Ramping up releases of hatchery Delta smelt to the wild
It’s a lovely December morning in Rio Vista, a town of 10,000 in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The sky is a soft blue, the sun brings welcome warmth against the chill, and the water is calm with just a hint of ripples―ideal conditions for the team of state and federal biologists standing on a boat launch on the Sacramento River at 8:30 am. They’re here to release captive-raised Delta smelt, a small endangered fish unique to the region, into the wild. The clock on the release began ticking at 7 am. That’s when another crew started loading the smelt into insulated cylindrical drums called carboys at the Fish Conservation and Culture Laboratory, a conservation hatchery about 30 miles south near the town of Byron. The hatchery, operated by the University of California, Davis, has maintained a genetically-diverse captive population of these imperiled fish since 2007.