Due to low numbers of adult salmon returning to California’s rivers because of previous droughts, officials this year banned recreational and commercial salmon fishing for only the third time in state history. So few Chinook salmon swam up their last remaining strongholds in the Sacramento Valley — Butte, Deer and Mill Creeks near Chico — that scientists this month began capturing then bringing juvenile fish to an emergency hatchery at University of California, Davis. Chuck Bonham, the director of California’s Fish and Wildlife Department, oversaw the effort with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and called the hatchery a “Noah’s Ark.”

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