Steelhead in Southern California What?!?! That’s the common reaction when someone mentions steelhead and Southern California in the same sentence. Most people think of steelhead habitat as extending only from Northern California up along the West Coast into Canada and Alaska. After all, steelhead are a coldwater fish, and cold water usually isn’t associated with Southern California.
When I started hearing rumors of giant steelhead as far south as San Diego, I have to admit that my curiosity was piqued. I refused to believe that they were real steelhead and dismissed the stories as merely about rainbow trout trapped in small creeks and rivers. But then the nonprofit I work for, California Trout, began to consider an office in Southern California solely to protect these fish, and a friend showed me a photo of a chromebright 30-inch fish from the Santa Clara River. That was all it took, I had to go down there and explore these rumors and stories and investigate this phenomenon for myself.
I’m a dedicated fly fisher to the point of obsession, and I know that some anglers believe that when it comes to fish, if you can’t catch it, it’s not worth caring about it. But like many fly fishers, I’m not just an angler, and the wildlife lover and conservationist in me maintains a curiosity about the natural world that extends past angling. I believe true fly fishers desire to know about all kinds of fish and wildlife. And of all the fish I’ve come across in my travels, few are dearer to my heart than the Pacific steelhead. Not only are they one of the most revered game fish, but ecologically, they are also one of the most interesting fish on this planet. They are equipped to survive, if we give them the chance.
Part of my job with CalTrout is to produce multimedia stories that help promote some of the organization’s conservation efforts. I was asked to make one such story about the Southern California steelhead. My first stop was at the office of Mark Capelli, a fisheries biologist for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration working out of Santa Barbara. Capelli helped write the recovery plan for Southern California steelhead and is an expert on these fish. The first thing I noticed as I entered his office was a photograph of a large adult steelhead on the bank of a river. Mark said the specimen was pulled from the Ventura River just a few years ago. The fish was more than 30 inches long and probably would’ve fought like hell if hooked on a fly rod. Mark went on to tell me about the history of steelhead and angling in Southern California. He produced several images, some dating back to the early 1900s, of large steelhead from just about every river flowing into the ocean, from the Santa Ynez River to the Los Angeles River. “The steelhead in Southern California occupied nearly ever watershed in Southern California, and there are several thousand miles of stream habitat,” Capelli said. “Trout and steelhead angling in Southern California was a major recreational activity with significant economic implications leading right up to 1950 and the completion of the major dams.”
The story of known human interaction with steelhead starts with the Chumash people, a tribe indigenous to the South Coast. For thousands of years, they coexisted with the fish, which they fondly called “Isha’kowoch,” “the glistening salmon,” and which they harvested from the rivers during the winter months. The Chumash had dances and prayers to honor the fish. As immigrants from Mexico and Spain and then elsewhere populated Southern California, the word of these magnificent creatures began to spread. By the early 1900s, they had become a popular game fish. People from far and wide would flock to the rivers from January to March to fish for giant steelhead. There were no salmon that far south, so the steelhead became the game fish of choice in Southern California. There are many photos taken during this era that depict angling for fish well over two feet in length.
By the mid-1940s, the age of dams had caught up with the southern part of the state. Walls of concrete trapped many of Southern California’s major rivers, cutting off steelhead from miles of their historic spawning and rearing habitat. Water was diverted from the rivers for municipalities and agricultural use. Concrete diversions, culverts at road crossings, altered stream channels, and what’s known as “Arizona crossings,” in which roads are built across the beds of streams that don’t run all year, began to create a landscape that fish could no longer recognize or fully use. As a result, the populations of steelhead began to decline precipitously. In the early twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of them had returned to the rivers between San Louis Obispo and Mexico. With the changed environment, less than a few hundred adults were returning annually.
Southern California steelhead now are statistically the most endangered native fish in the United States. “In a way, Southern California steelhead should not exist,” Peter Moyle, a leading fisheries biologist with the University of California Davis Center of Watershed Sciences, has said. “Here we have these fish that are going out to sea and returning to these streams that are heavily urbanized. Everything you can imagine that can be done to a stream has been done to the streams in Southern California, and yet the fish keep coming back, year after year.” These steelhead have been subjected to huge variances inflows, sediment loads, water temperatures, wildfire effects, pollution, and other harmful influences.
Thankfully, they are also one of the most adaptable fish on the planet. That adaptability has been the key to their survival, and it may help ensure that in the future, their runs will endure, despite the damage we have done to their environment. These steelhead can withstand the highest range of temperatures of any salmonid on earth. And because there are few hatcheries on these river systems, many of these runs of fish have maintained their wild and native genetics. Unlike many of the rivers up north, which were known for large runs of salmon, most of the dams down south didn’t come with mitigation programs that included a hatchery. This ultimately may be one of the main factors contributing to the fact that somehow, against all odds, wild Southern California steelhead continue to persist.
These wild fish have been able to exploit varied habitats and other opportunities throughout their life histories and thus preserve their runs, despite changing habitats and conditions. Say there is a big-water year, and a pair of wild steelhead enter the Ventura River. Those fish spawn in a matter of just a few days and can potentially lay more than one thousand eggs. Once those eggs hatch, unlike salmon fry, which all tend to move downriver toward the ocean in a school, some of the steelhead fry will tend to head upriver and develop in cold, shaded pools far up in the canyon, while others head downriver and develop in the brackish estuary or lagoon where the river meets the beach.
They have diversified their habitats, with the potential for some surviving if an environmental catastrophe befalls the others. If something happens in the headwaters that year — a mudslide or a chemical spill — it may wipe out all the fish in the upper stretch, but since there may still be fish in the estuary, that strain may well survive. Or if something happens lower in the system, the upper population would still survive and move back down once conditions improve. Studies show that sometimes the fry in the estuary head upriver and settle in the remote headwaters, and sometimes the fish that were very high up in the system come down and try the estuary for awhile.
Then, the next year, when a big storm comes, some of the matured fry will head out to the ocean to become steelhead, but others will stay in the river. Some will go to the ocean the season after that, and some will stay in the river their whole lives. Again, the chances of that genetic stock surviving threats to its existence is increased. By the same token, adult fish returning from the ocean may find unfavorable conditions in their stream of birth. They can then look for another river up or down the coast with better conditions or just go ahead and stay in the ocean for another year and try again the next season. It’s these options that give this species such a high chance of surviving.
Luckily, more and more is becoming known about the movements and life histories of the Southern California strains of steelhead. Such data helps the Department of Fish and Wildlife make management decisions that could help these fish coexist with our changing landscape. But the time to implement these decisions is now. These fish are on the precipice of extinction. As climate change begins to increasingly affect, the genetics of these fish will become more and more valuable. As rivers up north become warmer and more urbanized, it’s these wild steelhead that will be the future of the state’s steelhead stocks. We can’t rely on hatcheries. We have to have stocks of wild fish that can choose their own mates and make their own adaptations.
For more about Southern California’s steelhead, watch the California Trout documentary Southern California Steelhead: Against All Odds on Vimeo or YouTube.
