AI
Friday, November 10, 2017 10:11:43 AM
I hope so! From San Jose to San Diego, the effects of the drought are the destruction of millions of acres of farmland along with people's income.
They have been trying to protect the Delta Smelt since 1988 and now the Delta Smelt are still near extinction! The tiny fish are starving!
Scientists long have been frustrated that the state has failed to stop the slide of the fish toward extinction, while environmentalists protest that the fish declined because too much Delta water is pumped to cities and farms.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/08/31/delta-smelt-california-experiment-offers-hope-for-fish-near-extinction/
California drought: Delta smelt survey finds a single fish, heightening debate over water supply pril 15, 2015
The Delta’s warm, brackish and polluted water is too inhospitable.
The fate of this fish — wild or forever captive — throws into question the future of one of the world’s most contentious plumbing systems: the 700,000-acre Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the nexus of water moving from the state’s north to south.
In the fourth year of a historic drought, biologists are issuing desperate pleas to devote Delta water for those few wild creatures that remain — not just Delta smelt, but also longfin smelt, Sacramento splittail, Sacramento perch, river lamprey, green sturgeon, Central Valley steelhead trout and spring and winter runs of chinook salmon. It’s not just about saving a single species, they say, but about saving a precious ecosystem.
But farmers say it’s time to concede the fish is a lost cause — and to supply more of the Delta’s water to help humans.
Amid the crisis, there’s this question: Do these cultured captive fish represent a new beginning in the wild, or an experiment in futility? The future of the Delta smelt — and its impact on California’s water supply — is the latest installment of this newspaper’s series “A State of Drought.”
The fish itself is unremarkable — short-lived, tiny and so translucent it’s almost invisible. It lacks the charisma of a bald eagle, grizzly bear or bison. Until now, it’s been durable, surviving millions of years through droughts far worse than this one. It was once the most abundant fish in the Delta.
This countdown toward extinction represents the failure of what was once the largest estuary between Patagonia and Alaska.
“The policy of the people of United States is not to let any species go extinct,” said fish biologist Peter Moyle, associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis.
The fish exerts such force on the Delta’s waters that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regulates how and when pumping can be done to protect it and other imperiled endangered species. Since the smelt is protected under the Endangered Species Act, a federal court order can — and has — reduced pumping to farmers and cities in Southern California. Yet this protection hasn’t been enough for a species that lives in the pipeline of California’s critical hydraulic system.
In March, (2015) when the California Department of Fish and Wildlife conducted one of its monthly spring trawl surveys for adult smelt, it found only four females and two males hidden in the grasses of a vast network of man-made islands and channels at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. April’s survey found a single fish. While these surveys are merely a sampling of the population, they are a shadow of previous counts: In 2012, the March survey tallied 296 fish, while the April catch was 143.
Efforts to stave off the fish’s demise have been pointless and magnify the human suffering of the drought, said Chris Scheuring, attorney for the California Farm Bureau Federation.
“A lot of water has been thrown at the problem, to no apparent effect,” he said. “Twenty million Californians depend on a water supply kept away from them by one small, little population of fish.”
Good riddance, wrote Fresno-based Harry Cline of the Farm Press Blog. Turning off the pumps that serve the state and federal water projects wasted about 800,000 acre-feet of water in 2013 “based on the science of four buckets of minnows. That is enough water to produce crops on 200,000 acres or 10 million tons of tomatoes; 200 million boxes of lettuce; 20 million tons of grapes.”
Here at the little-known Fish Conservation and Cultural Laboratory, this “refuge population” of fish is thriving and reproducing. Unlike the Delta outside, the water here is reliable and abundant. It’s chilled to 52 to 60 degrees. It’s disinfected and filtered of dangerous pollutants. Six times a day, the fish are fed a diet of live zooplankton, brine shrimp or special dry food, at a taxpayer cost of $2.5 million a year.
The lab then conducts tedious artificial insemination: Each female fish is squeezed, creating a pool of eggs around the size of a quarter. Then the sperm from the males is added. The fertilized eggs, safe in a small bowl of water, are incubated until they hatch 40 days later.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2015/04/15/california-drought-delta-smelt-survey-finds-a-single-fish-heightening-debate-over-water-supply/
California Water Cutbacks Are Not Saving Delta Smelt
January 9, 2015
U.S. Supreme Court to rule on ESA-mandated water curtailments to protect Delta Smelt regardless of the cost to humans and economy
A summary of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) Fall Midwater Trawl Survey (FMWT) reports the lowest index for Delta Smelt in the 48-year history of this survey. The FMWT is mandated by the Delta Smelt Biological Opinion for the coordinated operation of the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project.
