pagedesign

With the major field­work for our 2022–23 field sea­son now com­plet­ed, here is a brief update on cur­rent sta­tus from Paul But­tner, the Project Man­ag­er for the Cal­i­for­nia Rice­lands Salmon Project. It includes a link to a recent KPIX sto­ry about the project.

Last week of Inten­sive Field Sea­son Updates This week rep­re­sent­ed “Finals Week” for the UC Davis crew that has worked tire­less­ly through­out this crazy, but pro­duc­tive, field sea­son.  They have man­aged through not just one but two sep­a­rate bypass flood­ing events and they were still going strong as they man­aged through this final week com­prised

Break­ing News:  Sud­den Change of Dai­ly Activ­i­ties This week start­ed out fair­ly hec­tic as we learned on Tues­day, March 8 that the Sut­ter Bypass was expect­ed the run again start­ing late-Fri­­day night, March 10.  Begin­ning March 8, this ini­ti­at­ed a flur­ry of activ­i­ty to pri­or­i­tize field drain­ing and removal of caged fish to relo­cate them to the

Updat­ed Catch Num­bers To date, we had cap­tured over 372 fish via trap net and sein­ing. Based on size chart assess­ments, these includ­ed 69 wild fall-run sized, 1 late-full-run-sized, 8 win­ter-run-sized, and 7 spring-run-sized Chi­nook salmon. We still had found/experienced 0 mor­tal­i­ty of any non-fall-run wild Chi­nook salmon.   Over­all mor­tal­i­ty has been low.  About 3.5%

So far, we had cap­tured 363 fish via trap net and sein­ing. Based on size chart assess­ments, these include 63 wild fall-run sized, 1 late-full-run-sized, 9 win­ter-run-sized, and 5 spring-run-sized Chi­nook salmon. We found/experienced 0 mor­tal­i­ty of any non-fall-run wild Chi­nook salmon.   Mor­tal­i­ty was low.  About 3.3% (12/363) mor­tal­i­ty of all fish encoun­tered by this

After hav­ing intro­duced the 4,500 Fall run (all PIT tagged) and 100 Late-Fall year­lings (all PIT and JSATS tagged) into the fields the pre­vi­ous week, empha­sis has turned to uti­liz­ing the net­work of sev­en PIT read­ers at the rice box­es to col­lect data on fish move­ments with­in the field and out the field drain.  All

The bypass flood­wa­ters reced­ed enough to enable the project field to be safe­ly accessed and the inten­sive data col­lec­tion and man­age­ment prac­tice imple­men­ta­tion offi­cial­ly began.  UCD sci­ence team work includ­ed sein­ing, begin­ning phas­es of PIT sys­tem instal­la­tion in the field, and instal­la­tion of a large fyke net sys­tem at the out­fall drain of the field

The flood­ing lev­els of the fields was begin­ning to sub­side and expect­ed to become acces­si­ble for work by the mid­dle of fol­low­ing week as the bypass con­tin­ues to slow­ly drain.  The UCD Team was able to begin some ini­tial sein­ing activ­i­ty by the end of this week. The Team also deployed lab-reared fish into cages

No sig­nif­i­cant change in field con­di­tions from the pre­vi­ous week in that the Sut­ter Bypass remained inun­dat­ed with flood­wa­ters.  The UCD team remained ready to begin sam­pling for recruit­ment of nat­ur­al occur­ring fish­es (wild or hatch­­ery-ori­­gin) just as soon as they could regain access.  The Team con­tin­ued work with the two groups of hatch­­ery-ori­­gin fish