Wildcat Creek supported a steelhead run historically, but degradation of habitat and construction of passage barriers from urbanization likely resulted in their extirpation sometime after 1915. The dams that form both of these artificial lakes Lake Anza and Jewel Lake are impassable barriers to spawning steelhead. In September 1983, the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD) planted 615 steelhead from Redwood Creek (tributary to San Leandro Creek) into Wildcat Creek between Alvarado Park and the Regional Parks Botanic Garden. The EBPRD reported that no trout were present in Wildcat Creek prior to this stocking, so that the newly established population would provide a second and separate source for a "precarious" and "unique" genetic stock. This re-introduction has been successful with steelhead reproducing in the creek below Jewel Lake. According to CEMAR's San Francisco Estuary Watersheds Evaluation of 2007, only of the watershed's total of stream channel is suitable and available to steelhead.