Jason Peltier, Chief Deputy General Manager of the Westlands Water District, sees these results as the “latest evidence of a failed regulatory regime.”
https://californiaagtoday.com/california-water-cutbacks-saving-delta-smelt/
Save the Fish, Starve the Humans Feb 4, 2011
Saving a two-inch “endangered” fish has cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in California ‘s Central Valley and turned parts of it, some of the most productive agricultural land in the U.S., into a dust bowl.
Putting humans first while saving “endangered species” should be a high priority policy goal of the new Republicans in Washington, D.C.
I know. I put repealing ObamaCare at the top of that list. Closely followed by rolling back Obama’s suicidal no-oil-drilling policy.
But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is next.
This rogue agency is gearing up to impose “cap and tax” to fight “global warming” without congressional authority to do so. The immediate effect would be to “skyrocket” (Obama’s word) electricity rates for everyone. Can’t wait to hear Nancy Pelosi call that a “job generator.”
The EPA also plans to impose stricter CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standards on all cars sold in the U.S. The immediate effect of this will be to mandate hybrid and electric cars at the same time that “cap and tax” skyrockets electricity rates and makes it impossible to build new electricity generating plants.
To the Republicans’ credit, Sen. James Inhofe (R.-Okla.) and Rep. Fred Upton (R.-Mich.) have introduced measures to restrict the EPA from ruining the economy to fight global warming.
While addressing these EPA/Obama absurdities, Republicans also need to rein in the Endangered Species Act. The California experience tells us why this is an urgent need if the private market economy is ever to revive.
University of California (Davis) Prof. Peter Moyle started the Save the Delta Smelt campaign. The professor admits that the smelt has no commercial value, that its life cycle is just one year, and that, even in optimal conditions, it’s prone to extinction anyway.
Nonetheless, it must be saved at any cost. That’s the mandate of the Endangered Species Act. Moyle was successful in convincing the EPA to list the Delta Smelt as endangered in 1993. Several court cases later, the obscene cost of saving a fish the professor says has only been in the Sacramento River delta for 8,000 to 10,000 years is now apparent.
Simply put, California transfers water from the water-rich north to the parched south, much of it through the Sacramento River delta. Pulling the freshwater south allows saltier water to infiltrate the delta area from the San Francisco Bay, disrupting what Moyle describes as the fish’s sensitivity to salinity levels.
To save the smelt, farmland in the delta has been purchased by the government and taken out of production, and freshwater deliveries to 25 million people and about 2 million acres of rich farmland south of the delta have been drastically reduced.
Massive unemployment among farmers and farm workers (many of them illegal), rising vegetable, fruit, and rice prices as demand increases but supply is constricted, sweeping “water conservation” programs in Southern California leading to a series of water rate hikes that hit the poorest the hardest, and a flight of water-using industries to friendlier places, costing working Californians good-paying jobs.
Reduced crops in California have aggravated already rising food prices throughout the world, contributing to the food riots in Tunisia that led to the overthrow of the government there.
That’s all. Small prices to pay to preserve this smelt, don’t ya think?
Note the politics here. The Democrats own California. The governor and all statewide offices and big majorities in the state legislature are all Democrats and they are backed by a liberal media and hard-left academia.
With the delta smelt issue, it’s Democrat vs. Democrat. The working poor, the welfare poor, the illegals, the United Farm Workers Union, the Los Angeles Democratic machine and its phalanx of minorities are all on one side. The environmentalists and their allies in Hollywood and San Francisco on the other.
The Enviros won. They own the courts, because the Endangered Species Act is crystal clear—once listed as endangered, a species must be preserved at any and all cost.
The result in California is devastating. Washington Republicans must act now—the result will save California’s economy, help the worlds food supply situation, and, just maybe, restore viable two-party politics here too.
http://humanevents.com/2011/02/04/save-the-fish-starve-the-humans/
UC Davis reels in $10M to save Delta smelt from extinction Mar 25, 2015
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation awarded the University of California Davis $10 million over four years to save a viable population of Delta smelt from extinction, the university reported Wednesday.
The money will go primarily to the UC Davis Fish Conservation and Culture Laboratory in Byron, near Discovery Bay.
The university runs a captive breeding facility in Byron, where the smelt population is kept genetically diverse as breeding stock. In addition to keeping a population alive, the smelt are used for research, said UC Davis spokeswoman Kat Kerlin.
https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2015/03/25/uc-davis-reels-in-10m-to-save-delta-smelt-from.html
Farmers Losing Crops to Endangered Fish -- May 8, 2009
The results of saving the Delta Smelt.
