This week, officials are expected to shut down all commercial and recreational salmon fishing off California for 2023. Much will be canceled off neighboring Oregon, too.
The reason: An alarming decline of fish stocks linked to the one-two punch of heavily engineered waterways and the supercharged heat and drought that come with climate change. There are new threats in the ocean, too, that are less understood but may be tied to global warming, according to researchers.
Scientists and fishers had been braced for bad numbers. Conditions were terrible a couple of years earlier, when the salmon were young and tiny in low, overheated creeks and rivers in California. But as the fish counts came in and the models spit out figures, the numbers were even more dismal than expected.
Of all the salmon in California, fall-run Chinook were the last ones robust enough for commercial fishing. But this year, fewer than 170,000 are expected to return to Central Valley rivers. That’s down from highs of over a million as recently as 1995.
While some dips are normal, this one is not.
“California salmon are in dire straits,” said Nate Mantua, a climate scientist who leads a team of salmon ecologists and biologists at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association Fisheries in Santa Cruz, Calif.
The shutdown would mean higher prices and no fresh local salmon in California this year, though it probably would have little or no effect beyond the region.