Researchers raising salmon in rice fields to save dwindling population
A group of researchers and rice farmers in the Central Valley are working together to try and help California's struggling salmon population.
"There's also snails you see and there's also long guys swimming around and I believe that those are dragonfly larvae. All of this is literally filet mignon for baby salmon," said Buttner, a member of the California Rice Commission.
The Central Valley is made up of hundreds of thousands of acres of rice fields.
The goal of this project is to see if all those fields could be used in the future to replicate the environment salmon would have experienced in the same area thousands of years ago.
"So this is the last drain -- the point at which the fish, if they want to, can leave the whole system," said Buttner.
That system is a network of flooded-out winter rice fields that Paul and his colleagues have converted into a habitat for baby salmon.
"Water comes in, it goes through these boxes," said Buttner. "All the boxes look like this with the two-inch hole about two-thirds from the bottom."
Those holes allow the baby salmon, which either naturally come into the fields during winter flooding or are released into the fields by the project's team, to swim freely from one section to another eating up all the plankton and other organisms in the rich floodwaters.
"It was a giant wetland full of plants and abundant fish and wildlife and salmon would rear on these habitats and basically gas up for lack of a better word," said Andres Rypel, a professor in the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology at UC Davis and also one of the scientists involved in the salmon project.
Rypel tracks hundreds of the salmon that were released into the rice field this winter.
"We're running an experiment where we're testing how well salmon that are reared in rice fields survive in comparison to a similar set of fish that were reared in a laboratory," said Rypel.
The hope is that if the experiment shows that the salmon released into the rice fields do better than the lab salmon, then more rice fields can be converted into salmon habitats.
"We know that the impact would be positive," said Rypel. "The big question that we want to figure out is: How many acres would it take to really change the trajectory of the population from a declining one to a growing one?"
That is something that will only be known once these experiments are completed, but Buttner says he is hopeful rice could become the unlikely savior of the California Salmon.
"It's just a natural great habitat story, right? A state that has lost 95 percent of its wetlands, and yet a half a million acres of flooded agriculture moved in called rice," said Buttner.
But rice of course only provides wetlands for half the year. Spring's arrival means the fields are being dried out in preparation for seed planting.
It won't be until next fall that the waters will rise again and a new crop of salmon will be able to take advantage.