Kern County launches assualt on struggling fishery

[Dan McKenzie]

New Assault Launched on the Fish and Delta!

by John Beuttler

Just when I though it couldn’t get much worse for the public’s Central Valley fisheries than the tragic collapse of the fall-run Chinook salmon, growers from Kern County decided to fired a shot at the heart of the Delta and its once premier sport fishery, striped bass. They same shot was also aimed at people who love to fish (about 3 million anglers statewide), and at the very existence of the Delta’s ecosystem. My point is they don’t give a damn about the people who fish or the public who owns the water and the fish, or even those that just care about the Delta and estuary of which it is a part.

Striped Bass were introduce in 1887 and again in 1892 by the Fish and Game Commission to establish a public fishery in the Bay-Delta estuary. After nearly seventy years it became the premier fishery of the estuary and a surrogate species for the health of the Delta estuary during the 1970's & 80's. The reason this happened was because striped bass are true estuarine species that has critical needs shared by other Delta species. These life sustaining requirements were demonstrable, in part, by scientific correlations between the fisheries population size and the fresh water that used to flow through the Delta into Suisun and Honker Bay's to maintain striped bass and the health of the Delta.

As water exports began taking an ever increasing toll during the last four decades, the fish fell from being one of the greatest urban sport fisheries of all time to being targeted for extinction because some believed too much of the Delta’s fresh water was needed to maintain the fisheries abundance. When the population fell from 4 million to 1 million during the past decade, the attacks to eradicate it escalated under the disguise that it was “nonnativeâ€