State Releasing Salmon Into American River
California Pinning Hopes on Hatcheries
Sharokina Shams
KCRA
05/05/2011
By the end of the day on Thursday, fish and game workers will be about done with the work of hatching, tagging, and then releasing salmon into the American River this season. Then, they will simply wait and hope.
Three or four years from now, they will finally know if the baby salmon, or smolts, they released have come back to the American River from the Bay. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes it doesn’t.
The long, costly process is California’s attempt to improve the salmon population, which has been so low over the last few years that some have wondered whether salmon would disappear completely from northern California rivers.
The Folsom and Nimbus dam stop salmon from traveling that far upstream to spawn, as they would otherwise do naturally after living their adult lives in the Bay. But just as those flood control measures hurt salmon, the state has been using hatcheries to try to make up for the lost population. Last year, they saw enough of an improvement in salmon returning to the American River from the Bay that the Department of Fish and Game allowed fishing of adult salmon after having forbidden it for years. Fishing of smolts is against the law and carries a fine. Adult salmon fishing though, is expected to be allowed this fall.
