‘Nearly Half’ of California’s Salmon Could Be Extinct in 50 Years

It's hard out there for a fish in California.

Between climate change, oil pipelines bursting, a historic statewide drought, and bursting dams, the Golden State's fish wild population is probably getting more help from beavers than it is from humans. And if these trends continue, it could lead to almost half of California's salmon, steelhead, and trout species to be wiped out in the next 50 years and reduced by a staggering 75 percent in 100 years.

This dramatic forecast is the conclusion of a joint study by UC Davis and nonprofit CalTrout entitled "State of the Salmonids [SOS] II: Fish in Hot Water." According to the report, the "overarching threat" of climate change will make it harder and harder for wild salmon, steelhead, and trout—all in the salmonid family—to find cold water habitats to survive in. But this environmental concern is only compounded by other "human-induced threats" that authors enumerated, like dams, agriculture, estuary alteration, urbanization, and transportation.

"State of the Salmonids I" was published in 2008 and established the baseline health level of 32 types of Californian salmon, steelhead, and trout populations.

In the nine years that have passed since the first report, things appear to have gotten significantly worse, as the number of species likely to be extinct in five decades nearly tripled from five to 14 between 2008 and today. And now, thanks mostly to the crippling drought of the last five years, researchers concluded that 81 percent of the remaining 31 species are "worse off today" than they were a decade ago.

"We have already lost one of our native fish," Curtis Knight, executive director of CalTrout, said in a press release. "The bull trout was last seen in the McCloud River in 1975. The fact we haven't lost another since 1975 is remarkable. These fish are resilient, but this report underscores that we must act now to prevent further extinctions."

Measures to improve the situation for salmonids and reverse the trend toward extinction include protecting river ecosystems, restoring coastal lagoons and estuaries, and promoting genetic variation.

There's only so much work that the beavers can do.