A Promising New Effort to Save California’s Salmon

Over a century of water and land use changes have led to catastrophic declines in salmon populations in rivers throughout California. Now, a groundbreaking collaboration between state and federal agencies and California's Winnemem Wintu Tribe is taking a new approach: bringing winter-run salmon back to their ancestral waters above Shasta Dam. We spoke with NOAA's Rachel Johnson to learn more.

You've been working on bringing winter-run salmon to the McCloud River for a few years. What is this project, and why is it necessary?

I've been studying salmon for 20 years now, and all runs of salmon are worse now than when I began my career. What we've been doing hasn't been working: the winter-run Chinook were listed as endangered in the 1990s. It's been thirty years, and the population continues to move in the wrong direction.

Winter-run salmon evolved to thrive in very different habitat; we've constrained them to spawning below a dam and expected them to thrive. Engineered solutions like releasing cold water from reservoirs are not proving to be effective. During every drought, they don't get the spring-fed, reliably cold water they need.

Winter-run salmon experienced high temperature-dependent mortality during the 2020-21 drought, and cold-water storage in Shasta Reservoir was looking bleak in 2022. These salmon return to the places where they spawned at three years old to lay their own eggs. We were really worried about losing the third cohort. If you lose the third one, it's hard to dig yourself out of that because you have a generation of salmon that didn't reproduce.

The reintroduction effort started with discussions about how to not lose winter-run salmon on our watch. In partnership with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, NOAA talked about implementing a plan to put salmon back in a landscape where they may thrive, and we re-engaged with the Winnemem Wintu and Chief Sisk. In 2022, winter-run salmon eggs were returned to their ancestral waters in the McCloud River. Three key agencies and a lot of people helped us bring eggs to the watershed, moving this project from vision to practice. It's a rare and exciting time.

Tell us about collaborating with the Winnemem Wintu.

I hadn't worked with the tribe on any projects before. It was a very powerful experience to start on a path that no one had walked down together, and Chief Sisk's leadership was a game changer. Chief Sisk brings people together in a joint vision that she's had for a very long time. We're just starting to appreciate that vision and have finally found a forum to work together.

Last year, Chief Sisk decided that the salmon eggs needed to be reared differently. Rather than putting eggs into trays along the river-a tool hatcheries typically use for mass production-she wanted to raise the eggs in a nature-based system that would expose them to all aspects of the river.

The idea was to place eggs in an aquarium tank with McCloud River water drawn from below the gravel. The center pool allows the fish, when they've hatched and are ready to move downstream, to swim into a larger tub. This tub includes plants the salmon need for medicine to grow strong, and it has helped fish orient to velocities of water flow that fish in hatching trays can't experience. Then they can choose when they're ready to go into the river.

This was innovative-a new way that agencies don't think to raise fish. You can feel the difference. Chief Sisk thinks like a Mama Salmon, and she created a rearing environment with the right conditions to make baby salmon grow wild and strong until adult salmon can return to finish the job. As she would say, Mama Salmon will always get it right and best; anytime we intervene in the river or play Mama Salmon, we'll probably not get it right.

What lessons could other resource managers draw from your experience?

From an agency perspective, we learned value of bravery-of making big changes and big decisions. Climate change is here. We don't lack knowledge of what to do-just the bravery to do it. It's easy to think that the status quo is not a decision, but it's the decision to not do something because of the fear of failure.

At each turn in this project, engaging with the tribe has resulted in something better. The Winnemem Wintu have been working on bringing their Nur (salmon) home for over 70 years, ever since the dam came in. They have a lot of knowledge about how salmon persisted-and they ask questions in a different way. Talking to Chief Sisk, I'd suggest we raise the eggs this or that way, and the answer was, "No, thank you, neither. There's a third option." Once the idea came into focus, everyone rallied behind it. It felt more natural, like a more holistic, ecosystem-level approach to making rivers stronger.

Can we replicate this?

I think it's really scalable. There's an ongoing conversation about how to reintroduce fish so that they imprint on their native rivers. The Karuk Tribe is already coming down from the Klamath to see nature-based rearing on the McCloud. Now we have a tool that's easy to integrate into other systems. And when people see it, they want to use it. With each idea from Chief Sisk, we're finding a better way of doing salmon reintroduction.

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