Monterey Bay Salmon & Trout Project

So the fire missed the hatchery, and one would think "back to business as usual"… but alas no such luck. I’m writing this article on a sunny Thursday in my office, contemplating the dire National Weather Service Forecast for next week starting Sunday night Dec 6th, with potentially a series of storms to come blasting through all week.

Normally I would be frustrated at the early arrival of some storms, hoping for a delay until New Years eve, but this year has been anything but normal…10” on rain one day in October, forecasts for an El Niño winter and oh yeah… there was a big fire this summer…so some early storms in December, well just another day in the office (or rather, out in the creek).

As many of you know, we have been struggling with trying to make the best educated decisions in the face of truly unknown impacts from the fire this winter. There are forecasts for major mudslides that could take out the hatchery building, silty water with sharp fines that could not only clog the pumps, but cause damage to the gills of fish in the race ways and tanks, trees falling on the hatchery and or the access road, spawning failure for the wild fish coming back and of course safety hazards to people working up there, or maybe nothing…How do you prepare for just another day in Scott Creek?

Well there have been a few meetings to say the least, protocols have been changed, new plans made fish moved and the action rethought and then done all over again. Ultimately we have used the judgments of what is likely to be the most safe options for the fish and the people caring for them. The following steps have been taken:

1. Right before the big storm in October, all of the coho from the hatchery, including the ~1700 parr and the 1yr old and 2 yr old broodstock were transported to new housing facilities at the NOAA Fisheries Lab in Santa Cruz, where we rushed to expand our freshwater system to receive all these fish.
2. Due to space limitations at the lab, a subset of the parr ~700 were released in San Vicente Creek, giving some fish a chance to make a go of it in the wild, just in case something happened to our freshwater system in Santa Cruz.
3. The ~5500 Scott Creek steelhead parr have been fin clipped and tagged and half of them will be released into the lower section of Scott Creek to see how they do in the winter months on Dec 3rd. The other half will be held at the hatchery until spring to see if they can make it through the winter. If things get really bad, they will also be released during the winter.
4. The San Lorenzo steelhead fin clipping is being held Saturday Dec 5th, and most of the fish will be released into the San Lorenzo soon after that, with a few being held for the duration of the winter.
5. We are planning on moving the spawning operations and egg tray system to the NOAA lab for the winter where we will spawn the coho broodstock and any wild coho that are collected.
6. A few San Lorenzo steelhead for the STEP program will be spawned at the hatchery, but if conditions deteriorate, the eggs will be moved to the NOAA lab if necessary.
7. Come next spring, the rest of the juvenile coho at the NOAA lab, that will then be 1 yr. old, will be tagged and released into Scott Creek at their normal smolt migration time.
8. If the hatchery survives the winter, we will move any newly spawned coho fry back up to the facility for rearing in the spring after the winter storms have subsided.

And what about the fish in the river? The impacts of the fire on salmon population are likely to be mixed, certainly bad in the short term, but potentially beneficial in the future. It turns out that our past research efforts in Scott Creek have laid the ground work for a unique research opportunity. While there have been fires in other research rivers before, it appears that none have been studied to the extent that we have been doing in Scott Creek since 2002. Between our fisheries work with NOAA and UCSC, and Cal Poly Swanton Pacific Ranch’s hydrological studies, there is an incredible amount of information on what Scott Creek was like before the fire. This will enable us to study what impacts or changes the fire causes for the fish, associated ecosystem and habitat in this river.

To this extent, we have sought and received some additional research funding and will have at least one, if not several graduate students dedicated to studying how the fish and Scott Creek recover after the fire. All of this is making for what will probably be a challenging and exciting winter, and several years of hard work in our future as we continue to work with MBSTP to try and recover steelhead and coho populations in the Santa Cruz Mountains and watch as Scott Creek heals from this summers fire.