Neighbors Along the Riverbed Episode 8: Native Fish, Local Scales

Neighbors Along the Riverbed Episode 8: Native Fish, Local Scales

Mickey Morgan 0:08
Let's start local. When working to change something, it can be overwhelming to try tackling an issue at its full scale, all at once, can also be overwhelming to feel like you're working on something by yourself. One of the themes that can be heard throughout these episodes is efforts towards salmon habitat restoration and conservation and local creeks. And all of these efforts make a difference on the level of an entire watershed. These salmon aren't just local to where they live in the California coast, but also native. When I talk about where I'm from, I think of a couple of different things that also apply to the salmon population segments that we're working to recover in local waters. But beyond that, I think of how my great grandparents got here as Jewish refugees for generations and generations on lands that aren't this one. And that means I'm definitely not native here. When talking about being native to these lands and waters, this means the people whose ancestors were here for generations Muwekma Ohlone and Kumeyaay people for sure, but also the seven endangered and threatened salmon. When there aren't any barriers, wild salmon and steelhead will return to their natal streams. The waterways they were born in, their parents were born in, and all their ancestors before them for thousands of years.

I asked some folks who work in a lab using fish as research subjects, what comes to mind when they think about native and local fish in the Bay Area? I wonder if this is a context that they consider when they work.

Speaker 5 1:54
Not so much for me.

Speaker 4
I mean your fish are tropical right?

Mickey Morgan
Oh yeah.

Speaker 5
I have heard the stickleback in the pond, or not pond but creeks and rivers. So I haven’t ever seen.

Speaker 4
Yeah, yeah. So Tyler and I actually went on a collection trip this year earlier this year to Cerrito Creek, which was really fun. It was, we went with another lab in our department. And it was cool because we went and we like, you know, we we caught we netted for sticklebacks, and there were just a ton of sticklebacks. It was really amazing. Like we barely found anything else. Although I think we did find one goldfish, which was like had been a pet and had been like, was

Mickey Morgan 2:38
Clearly, carp is not
Speaker 4
It was very big, it was.

Mickey Morgan
Yeah. Yeah, they can be quite invasive. Yeah. Do people think about like their impact on local environments?

Speaker 5 2:49
Moving back here, I feel like I try to think about that. With like, my choices, but also like, as a person who commutes I'm already like, I drive so much. It's like, I know, my carbon footprint isn't great. I know that like I probably consume more plastic waste than like the average person by nature of this job. It's like, pretty insane. So I try to make like, do the like little things I can, but…

Speaker 4 3:22
I feel like it's really hard in molecular biology research where like you have this what feels like a trade off between things being sterile and things being, I don’t know.

Speaker 4 & 5, together 3:30
Reusable?

Speaker 5 3:33
And like decent for the environment?

Speaker 4 3:34
Yeah.

Speaker 5 3:34
I do a lot of dishes, cleaning when

Speaker 4 3:40
We, we reuse our petri dishes as well.

Speaker 5 3:42
We, when I say you guys, it's myself, maybe some other people. Other people are, strictly blast plastic ones. It drives me utterly insane. But yeah.

Mickey Morgan
Yeah, interesting.

Speaker 5 3:55
I guess that’s not my business.


Speaker 4 3:56
Well it’s like, It's hard even with like tips, you know, like you can't reuse tips. That's just like, that's not how good, like rigorous science is done. But I think when you start thinking about it can get overwhelming.

Mickey Morgan 4:10
Yeah. When we are talking about working towards ecological justice locally, this requires strategies to be imagined relative to where folks are working from, because different communities face different barriers. At Alameda Creek, Joe Sullivan from the East Bay Regional Parks District is able to help me continue working through some of the differences.

They're telling me that like I guess the culture is pretty different. Like people aren't too aware that there's even a creek there. There's not much fish going through and when there are there was I guess, similar to last last year with the guys here they got like stuck in the channel.