Dying Pistachio trees in San Joaquin Valley.
A once fertile field.
They have been trying to protect the Delta Smelt since 1988 and now the Delta Smelt are still near extinction! The tiny fish are starving!
Scientists long have been frustrated that the state has failed to stop the slide of the fish toward extinction, while environmentalists protest that the fish declined because too much Delta water is pumped to cities and farms.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/08/31/delta-smelt-california-experiment-offers-hope-for-fish-near-extinction/
California drought: Delta smelt survey finds a single fish, heightening debate over water supply pril 15, 2015
The Delta’s warm, brackish and polluted water is too inhospitable.
The fate of this fish — wild or forever captive — throws into question the future of one of the world’s most contentious plumbing systems: the 700,000-acre Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the nexus of water moving from the state’s north to south.
In the fourth year of a historic drought, biologists are issuing desperate pleas to devote Delta water for those few wild creatures that remain — not just Delta smelt, but also longfin smelt, Sacramento splittail, Sacramento perch, river lamprey, green sturgeon, Central Valley steelhead trout and spring and winter runs of chinook salmon. It’s not just about saving a single species, they say, but about saving a precious ecosystem.
But farmers say it’s time to concede the fish is a lost cause — and to supply more of the Delta’s water to help humans.
Amid the crisis, there’s this question: Do these cultured captive fish represent a new beginning in the wild, or an experiment in futility? The future of the Delta smelt — and its impact on California’s water supply — is the latest installment of this newspaper’s series “A State of Drought.”
The fish itself is unremarkable — short-lived, tiny and so translucent it’s almost invisible. It lacks the charisma of a bald eagle, grizzly bear or bison. Until now, it’s been durable, surviving millions of years through droughts far worse than this one. It was once the most abundant fish in the Delta.
This countdown toward extinction represents the failure of what was once the largest estuary between Patagonia and Alaska.
“The policy of the people of United States is not to let any species go extinct,” said fish biologist Peter Moyle, associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis.
The fish exerts such force on the Delta’s waters that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regulates how and when pumping can be done to protect it and other imperiled endangered species. Since the smelt is protected under the Endangered Species Act, a federal court order can — and has — reduced pumping to farmers and cities in Southern California. Yet this protection hasn’t been enough for a species that lives in the pipeline of California’s critical hydraulic system.
In March, (2015) when the California Department of Fish and Wildlife conducted one of its monthly spring trawl surveys for adult smelt, it found only four females and two males hidden in the grasses of a vast network of man-made islands and channels at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. April’s survey found a single fish. While these surveys are merely a sampling of the population, they are a shadow of previous counts: In 2012, the March survey tallied 296 fish, while the April catch was 143.
Efforts to stave off the fish’s demise have been pointless and magnify the human suffering of the drought, said Chris Scheuring, attorney for the California Farm Bureau Federation.
“A lot of water has been thrown at the problem, to no apparent effect,” he said. “Twenty million Californians depend on a water supply kept away from them by one small, little population of fish.”
Good riddance, wrote Fresno-based Harry Cline of the Farm Press Blog. Turning off the pumps that serve the state and federal water projects wasted about 800,000 acre-feet of water in 2013 “based on the science of four buckets of minnows. That is enough water to produce crops on 200,000 acres or 10 million tons of tomatoes; 200 million boxes of lettuce; 20 million tons of grapes.”
Here at the little-known Fish Conservation and Cultural Laboratory, this “refuge population” of fish is thriving and reproducing. Unlike the Delta outside, the water here is reliable and abundant. It’s chilled to 52 to 60 degrees. It’s disinfected and filtered of dangerous pollutants. Six times a day, the fish are fed a diet of live zooplankton, brine shrimp or special dry food, at a taxpayer cost of $2.5 million a year.
The lab then conducts tedious artificial insemination: Each female fish is squeezed, creating a pool of eggs around the size of a quarter. Then the sperm from the males is added. The fertilized eggs, safe in a small bowl of water, are incubated until they hatch 40 days later.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2015/04/15/california-drought-delta-smelt-survey-finds-a-single-fish-heightening-debate-over-water-supply/
California Water Cutbacks Are Not Saving Delta Smelt
January 9, 2015
U.S. Supreme Court to rule on ESA-mandated water curtailments to protect Delta Smelt regardless of the cost to humans and economy
A summary of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) Fall Midwater Trawl Survey (FMWT) reports the lowest index for Delta Smelt in the 48-year history of this survey. The FMWT is mandated by the Delta Smelt Biological Opinion for the coordinated operation of the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project.
