In Helltown, California, piles of Chinook salmon carcasses lay upside down on the banks of Butte Creek. With drought and record high heat affecting water levels, many Chinook salmon have been found decomposing on the creek's shores.
The spring-run Chinook salmon, one of the most iconic fish in California, have rested in the historically cold waters for centuries, the Washington Post reported.
Related
After making a brutal upstream journey to Butte Creek, the fish lays its eggs and perishes to complete its cycle of life. The creek, once a place of life for the fish, is now a place of death.
One of the causes for the fish dying is the creek's temperature rising 10 degrees in some parts of the spawning grounds. An estimated 16,000 Chinook salmon made the journey from the Golden Gate Bridge to the creek, the Post reported. Of those that made the trip, about 14,500 have died.
The majority of the fish that died did so before completing the reproduction cycle, meaning that a year of spring-run Chinook reproduction will be lost due to the valley's hot, low-flow waterways, hurting the state's population rates.
Colin Purdy, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife's environmental programs manager for fisheries based in the city of Chico, discussed the fish population.
"This year has been huge in terms of pre-spawn mortalities," Purdy said. "This fall, we'll just hope to see enough juveniles get out to sustain the population, and we need enough adults to survive to help us avoid a failed class."
The trip for the Chinook salmon is a 325-mile swim upstream. But, because of the drought this year, the Sierra snowpack, which cools the fish's path, was half its annual average. This has resulted in the fish not having cool enough waters to make it to their destination safely.
Related
The Post's report found that from 2003 to 2020, the average rate of winter-run Chinook dying before laying eggs was 1.3%, but the number could be as high as 23.3% this year.
The number has improved in recent weeks, but the outlook for the species is still not good. The difference now is the frequency and severity of the droughts which hit the state, environmentalists say.
As the year continues to be one of the hottest in recorded history, the lifecycle of the Chinook salmon continues to be at risk as more are expected to die by year's end.
