[Water_news] 1. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS - Top Items for 5/18/09

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation for DWR personnel of significant news articles and comment

 

May 18, 2009

 

1.   Top Item–

 

Fish barrier of bubbles

The Stockton Record

 

New way to save salmon in the delta

The San Francisco Chronicle

 

To save salmon, Calif officials try spa-like combo

The Associated Press

 

Lights, sound push baby salmon past pumps

United Press International

 

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Fish barrier of bubbles

The Stockton Record – 5/16/09

By Alex Breitler

 

LATHROP - Imagine you're a 4-inch-long baby salmon in an immense, black river. As you wriggle downstream in an improbable journey to the ocean, a flashing glow appears where the channel forks to the left.

 

A wall of bubbles rises through the murkiness, illuminated by staccato bursts of light from the channel bottom. You try to pass through, and a piercing "WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!" noise scares you out of your scales.

 

You dart to the right, picking the other fork, the familiarity of darkness over this bizarre and unnatural display.

 

The humans up above are gloating. That's exactly what they wanted. And that's exactly what's happened this spring where Old River leaves the San Joaquin River, in the south Delta near Lathrop.

 

For years, officials have piled rocks into Old River to prevent salmon from swimming that way, toward diversions and giant export pumps.

 

The rocks worked, but a federal judge recently ruled that they were harming another species: the Delta smelt.

 

What now? Officials decided that bubbles, noises and bright lights - a "non-physical barrier" - might scare salmon into staying in the San Joaquin.

 

The state Department of Water Resources built the barrier, with the approval of fishery agencies. Barges lay down 367 feet of steel frame across the entrance to Old River; crews installed light bars, underwater sound speakers and air machines to make the river bubble like a spa.

 

About 15 miles upstream, they released 950 fish tagged with monitoring devices. Seventy-nine percent of those fish stayed in the San Joaquin when the barrier was on, compared with 52 percent when it was not, said Mark Bowen, a biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which contributed to the project.

 

The six-week, roughly $1 million experiment cost no more than the old rock barrier, officials said. And this way, the channel remains open to boaters.

 

"This is unique," said Mark Holderman, an engineer with Water Resources. "Nothing like this has been done before."

 

Jerry Johns, deputy director of Water Resources, said the device could be used at the same location in future years and might have applications closer to the dangerous export pumps or even on the Sacramento River, from which most of the Central Valley salmon emerge.

 

Smelt, which head up Old River to spawn and could not get through the old rock barrier, don't seem to mind the bubble curtain as much as salmon, Johns said.

 

The state's salmon crisis has been blamed largely on ocean conditions, but mankind's manipulation of inland waterways - dams, canals, diversions and the like - have not helped.

 

"We really needed to do something this year for the salmon," Johns said.

 

It's not an end-all solution, of course. The downstream journey is still hazardous. Noise-frequency cameras at a monitoring station show grainy images of large predators such as striped bass lurking near the barrier to gulp down defenseless salmon.

 

Only a fraction of the babies will return upriver to spawn as adults.

 

"It's no wonder you have to have zillions of these things to get a few coming back," Holderman said.#

 

http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090516/A_NEWS/905160333

 

New way to save salmon in the delta

The San Francisco Chronicle – 5/16/09

By Kelly Zito

 

During their sprint to the sea this spring, baby salmon on the San Joaquin River tried to elude not only hungry bass and sharp rocks, but a wall of sound, strobe lights and bubbles.

Quake gives Los Angeles area 'serious jolt' 05.18.09

The underwater show is the state's latest attempt to save the fabled species from being sucked into giant pumps at the heart of the state water system.

 

The $1 million project, introduced Friday by the state Department of Water Resources, also could aid the threatened delta smelt, another species whose rapid decline has alarmed ecologists and policymakers and highlighted the state's deteriorating water system.

 

"We're trying to figure out a better way to protect salmon ... and keep them in the main stem of the San Joaquin River," Jerry Johns, deputy director of the state agency, told reporters Friday.

 

Johns, with about a dozen other state and federal officials and project subcontractors, stood at the confluence of the San Joaquin River - second-longest in the state - and Old River near the town of Lathrop.

 

Behind them, a 350-foot-long row of bobbing red buoys marked the spot where a trestle carrying air-bubble tubes, speakers and lights had been lowered into the 10-foot-deep water about a month ago.

 

For the past four weeks, more than 900 tagged juvenile chinook salmon have been released about 15 miles south on the San Joaquin. As the fish encountered the light flashes, bubbles and noise - a constant hum from high to low frequencies - 79 percent of them angled north and remained on the San Joaquin.

 

That's an important number because the San Joaquin River has proved far less harmful to the fish than Old River, where they are more vulnerable to predators, water diversions for farmland and particularly the giant pumps near Tracy that send water from the southern Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to 25 million Californians.

 

Researchers said the equipment does no physical harm to salmon or other species and has been used successfully in projects in the Great Lakes and in England.

 

Still, UC Davis wildlife expert Peter Moyle said nonphysical barriers are best used over short periods because the fish may become desensitized to the light and sound show over time.

 

With the project completed, the equipment will be removed by the end of the month. Officials hope to declare the experiment a success and continue the project next spring.

 

During previous spring migrations, the state agency installed a rock barrier at the confluence but that impeded water flows in Old River and harmed the native delta smelt species, a federal judge found in 2007.

 

Concerns about the delta smelt - a key indicator of the health of the delta ecosystem - prompted steep reductions in the amount of water pumped through the region, forcing rationing around the state and billions of dollars in losses to agriculture.