Joe Sullivan 4:49
Yeah, they did. It is, it is very different. The, and I think it has a lot to do with most of the creek looks like this. And you see the, so you're like, there can't be any fish in here. But as soon as you get into the canyon, it turns into a natural natural stream as much as it can be. And then it's like wow, it's much different than this and it's really pretty and boulders and it just, it's to be that close so people can, can actually go see what Alameda Creek used to look like. And it does look like it's a lot different than, than at San Lorenzo creek for sure. Yeah. But yeah, if you just saw if you saw this every day, I don't think you would really think that it could support many fish. But the, the salmon in this system, they're, they're not utilizing the flood control channel as habitat that it's this is just a highway to get up to the suitable habitat. So they're, they're shooting through here as fast as they can.

Mickey Morgan 5:55
So how, what like cities does the Alameda go through? Or at least I mean, until you get into the valley, like, is it in others?

Joe Sullivan 6:05
It starts in Sunol, S-U-N-O-L, and then comes through Niles once it gets through the canyon there. Sunol’s on the other side of the canyon.

Mickey Morgan 6:16
Yeah.

Joe Sullivan 6:17
And then I think we're in Union City, Fremont area, never know exactly which one we're in here. And then it goes out through San Leandro, out into the bay, so it definitely traverses several, several communities for sure.


Mickey Morgan 6:44
Historically there were steelhead salmon, also called steelhead trout, in both alameda creek and San Lorenzo creek. The restoration of the alameda river is considered essential in the recovery of the central california coast steelhead. Also essential is Coyote, Green Valley, and Sonoma Creeks, and the Napa and Petaluma Rivers. Saying these salmon are local and native to your communities in coastal california isn’t an exaggeration. When there aren't barriers like dams and low levels of usable water, salmon and steelhead move through our cities. Between office buildings and apartments and corner stores.

Brittany Struck, out of the Long Beach office and Dan Logan from the Santa Rosa office of NOAA Fisheries, explained how storm flows in the winter season affect the fish and the infrastructure they travel through.

Brittany Struck 7:41
Yeah, so, so flooding, I think we should probably clarify when we say flooding, a lot of our streams already have flood control measures around them. So whether that's a levee, whether that's a berm. Typically during normal storms, not to the magnitude of these last storms, there wouldn't necessarily be flooding above these levees. But at these higher flows that are generated from a storm event and certainly from these last set of storms that produce flood flows that are able to breach an estuary. You know, are able to breach a sand berm that has been built up for you know, maybe several seasons, given the lack of precipitation and the lack of storm flows that we haven't seen, you know, before before the end of December of last year. And the other layer of complexity or challenge in southern California is most of our resident population O. mykiss, not ocean going, you can think of them as trapped above long standing barriers within our coastal watersheds. So the flooding is important in terms of basically opening up the highway so that the ocean, the steelhead in the ocean, have now a way into the watersheds to complete their lifecycle.

Dan Logan 9:20
There's been a lot of reports on flooding and landslides that have come in and when those landslides when they come down the hill, those are also destined for streams, it can actually bury the fish. Some of the debris flows that come into a river can actually block migration, which might be measured in days or weeks, some of them might be years, decades, longer.

Brittany Struck 9:55
That specific example is a sewer pipeline that, that runs along the Ventura river. You know, these flows were so high and so powerful that they were able to damage and break a sewer pipeline that was buried. But the creek you know, does what it does naturally and erodes away in certain portions and damages and breaks these these sewer pipelines and then you have raw sewage in the river.

Mickey Morgan 10:25
The conservation and habitat restoration strategies have to be different regionally, not just because of the unique topography across California, but also because local communities and regions have different understandings of how much salmon and steelhead are part of their neighborhood. Local people have a really important source of knowledge in these efforts. You know, your friends, family, co workers, fellow students, what's a way that could get you and those around you invested in working with salmon and steelhead? Do you have any questions or want to add to this conversation? Email salmon neighbors@gmail.com