Controversy Faces Plan To Restore Rare Sierra Trout

June 21, 2009

Release from: Jeff DeLong
Reno Gazette-Journal

Government biologists are again moving forward with plans to restore one of the country’s rarest trout by poisoning a remote Sierra stream and again, critics are battling the idea.

The project at Silver King Creek in a wilderness area south of Lake Tahoe isn’t slated until the summer of 2010 but controversy is dogging the plan now just as it has since it was first proposed in 2002.

“They want to put an agent in the water that kills everything,” said Patty Clary of Californians for Alternatives to Toxics, a primary opponent of the project.

“It’s still a very exciting project and it’s very viable,” countered Bob Williams, field supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Reno.

The debate revolves around efforts by U.S. Fish and Wildlife and the California Department of Fish and Game to restore the rare Paiute cutthroat trout to its native habitat in Alpine County’s Silver King Creek.

The fish, listed as endangered in 1967 and upgraded to threatened status in 1975, is in trouble because it has become hybridized with other trout planted in the stream by anglers long ago, experts said.

Efforts would involve use of the fish poison rotenone along 11 miles of Silver King Creek, its tributaries and Tamarack Lake. Non-native, hybridized trout could then be removed and the stream restocked with pure Paiute cutthroats raised in hatcheries.

“It would be a huge success story,” Williams said. “This would be a species we can remove from the (endangered) list.”

Over the years, permit problems and challenges by opponents halted the project several times. In August 2005, a team hiking into Carson Iceberg Wilderness to perform the job was ordered to turn around after a federal judge sided with conservationists, ordering a full environmental impact report be prepared first.

That document was released in March and should adequately address concerns, proponents said. Officials are in the process of responding to comments on the report.

“Our intent is to address those controversies up front,” said Stafford Lehr, senior environmental scientist and project manager for the California Department of Fish and Game. “It’s going to be a matter of opinion as to whether we have done that.”

The “vast majority” of comments are favorable, Lehr said. But critics remain dissatisfied.

“It wasn’t really that much of a change,” Clary said of the project as outlined in the new environmental report.

A June 12 comment written to California water quality officials by attorney Julia Olson on behalf of Californians for Alternatives to Toxics and Wilderness Watch describes the document as “unreliable” and inadequate.

Critics say the study fails to disclose environmental impacts of fish poisoning, including effects on macro invertebrates such as stoneflies and mayflies.

The issue is of particular concern because the stream is in a wilderness area and officials are pushing to “poison the stream and everything in it,” Clary said.

“That’s not OK,” she said. “This is a very precious area. We don’t have a lot of wilderness in our world.”

Clary questions the notion the Paiute cutthroat is native to Silver King Creek, suggesting the fish my have been planted there by Native Americans prior to contact with white settlers.

Williams said the use of rotenone would have no long-lasting impacts on aquatic life and that macro invertebrates would recolonize the treated stretch of stream within a few years. Those very creatures would be needed as food for the cutthroats introduced into the stream, he said.

“We have taken what we believe to be steps above and beyond what normally would be done,” Williams said. “We believe we have taken all the necessary precautions.”

The project is strongly in line with his agency’s mission to protect endangered wildlife, Williams said.

“It preserves the persistence of a very unique species of trout in the Sierra,” Williams said. “It’s what the Fish and Wildlife Service works so hard to do — to preserve fish and wildlife for future generations.”