Droughts lead to California's biggest salmon hatchery driving millions of fish to the coast

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/droughts-lead-to-californias-biggest-salmon-hatchery-driving-millions-of-fish-to-the-coast-10215461.html

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Pacific salmon are known for their great migrations.

Moving across continents, they can travel thousands of miles to find the ideal waters to breed in.

Usually they do this by swimming, but recently salmon in California have used transport to ensure their annual migration is completed.

This year in Anderson, California the state’s biggest fish hatchery has decided to give 12 million fish a helping hand by driving the fish down the road to be released in the San Francisco Bay. At the Coleman hatchery, tens of thousands of salmon arrive each year to lay their eggs in the calm waters before being set free to embark on their epic journey back to ocean.

However, this year instead of taking the three week journey to the coast, salmon are loaded onto a lorry and driven for four hours to the San Francisco Bay.

According to Brett Galyean, this is largely down to the low water levels along the Sacramento River.

The fish are first sucked up through the tube (AFP) He said: “If we release them out into they would experience maybe low water and warmer water, which would provide stress to them and give predators a better chance at eating them. ”

To transport the salmon, the fish are sucked up 60,000 at a time into the massive tanks where they are held in cold water and driven to the San Francisco Bay. They are finally driven to the coast in massive tankers (AFP) It is here that they are released into the bay, where after being held for a couple of hours are set free and sent to find their way to the Pacific Ocean.

The salmon fishing industry in the US is said to be worth billions of dollars and provide a lifeline for certain communities along the migration routes.

They are then dropped into nets in the bay before being released (AFP) Steve Martano, a worker for the Fish and Wildlife Service said: “This is not our usual procedures but this is the best we can do under the circumstances.

“At least now we will get some kind of ocean harvest and some kind of benefit to the ocean fishery.”