Blog: ‘North Delta Arc’ Lifts Hope for Recovery of Native Fish
From the California WaterBlog in a post by the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences:
“Matt Young and Denise De Carion thought they had seen about all there is of fish communities in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. … In all their dozens of sampling runs, the story was the same: the Delta supports predominantly non-native species such as bass, catfish and bluegill sunfish – the garden variety found in almost any North American warm-water lake.
“Then, in 2011, the story changed. Young and De Carion were helping the California Department of Water Resources explore fish populations in the north Delta, a region they had never surveyed and that no one had comprehensively sampled. … Rather than the typical catch of mostly non-native warm-water fishes, they netted a mix of natives and non-natives – predominantly river and estuary species such as tule perch and Sacramento splittail. …
“The realization inspired researchers at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences to investigate what now appears to be an arc of habitat that supports native fish.”
Read more from the California WaterBlog