Safeguarding a species

BYRON -- After fighting for decades to protect the threatened Delta smelt, wildlife officials have begun to move in a new direction: a captive-breeding program in case the fragile fish goes extinct in the wild.

The decision to begin a species rescue program was made cooperatively by state and federal agencies and academics in recent weeks. Officials are still working to fully fund the effort, but it will be based at a UC Davis smelt research lab at the state Department of Water Resources facility near this south Delta town in Contra Costa County.

UC Davis will isolate a separate group of smelt, captured in the wild last year, and breed them to create a genetically strong strain that could be used to replenish the wild population.

No decision has been made to actually reintroduce these fish. Officials said that ruling is years away and would first require many answers about whether such fish are compatible with their wild cousins.

But the program marks a significant new dimension for management of the smelt -- and the Delta itself.

"We're trying to create a safeguard against extinction, but hopefully the fish will come back in the wild so we won't have to restock," said Joan Lindberg, an ecologist and supervisor of the UC Davis Fish Conservation and Culture Laboratory. "The bigger issue is trying to clean up the Delta so the wild fish can continue to survive."

Lindberg's lab has been breeding smelt for 15 years for research purposes. At any given time, its tanks hold as many as 50,000 juveniles and 20,000 adult fish. They range from larval fish smaller than a grain of rice to adults the size of a pinky finger.

Smelt have been in sharp decline over the past five years. The cause remains unclear, despite millions spent on research during the past two years. Possible culprits include water contamination, invasive species and the effects of water exports -- or all of these together.

The Delta collects more than 40 percent of California's winter runoff and provides drinking water to 23 million Californians. But moving that water to cities and farms has greatly altered the estuary, the largest on the West Coast of the Americas.

The smelt is unique to the Delta and, because it lives just a year and is sensitive to water quality, is considered a strong indicator of the estuary's health.

Biologists fear if the smelt disappear, other species may follow in a cascade of extinctions.

"This is going to be more like a fail-safe program if things don't go well over the next several years," Jerry Johns, deputy director of the Department of Water Resources, said of the captive-breeding effort. "This doesn't do anything to help fish already in the Delta. We still need to aggressively move on other programs to help those fish."

The Department of Water Resources operates one of the Delta's two major export facilities. The pumps were stopped for nine days in June to protect smelt amid a population crash.

Along with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the Department of Water Resources also recently lost a federal lawsuit by environmental groups, which found that water exports contributed to the decline of Delta fish.

Johns said the Department of Water Resources plans to spend $600,000 to help UC Davis launch the smelt breeding program. This will provide facilities to house and manage the fish.

But the program will need money to expand as the fish population grows. Johns said the Department of Water Resources and other agencies are collaborating on a cost-sharing deal.

About a year ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service started its own smelt breeding program at Livingston Stone Hatchery near Shasta Lake. Plans call for moving that program closer to the Delta to work in concert with the UC Davis lab.

"If you're going to have a captive population, then you try to have a redundant backup so if something happens at one facility, you don't lose all your fish," said Bob Clark, assistant fisheries program regional manager at the wildlife service.

The new breeding effort was partly triggered by a decision earlier this year to discontinue collection of smelt in the wild for scientific purposes. Concern arose that even scientific collection could jeopardize the species.

Thus, UC Davis smelt became the best option.

The lab still held a group of adult smelt collected from the wild in the fall of 2006. They had already spawned once at the lab, and researchers discovered several useful things along the way: Smelt can breed more than once in a season, and they can live in captivity beyond the usual one-year life span.

These special smelt will launch a new generation that might one day help them hold on in the wild. Lindberg plans to spawn that first new generation next spring.

The fish -- about 1,000 individuals -- are closely guarded in a separate warehouse.

Breeding smelt is difficult because they are so small and sensitive. At the larval stage, it is tricky to screen debris and contaminants from tanks without also screening out the fish.

Captive-breeding programs have their critics. Intervention creates a weaker species, they claim, which often faces the same old threats when returned to the wild.

The California condor is an example. Captive breeding saved the condor from extinction, but reintroduced birds still face many environmental threats upon release.

"There is a tendency for people to think that if we have a refuge population, then we don't have to work as hard at restoration because we have a fallback," said Tina Swanson, a senior scientist at the Bay Institute. "I worry it will allow people to take their eye off the real problem, which is ecosystem degradation in the Delta."

Yet Lindberg said the effort is worthwhile because the captive fish may hold greater genetic variability -- and thus greater strength -- than fish now in the wild.

It is hard to know how small the wild population has shrunk, but these fish were captured before the latest population decline and probably won't survive beyond one more breeding season.

"We need to move now to use these fish," Lindberg said. "It would be unwise to lose this opportunity."

About the writer:

• The Bee's Matt Weiser can be reached at (916) 321-1264 or mweiser@sacbee.com.