PD Editorial: California’s native fisheries in peril

California’s prolonged drought is taking a toll on lawns and farms and forests. It’s also a threat to wildlife, especially fish, which must have cold water to survive.

“We’re going to be losing most of our salmon and steelhead if things continue,” Peter Moyle, an authority on California’s native fish, warned the Los Angeles Times recently.

In 2014, nearly all of the winter-run Chinook salmon in the upper Sacramento River and its tributaries died because low flows allowed water temperatures to rise as high as 62 degrees, too warm for the hatchlings to survive.

This year isn’t looking any more promising.

And if the drought persists for even two or three more years, the outlook is truly bleak.

As many as 18 native fish species, including most salmon runs and several breeds of trout, “face likelihood of near-term extinction,” according to a new report from the Public Policy Institute of California that concludes cities and farms are adapting better to drought conditions than are wetlands, forests or wildlife.

Central Valley ag interests and their allies in Congress seem to see the drought as an excuse to relax environmental protection for fisheries.

For now, however, federal water managers do not. They’re trying to prevent a repeat of last year, when just 5 percent of the Sacramento River brood stock survived, by better managing releases of cold water from Shasta Dam.

Fearing another disaster on the Klamath River, the site of a catastrophic fish kill in 2002, the federal Bureau of Reclamation started releasing cool water into the Klamath last week from a dam on its primary tributary, the Trinity River.

State water officials also are factoring fish into drought policy.

Here in Sonoma County, as Staff Writer Guy Kovner reported this past week, landowners in four watersheds are receiving orders to report their use to state regulators as part of an emergency effort to save juvenile coho salmon and steelhead trout, some of them stuck in dwindling pools until rain restores water levels in area streams.

To stop some of those small pools from drying up, Camp Meeker’s water district is releasing 2,700 gallons an hour into Dutch Bill Creek, and one west county property owner is releasing 1,320 gallons an hour into Green Valley Creek.

Meanwhile, 68 grape growers agreed to cut their water use by 25 percent from 2013 levels - matching the state’s mandatory cutbacks for non-farm users ­- and a wine industry group is trying to enlist the help of 62 more vineyards.

The cooperative approach is welcome, laudable and, regrettably, it stands in contrast to a lawsuit filed by Central Valley water districts seeking to halt relief for the Klamath River.

After years of fighting efforts to assist the endangered Delta smelt, the Westlands Water District and others are now arguing that federal water regulators have no authority to assist Klamath salmon because they aren’t on the endangered species list.

A federal judge rejected that argument last year, and a judge refused last week to grant an injunction while this year’s suit is litigated. Salmon support coastal communities in California and the Pacific Northwest as well as the subsistence and ceremonial needs of Native American tribes. These prized fish are a unique and valuable resource that can’t be replanted like row crops if they’re abandoned during the drought.