Water from the Delta has been fought over for more than a half century. Reporter Lauren Sommer sat down with Jason Peltier, the Deputy General Manager of Westlands Water District to discuss the future of the Delta and California’s water supply. The Westlands Water District is a 600,000 acre agricultural district on the west side of the San Joaquin valley. It’s part of the 3 million acres of farmland that’s served by water that’s moved from the Delta.

For another viewpoint, check out this Q&A with Barry Nelson of the Natural Resources Defense Council or see the rest of our series coverage.

Jason Peltier, Deputy General Manager of Westlands Water District

Where does the water for Westlands agriculture come from?

Through our history, California has accomplished great engineering feats with a system of dams and reservoirs. Those dams, like Shasta and Folsom, allow us to store water and move it through time. In other words, from wet season to dry season. And the aqueducts allow us to move the water from place to place.

How has the allocation of water changed over the years?

Over the last 20 years, our farmers have seen dramatic swings in their water supply, mostly on the downside. We’ve experienced 40%, 60%, up to 90% reductions in deliveries out of the Delta. In some cases there were dry years, but mostly it’s driven by environmental laws, the Endangered Species Act and the Central Valley Project Improvement Act. They’ve had a rough couple of decades dealing with uncertainty, unpredictability. You can’t get a loan to farm unless you can show the banker what water you have. And they don’t have a lot of confidence in going to their bankers.

Fifteen years ago, people were astonished by it. Now they are learning how to cope with it to some extent. The district has purchased 100,000 acres of farmland and taken it out of irrigated agriculture. Our farmers have shifted their crops to higher value, permanent crops, so they can afford to buy water on the market when the projects can’t deliver water. 80% of the district is on drip irrigation today. We’ve seen our water rates go up tremendously — our cheapest water is $100 an acre foot. Sometimes on the market, farmers are paying $400 an acre-foot.

Where do those fluctuations come from?

Part of these 20 years of water supply uncertainty has been driven primarily by environmental laws and restrictions. The restrictions that emanate out of the Endangered Species Act in the form of the biological opinions issued by the federal agencies have been kind of an added wrinkle of complexity for us. We can look at the results of reallocating water supply over the last two decades, and here in the last few years, you know, the fish have not done any better. We’ve seen 40 million acre-feet reallocated from human use to environmental use, and we haven’t seen the kind of response any of us would like to see. It’s very frustrating.

Something Westlands has sued over–

Well, yes, there’s been a lot of litigation and I’m sure there will be going forth because the stakes are so high. We’re quite happy to use the third branch of government to help to decide some of these huge differences we have with the administration. You know, we lose more than we win. But you know, it helps, even losing creates some certainty that, in the big picture, is of great value to us.

Now, there’s a new planning effort underway to create more certainty, right?

All the stakeholders kind of came together and said you know, what we’re living, this status quo is unacceptable for all of our interests. So we’ve got to try and find a new approach, a new way to address and resolve the conflicts between water project operations and our fisheries and our ecosystem. And that’s what gave rise to the Bay Delta Conservation Planning effort.

That plan, the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, calls for a large tunnel or canal to take water around the Delta, instead of through it.

It’s been recognized for decades that the location of the export pumps in the southern end of the Delta is a real problem for water quality issues, for vulnerability to earthquakes, for fish on some levels. So, we’re kind of trying to figure out how can we relocate those intakes up to the Sacramento River? We would be able to positively screen for fish, because we’d have a river flowing by. So there’s the alternative conveyance, probably cost $12 billion. And we think, you know, it is expensive. But it’s not because we have such a huge population base to spread our costs over. There’s a huge part of the economy of California that is at-risk today. And we shouldn’t accept that. We shouldn’t live with it.

The plan also calls for a lot of habitat restoration. Who should pay for that?

Our current planning target for recreation of intertidal habitat is about 60,000 acres. It’s to be determined how that’s going to be paid for. But in our minds, most of that is a public investment. That land was at one time fully in contact with water. With the Swamp and Overflow Act in the mid-1800s, islands were created, levees were built, and that water-land contact was lost. We can’t go back and find the people that built the levees in the 1800s, but we can recognize that there’s a broad public value for increasing intertidal habitat and trying to recreate some of the food conditions. Creating better habitat creates more food for the lower-end of the food chain, which then hopefully will work its way up to help the native fish.

Fish recovery is good for everybody, right?

The Delta is not dying – it’s a healthy and vibrant place. But there are those that think that the system is over-subscribed. We hear, “we don’t have enough water in California; we’ve got too many people, too many demands.” Some years, that’s the case. But there are also a lot of years when we have absolutely plenty of water in the system to meet the reasonable needs that are out there.

Plenty of water to meet the needs of both water users and the species?

All the beneficial uses. The average through the years is at about 80% of the water that flows into the Delta goes out to the ocean. And after a new conveyance is built, we’ll still be at about 80%. If somebody could tell me specifically where additional water is needed, when it’s needed and what good it’s going to do, we could have a conversation. As it is, it’s kind of a bumper sticker kind of a debate.

Right, fish vs. farms.

Farmers and fishermen have a heck of a lot more in common than they have dividing them. One of the saddest things for me right now is that we can’t work together more constructively: they want healthy fishery to sustain their fishing, and we want a healthy fishery to sustain our ability to export water. And we have an identity of interest. It’s just how we come at the problem.

When Spanish explorers first viewed the Delta from the top of Mt. Diablo in the late 1700’s, they thought they had discovered an inland sea. A vast low-lying, partly submerged marshland of wetland plants (tules) and winding tidal channels, the Delta teemed with birds and game animals, including elk, antelope, and grizzly bears. It’s only human inhabitants – small settlements of Miwok Indians – fished and hunted there during the drier months.