 

Using the curtain of bubbles, Department of Water Resources officials hope they can improve the fortunes of both species.

 

In theory, the system could be adjusted to divert the smelt and other threatened fish away from pumps or other hazards, officials said. In turn, healthy fish populations could help reduce tensions between environmentalists and the water agencies that serve urban and rural customers.

 

But those who make their living fishing say the state must make sweeping changes - stricter conservation, water recycling and converting seawater into drinking water - to resuscitate fish species and repair the fragile ecosystem they rely on.

 

"The state is willing to bring out this gee-whiz technology, but the key is having adequate water flows," said Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations.

 

Chinook hatch in rivers and streams. Also known as king, spring or tyee salmon, they pass through San Francisco Bay and roam the Pacific Ocean as far away as Alaska before returning three years later to spawn where they were born - usually in the Sacramento River and its tributaries.

 

This year, for the second time in a row, the National Marine Fisheries Service banned commercial salmon fishing off California and much of Oregon. The action came after just 66,286 chinook salmon returned to the river system last year, the lowest number on record.

 

Studies blame a sparse food supply in the warming ocean, poor river conditions and dams.

 

"We've always looked at California's rivers and the delta as plumbing, not as living ecosystems - and that's a big part of the problem," Grader said. "If we can get away from this engineering-think ... we can start doing some better planning."#

 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/15/MNJQ17KLQF.DTL&type=science

 

To save salmon, Calif officials try spa-like combo

The Associated Press – 5/15/09

By Tracie Cone

 

FRESNO, Calif. — In a state where the Legislature once created a self-esteem task force, no one should be surprised that the elements of a good hot tub soak are being tested to keep migrating salmon on track.

 

A fish-irritating curtain of sound, lights and bubbles across the Old River, where a wrong left turn could mean being sucked into giant irrigation pumps, aims to keep juvenile Chinook smolts in the San Joaquin River on their springtime swim to the Pacific.

 

"People are going to hear about this and think, 'Boy those Californians really love their animals, they've installed jacuzzis for fish,'" said Mark Holderman, an engineer with the Department of Water Resources.

 

The spa combination is the latest of countless measures designed to save the endangered fish that migrate through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in the state's agricultural heartland.

 

For years, legal battles have been waged between farm water users and those representing the interests of the species whose existence have become threatened as demands on the Delta have increased.

 

It turns out that what was good for the dwindling Chinook – a rock dam that blocked the Old River nearly every spring since 1992 – was bad for the Delta Smelt, a tiny fish federal scientists say is on the brink of extinction.

 

The smelt's decline has prompted recent cutbacks in pumping from the freshwater estuary, pushing its needs ahead of Chinook and leaving state officials scrambling to find what's good for both of them.

 

"There's a battle between smelt and salmon as to who gets the attention," Holderman said. "Right now it's the smelt."

 

The rock barrier created problems for the smelt by causing more water to flow into downstream connectors, which "acted like bathtub drains" sucking smelt close to the giant pumps that push Delta water into surface canals for delivery across the state.

 

A biological opinion issued in December to protect the smelt left the state looking for a way to save this year's run of salmon, now in year two of a commercial fishing ban.

 

"To fix the problems that have occurred because of changes man has made in the Delta requires engineering solutions," said Holderman, the project manager. "Sometimes you fix one problem and you have to go fix another because of the problems it created."

 

California looked for answers in Denver, where scientists with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation have been performing light-and-sound lab tests on fish to keep them from dying in dam intake valves. Biologist Mark Bowman found that a wall of bubbles, combined with strobe lights and just the right low-frequency, bone-jarring bass notes worked best to divert Chinook smolts.

 

"It turns out the same sound that irritates me when someone pulls up next to me at a stoplight is the same sound that irritates the fish," Holderman said.

 

Preliminary studies on tagged smolt show that 80 percent of the fish flee the barrier, not as good as the 100 percent the DWR stopped with the 120-yard rock wall, culverts and nets, but worth exploring, say biologists.

 

Without a barrier, about half of the fish turn at the Old River, roughly equal to its share of the flow.

 

At $1 million, the electronic barrier is twice as expensive as building and removing a rock wall every year, but officials believe the costs will come down if the installation is permanent.

 

Holderman said there also are dangerous salmon detours along the Sacramento River, such as the Georgiana Slough near Rio Vista, where the department would like to install similar walls of sound, bubbles and light if the season's tests end well.

"We're just trying to get them the shortest route out to the ocean we can," Holderman said. #

 

http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/may/15/ca-salmon-spa-051509/?california&zIndex=100080

 

Lights, sound push baby salmon past pumps

United Press International – 5/16/09

 

TRACY, Calif., May 16 (UPI) -- Biologists say they're using sound, bright lights and bubbles to keep baby salmon from being sucked into pumps on California's San Joaquin River.

 

The pumps divert water from the southern Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta for use on farmland and for drinking water for 25 million Californians, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday.

 

The $1 million project is the latest attempt to save baby salmon en route to the sea and also could aid threatened delta smelt, said Jerry Johns, deputy director of the state Department of Water Resources.

 

The system began operating a month ago when more than 900 tagged juvenile chinook salmon were released about 15 miles from the pumps, Johns said.

 

As the fish encountered strobe lights, a curtain of bubbles and a hum in varying frequencies, 79 percent of them turned away from the pumps and remained on course for the open sea, Johns said.

 

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2009/05/16/Lights-sound-push-baby-salmon-past-pumps/UPI-43981242502477/

 

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