After nearly a decade of work and nearly $369,000 in state spending, a steelhead restoration effort in San Diego County has been canceled, raising questions about whether larger and more complex initiatives will succeed.
The California Coastal Conservancy and its partners have tried since 2003 to revive the critically endangered fish in San Mateo Creek, which cuts through Camp Pendleton to the Cleveland National Forest.
Despite killing nearly 50,000 nonnative fish and frogs in the watershed, the groups couldn’t get ahead of those populations which routinely escape from private ponds upstream and eat young steelhead. The conservancy board voted Thursday to stop pouring money into the project, which is a small piece of an overarching initiative by agencies and nonprofit groups to boost steelhead in Southern California.
Water district officials who challenge whether recovery of steelhead is possible in urbanized rivers — part of the federal government’s long-term strategy — have seized on the failure of the San Mateo project.
“If on a smaller, more manageable watershed like the San Mateo they are unable to make progress, what makes them think they are able to make progress on a much larger and more complicated watershed?” said Don Smith, director of water resources for the Vista Irrigation District.
Are steelhead salmon?
Salmon is a lay term, not a scientific one -- making the question more complex to answer than some might realize. They are in the same family, but not the same species.
The word “salmon” comes from Latin, meaning “to jump” — an appropriate name because of that fish’s striking ability to leap over falls on their way to their spawning grounds.
The five Pacific salmon are in the genus Oncorhynchus, but steelhead are a different species, O. mykiss. Both are in the formal taxonomic family Salmonidae.
Separate genus classifications are because steelhead differ in important ways from the other five species of salmon — sockeye, pink, chum, coho and chinook.
For example, steelhead do not die after spawning as do the other Pacific salmon. Also, steelhead do not need to go to the ocean to mature and complete their life cycle, and they can give rise to resident forms commonly known as rainbow trout.
Source: National Marine Fisheries Service
At the National Marine Fisheries Service, steelhead recovery coordinator Mark Capelli said setbacks are inevitable and should be viewed in the context of progress on other fronts, such as preparations to remove dams and restore historic flows and vegetation to some steelhead streams.
“Just because this particular effort is not successful does not mean that the issue goes away,” he said. “We will find some other way to address (it).”
Historically in Southern California, more than 30,000 steelhead returned from the ocean each year to spawn and they supported an important recreational fishery. But by the mid-1900s, hazards such as dams, concrete channels, and chemical pollutants degraded the fish’s habitat. Today’s annual runs number about 500 adults, making steelhead one of the rarest species in the nation.
After steelhead were added to the Endangered Species Act list in 1997, federal officials spent years on the complicated process of writing a recovery plan for the fish in Southern California. In 2009, National Marine Fisheries Service published a draft that is still months from being finalized. The 430-page proposal can’t mandate changes, but its recommendations will set the tone for when the agency and other regulators review water-supply and flood-control projects.