitat for juvenile Chinook salmon, our results should not be interpreted to suggest that suitable natural (i.e. non-agricultural) habitats are not essential to establishing self-sustaining runs of naturally produced Central Valley Chinook.”

[Darian]

After considering the info in your post, I can understand the concern with imprinting on flooded ag land. I hadn't even thought about that angle. Thinking out loud here; If it were possible to contain returning Salmon to channels in the ag flood plains and providing an exit at the upstream end of the flood-plain, some fish might re-enter the river seeking gravels to spawn in but that probability seems low if they've already imprinted on the flood plain....

I agree that there's a very large number of fish produced in hatcheries with more to come if the rice fields idea works out. Increased production and decreased usable habitat doesn't add up to a sustainable population of naturally spawning fish. So, I don't think anyone could be blamed for concluding that this project is showing the potential for farmed production of Salmon whether sold direct to market or caught by commercial fisherman. Maybe trying to demonstrate the benefits of using set-backs of levees is part of the justification.

Kinda scary to think that there's a new hatchery proposed for the San Joaquin River. I don't want to give anyone any ideas but just imagine if the UCD type of project/operation were started in similar flood plains (by-passes) along the San Joaquin with all of the tainted ag drainage water and Salmon feeding on daphnia laden with mineral salts.... YUK!!!

[matt johnson]

The goal of this study is to provide floodplain rearing habitat for wild or natural juvenile salmon. Hatchery fish are just being used as surrogates to conduct the growth investigations....

This is cutting edge restoration work. Most of the focus of salmon restoration in the Central Valley has been on spawning habitat (gravel injections) and egg incubation temps below rim dams.

It has not really worked.

95% of the floodplain rearing habitat for juveniles salmonids in the Central Valley has been lost. Amazingly, this has been overlooked .

Here is a link to the Knaggs Ranch study on the Cal Trout website:

http://caltrout.org/initiatives/stee...odplain-study/

The best population of natural salmon going in the Central Valley right now is Butte Creek spring-run Chinook. Wonder why? I believe it is because the labrytnh of canals, sloughs, and flooded bypassess at the bottom of Butte closely mimics what used to be available to juvenile salmon throughout the Central Valley before we leveed our rivers and stored our hgih winter and spring flows in reservoirs. Check out the bottom of Butte Creek on Google Earth sometime....

Inundating the Yolo Bypass on a regular basis requires a fairly simple feat of engineering: lowering the levee at the top. Improvements for adult fish passage to get adults out of Yolo and on to their spawning destination will also be required: again, pretty simple.

Really hope to see this concept come to full fruition. Matt

[Darian]

Interesting info. So, this project is primarily for demonstrating that flooded ag land is good habitat for rearing young Salmon before outmigration. I have no reason to doubt that. The engineering required to modify weirs, etc., you mention may be easily done but obtaining funding for that purpose may not be.

Could the potential imprinting of young Salmon in the flooded rice fields create a need to return to those fields as an adult fish???

Where will the water for periodic/timed flooding come from in dry/low water years??

It's difficult for me, as an outside observer, to see flooded rice fields as natural habitat for rearing young Salmon (successful tho they may be). They still look like a hatchery to me.

Just questions/observations. I do hope the concept/project is successful.

[matt johnson]

Could the potential imprinting of young Salmon in the flooded rice fields create a need to return to those fields as an adult fish???.

I don't think so. The water that would flood the rice fields is Sacramento River water. Also, non-natal juvenile rearing of salmon is commonly observed with Central Valley Chinook (juveniles swimming up into and occupying waterways there were not born in for a period of time). This often occurrs in "ephemeral" streams, or streams that only run during wet periods and do not provide spawning habitat. These empheral streams are pretty common in the Upper Sacramento River Basin and we don't see adults trying to get in them

Where will the water for periodic/timed flooding come from in dry/low water years?

I think the water will fall from the sky during normal to wet water years. Just have to make the by-pass flood at a lower Sac river height. Dry years could be a little tougher? Water transfer from from upstream Ag? Possibly using "B2" water [the 800,00 annual acre feet of water dedicated to the environment (CVPIA Section 3406)]. I've spoken with researchers involved in this work and they tell me that innumdation of Yolo only needs to occurr for about 5 weeks to make it work ( flood the fields to hatch the eggs of the critters that feed the salmon to fatten them up to make them stronger).

Unfortunately nothing is easy about water in California, especially when trying to balance the needs of Ag, salmon. and flood protection. But, this concept seems like win-win all around to me. Might not be possible on all years though?

It's difficult for me, as an outside observer, to see flooded rice fields as natural habitat for rearing young Salmon (successful tho they may be). They still look like a hatchery to me.

Those are not rice fields out in the Yolo, they are "reclaimed" flood plains. All a matter of perspective I guess

[Bill Kiene semi-retired]

http://www.sfgate.com/science/articl...nt-4924225.php

More info here......