Jason Peltier, Chief Deputy General Manager of the Westlands Water District, sees these results as the “latest evidence of a failed regulatory regime.”
https://californiaagtoday.com/california-water-cutbacks-saving-delta-smelt/
Save the Fish, Starve the Humans Feb 4, 2011
Saving a two-inch “endangered” fish has cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in California ‘s Central Valley and turned parts of it, some of the most productive agricultural land in the U.S., into a dust bowl.
Putting humans first while saving “endangered species” should be a high priority policy goal of the new Republicans in Washington, D.C.
I know. I put repealing ObamaCare at the top of that list. Closely followed by rolling back Obama’s suicidal no-oil-drilling policy.
But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is next.
This rogue agency is gearing up to impose “cap and tax” to fight “global warming” without congressional authority to do so. The immediate effect would be to “skyrocket” (Obama’s word) electricity rates for everyone. Can’t wait to hear Nancy Pelosi call that a “job generator.”
The EPA also plans to impose stricter CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standards on all cars sold in the U.S. The immediate effect of this will be to mandate hybrid and electric cars at the same time that “cap and tax” skyrockets electricity rates and makes it impossible to build new electricity generating plants.
To the Republicans’ credit, Sen. James Inhofe (R.-Okla.) and Rep. Fred Upton (R.-Mich.) have introduced measures to restrict the EPA from ruining the economy to fight global warming.
While addressing these EPA/Obama absurdities, Republicans also need to rein in the Endangered Species Act. The California experience tells us why this is an urgent need if the private market economy is ever to revive.
University of California (Davis) Prof. Peter Moyle started the Save the Delta Smelt campaign. The professor admits that the smelt has no commercial value, that its life cycle is just one year, and that, even in optimal conditions, it’s prone to extinction anyway.
Nonetheless, it must be saved at any cost. That’s the mandate of the Endangered Species Act. Moyle was successful in convincing the EPA to list the Delta Smelt as endangered in 1993. Several court cases later, the obscene cost of saving a fish the professor says has only been in the Sacramento River delta for 8,000 to 10,000 years is now apparent.
Simply put, California transfers water from the water-rich north to the parched south, much of it through the Sacramento River delta. Pulling the freshwater south allows saltier water to infiltrate the delta area from the San Francisco Bay, disrupting what Moyle describes as the fish’s sensitivity to salinity levels.
To save the smelt, farmland in the delta has been purchased by the government and taken out of production, and freshwater deliveries to 25 million people and about 2 million acres of rich farmland south of the delta have been drastically reduced.
Massive unemployment among farmers and farm workers (many of them illegal), rising vegetable, fruit, and rice prices as demand increases but supply is constricted, sweeping “water conservation” programs in Southern California leading to a series of water rate hikes that hit the poorest the hardest, and a flight of water-using industries to friendlier places, costing working Californians good-paying jobs.
Reduced crops in California have aggravated already rising food prices throughout the world, contributing to the food riots in Tunisia that led to the overthrow of the government there.
That’s all. Small prices to pay to preserve this smelt, don’t ya think?
Note the politics here. The Democrats own California. The governor and all statewide offices and big majorities in the state legislature are all Democrats and they are backed by a liberal media and hard-left academia.
With the delta smelt issue, it’s Democrat vs. Democrat. The working poor, the welfare poor, the illegals, the United Farm Workers Union, the Los Angeles Democratic machine and its phalanx of minorities are all on one side. The environmentalists and their allies in Hollywood and San Francisco on the other.
The Enviros won. They own the courts, because the Endangered Species Act is crystal clear—once listed as endangered, a species must be preserved at any and all cost.
The result in California is devastating. Washington Republicans must act now—the result will save California’s economy, help the worlds food supply situation, and, just maybe, restore viable two-party politics here too.
http://humanevents.com/2011/02/04/save-the-fish-starve-the-humans/
UC Davis reels in $10M to save Delta smelt from extinction Mar 25, 2015
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation awarded the University of California Davis $10 million over four years to save a viable population of Delta smelt from extinction, the university reported Wednesday.
The money will go primarily to the UC Davis Fish Conservation and Culture Laboratory in Byron, near Discovery Bay.
The university runs a captive breeding facility in Byron, where the smelt population is kept genetically diverse as breeding stock. In addition to keeping a population alive, the smelt are used for research, said UC Davis spokeswoman Kat Kerlin.
https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2015/03/25/uc-davis-reels-in-10m-to-save-delta-smelt-from.html
Farmers Losing Crops to Endangered Fish -- May 8, 2009
The results of saving the Delta Smelt.
Dying Pistachio trees in San Joaquin Valley.
A once fertile field.
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