Ringside: Ignoring Role of Bass in Salmon Decline is Negligence

A March 5 “Perspective” in the Manteca Bulletin highlights a chronically underemphasized problem impacting every Californian. Bass, as editor Dennis Wyatt succinctly explains, are a “destructive, invasive species, that are a serious threat to the sustainability of the ecosystem.”

Wyatt proposes a solution that has been implemented in Oregon, a bounty system. As he puts it, “The state would need to allow bass fishing year round with no limits. Then they would need to put in place a bounty program where authorized bait stores are contracted to serve as agents. For every bass a customer brings in, they would receive $5. The head would be cut off and the rest of the fish returned to the angler so it doesn’t go to waste. It is a proven and effective way to protect struggling native fish populations.”

Why hasn’t this happened?

Instead, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife manages striped bass in California to ensure a healthy population for recreational fishing, including bag limits and commercial fishing restrictions. These protections for non-native predatory fish allow bass to continue eating native salmon, which drive the flow regulations in California. Less salmon means more water flows to the ocean instead of irrigating crops and supplying our cities.

We covered this in WC 47 and it’s one of these issues that needs to be brought up repetitively until something changes. The variables affecting salmon are hydrology, hatcheries, habitat, and harvest. All four have been public policy priorities. Since the State Water Project was largely completed in 1967, California’s rivers have never had such a high a percentage of unimpaired flows combined with timed releases for the fish. California’s six salmon hatcheries release 30 million salmon smolts every year. The tide has long turned in the battle to restore and improve habitat faster than it is degraded by development. And there is a good chance that commercial salmon fishing in California is going to be restricted in 2025 for the third consecutive year.

But salmon populations continue to decline.

Meanwhile, Wyatt notes that thanks to predation “almost 90 percent of the salmon that enter the Delta never made it past Vernalis — a point near the Airport Way bridge south of Manteca — to eventually reach breeding areas on the Stanislaus, Tuolumne, and Merced rivers.” Fishermen on the American River report bass congregating in the shallows downstream from the Nimbus Fish Hatchery, showing up to feast whenever salmon fingerlings are released to swim downstream.

While anecdotes are plentiful and unequivocal, scientific studies remain nuanced. But there is no reason, at the very least, restrictions on bass fishing cannot be lifted, and a bounty established, in the known hot spots throughout the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta where bass are clearly wiping out salmon.

And on the other hand, why should any incremental solution be enough, when in the interests of saving salmon, entire industries are being reduced thanks to tactics – more flow – that haven’t worked? Nobody should fault the bass sportfishing industry for lobbying for its own interests. But California has the worst business climate of any state, and thanks to the Department of Fish & Wildlife, along with other state agencies dominated by environmentalist fanatics and special interest lobbyists, California’s farmers are among the most harassed and endangered of any business sector in the state. The stakes are high. According to EDD, California employs nearly 800,000 farmworkers, and virtually all of those jobs depend on irrigation water being available.

So in a state where, once you add the managers, owners, vendors, and shippers, an agricultural industry supporting well over a million jobs is under relentless attack by California Dept. of Fish and Game regulations, that same agency protects a niche industry that – according to the American Sport Fishing Association – supports 22,000 jobs in freshwater fishing statewide.

The inherent illogic of this needs to break through to the State Legislature. Bass are bigger, tougher fish than salmon. Compared to salmon, they will disproportionately benefit from more water and better habitat. Everything the state has tried so far has not helped salmon recovery. Bass eat salmon. That is a simple and undeniable truth.

Trying to redesign the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta so bass and salmon can both thrive is impossible. Salmon recovery without bass decline is a fantasy. Instead of recognizing this, CDFW is willing to withhold millions of acre feet per year of irrigation water from farmers, costing them tens of billions of dollars. Ultimately, only the biggest, corporate owned agribusinesses will survive. At the same time CDFWs actions purportedly to help salmon will force implementation of deeply flawed legislation such as SB 1157, which not only rations urban water consumption but takes away any incentive for urban water agencies to invest in alternative water supply solutions.

Before we devastate our agricultural industry and further dehydrate our cities, CDFW needs to lift restrictions on bass fishing. Until they do, they are not serious about saving salmon, much less serving the vast majority of Californians.