Session Coordinators: Dr. Philip Georgakakos, UC Berkley; Dr. Gabriel Rossi, UC Berkeley, and Abel Brumo, Stillwater Sciences
 

Ordering and prioritizing recovery actions for California’s endangered salmon and steelhead is a dizzying challenge. Instream flow, habitat alteration, genetic bottlenecks, and hatchery management each have a claim as a priority for our attention and recovery dollars. In this pantheon of insults to native salmonids, the effects of invasive predatory fish are sometimes assumed to be an unavoidable and unmanageable reality of California’s modern landscape. However, non-native predatory fish are affecting the survival, distribution, abundance, and life history patterns of native salmonids. And the impacts of many non-native predatory fish are increasing with climate change. Here we seek to look deeper at the types of interactions between non-native predatory fish and native salmon in California, their ecological implications for salmon recovery, and management tools to reduce the effects of non-native predatory fish on native salmonids. 

River ecosystems contain mosaics of linked food webs. Therefore managers must carefully consider both the immediate and cascading effects of actions which remove predators or alter predator-prey dynamics. But given the critical state of our salmon populations it is necessary to make these considerations now, and carefully weigh the benefits and risks of different approaches. This session will include talks on the ecology of interactions between non-native predatory fish and Pacific Salmon, the success and failures of methods to manage non-native predatory fish in salmon-bearing streams, and novel and traditional management strategies for the future. The session will conclude with a round table discussion on how to proceed with the management of non-native predatory fish in California’s salmon-bearing streams.

Landscape-scale and Habitat-level Drivers of Fish Predation in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, Cyril Michel, NOAA