Every summer a line of volunteers in masks and wetsuits floats down the South Fork Eel, shoulder to shoulder across the current, counting the one fish almost everyone on the river wants gone. They are counting Sacramento pikeminnow, and this is the 11th year they’ve done it. The Eel River Recovery Project runs the dive every summer. … The pikeminnow is the most reviled animal in the Eel. Someone dumped it into Lake Pillsbury in 1979 — a bait-bucket introduction, illegal — and by 1986, it had spread through the whole basin, its numbers climbing into the millions. A torpedo of a fish, it eats juvenile salmon and steelhead on a river fighting to bring those runs back. … Here is the part that complicates the hatred: the Sacramento pikeminnow is not an invader. It’s a California native. 

Other fish restoration news:

• Legis1: Sea lions vs. salmon: Congress faces conservation dilemma​
• Active NorCal (Redding, Calif.): CalTrout just secured major funding for a coho salmon restoration project on the Eel River