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Your Letters

Dear Estuary,

I take great exception to your December 1997 article on striped bass population decline excerpted from an article written by Bill Bennett of U.C. Davis (IEP News, Autumn 1997). According to the article, Mr. Bennett suggests that the decline of the striped bass population in the Estuary was due to global warming rather than low freshwater flows and high exports from the state and federal water project pumps. Mr. Bennett suggests that the warmer ocean temperatures stimulated an outmigration of striped bass from the Estuary to the ocean.

Mr. Bennett apparently believes the stripers just disappear into the ocean, never to return to the Delta. There is no mention of the fact that striped bass are an anadromous fish and as such will seek out the fresh water of the Delta to spawn as they have for the last 125 years.This drive in anadromous fish to propagate and preserve the species supersedes all other drives. It is far fetched to believe that salmon could suddenly give up this primary survival trait simply because of an inconsistent El Niñoo event over the last 20 years.

More importantly, Mr. Bennett ignores the overwhelming preponderance of data from the Interagency Ecological Program (a cooperative study program consisting of biologists, hydrologists and engineers largely from state and federal resource agencies). I refer Mr. Bennett to the 1987 IEP Technical Report No. 20 documenting the decimation of the striped bass population due to the state and Central Valley water project pumps, and depicting a minimum loss of 793 million striped bass eggs and larvae from the pumps for the year 1985 alone. Another table, submitted for the 1992 State Water Rights Proceedings, estimates the loss of striped bass (1"-6" in length) from 1957 through 1989 to be in excess of one billion fish due to the water projects.

To ignore this documentation from so many expert scientists is to ignore reality. It is intuitively obvious to even the most causal observer the main reason for the decline of the fishery.

As a final note, it was not surprising to learn that Mr. Bennett's study to deflect the focus of attention from the pumps was funded by the water contractors vis-a-vis the Bureau of Reclamation.

Larry Stenger
-Cal Fish & Game Striped Bass Advisory Board
-U.S.F.W. Striped Bass Technical Team
-California Striped Bass Association
-United Anglers of California
-San Francisco Estuary Project

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