Today the Delta, dotted with levees and constructed islands, bears little resemblance to its native state; much has been reclaimed for agricultural use. But it wasn’t until the mid-Nineteenth Century, just over 150 years ago, that its momentous physical transformation began. It’s been a Herculean effort to meet the steep demands of California’s increasingly crowded and insatiably thirsty population, nearly two-thirds of who rely on the Delta as a primary water source. A stark symbol of our quest to bend nature to our will, the Delta also remains the epicenter of an epic drama of seemingly insurmountable political battles and power struggles, pitting north against south; farmer against environmentalist.

So how did it get like this?

Take a quick paddle through the key events in the slideshow above.

Water from the Delta has been fought over for more than a half century. Reporter Lauren Sommer sat down with Barry Nelson, the Senior Policy Analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council to discuss the future of the Delta and California’s water supply.

For another viewpoint, check out this Q&A with Jason Peltier of the Westlands Water District or see the rest of our series coverage.

Barry Nelson, Senior Policy Analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

When were the first signs that the Delta ecosystem was in trouble?

Since the 1960s, we’ve seen a steadily growing trend of diversions from the Delta. If you look at long-term averages, you filter out the impacts of droughts and wet years, we’ve taken more and more and more water from the Delta pretty steadily for the last 50 years, and that really hit a crisis point in the ‘90s. That’s the point at which we started seeing the winter-run salmon and the Delta smelt being protected under the state and federal Endangered Species Act.

And ten years ago, things really changed dramatically. Starting in 2000, suddenly we started taking a lot more water out of the Delta for a lot of reasons. It was an enormous increase, about a 20% increase on average. And the ecosystem crashed. It was called the “pelagic organism decline.” But what it meant was pretty simple: that everything swimming in the Delta was in deep trouble.

So now we’ve got half a dozen species in deep trouble in the estuary and a fishing industry that’s honestly fighting for survival.

What caused their decline?

A lot of work has been done looking at this catastrophic, across-the-board, collapse of the Bay Delta ecosystem. And the bottom line was recognition that, while there are lots of stressors, there are pollution problems in the ecosystem. We do have invasive species like clams that have come from overseas. But the core problem is the amount of water we pump out of that system.

There was a huge fight in the courts over this issue. And ultimately, the courts and then the agencies imposed a new set of rules that really have returned us to the level of pumping we saw for about 30 years prior to the 2000’s.

And what were those rules on pumping?

The Delta’s a complicated ecosystem. As water flows through it, it flows through it in a complicated pattern. Fish have evolved to survive with that pattern; water coming through at certain times of year, and flowing through those Delta channels into the Bay.

Basically, the federal rules control two things: the amount of water that flows all the way through the ecosystem into the Bay in order to maintain a healthy ecosystem and the extent to which some of the channels within the Delta flow backwards.

The pumps in the south Delta are so powerful that they literally reverse the direction of flow in these Delta channels. And if you’re a young migrating salmon swimming downstream towards the ocean as Mother Nature programmed you, when the Delta channels are flowing the wrong direction, it’s very easy for those fish to follow that water and get sucked right into the pumps. And that’s why those pumps have killed in the last decade or so not a million fish, not tens of millions of fish, but over a hundred million young fish killed just at the pumps.

So if you could design your ideal plan for the Delta, what would that look like?

First, we know we need to see some real habitat restoration in the Delta. We’ve converted almost every scrap of habitat in the Delta to farmland, and in order to restore a healthy Delta, we need to return some of that to habitat. And actually I think that’s something where there’s a fair amount of agreement. How you do that is not trivial, but I think there’s a fair amount of agreement around that. And given the challenge of maintaining all of the existing levees in perpetuity, the question is: are we going to do it in a planned and thoughtful way?

Second, we really don’t have a choice but to maintain a lot of our Delta levees for a couple of decades. It’s going to take a long time to make major changes in the Delta. And there is so much infrastructure, the Delta communities, Delta farming, and water supply that depend on Delta levees today.

Third, from our perspective, the challenge we face in terms of exporting water from the Delta is first figuring out how much water we can safely pump from the Delta. And then designing a facility around that.

You’re talking about the “peripheral canal,” right? A canal or tunnel that would take water around the Delta?

Well, there are two conflicting visions for a facility in the Delta. One is the old plan. Fifty years ago, the state of California was planning to build a peripheral canal around the Delta, an enormous facility that would allow those pumps in the south Delta to take water from the north Delta and pump it around the Delta rather than through Delta channels. And that was really a simple proposal to simply take more water from the ecosystem. We know now that that, the amount of water that that would have taken would have been devastating to the ecosystem.

That’s the old version of the canal. But there’s a new version out there. And that is a proposal to deal with earthquake risks in the Delta. It’s to deal with the fact that there really are earthquake risks in the Delta that represent significant threats to water supply. And a facility could provide a lifeline in case the Delta was to temporarily fail. What we’re struggling with right now is that we have competing interests in California advancing two different visions for what the problem is in the Delta.

With such a long history of disagreement, what are the chances of agreeing on a plan?

There’s a reason that the discussion on the Delta is so politically heated that people don’t usually talk about. And that is California is out of rivers. If you look around the state of California at the Colorado River and the Klamath River and the Trinity River, the Owens River, the San Joaquin, on and on, we’ve really started to hit real hard physical limits in the amount of water we can take out of all of those rivers.

Ten years ago we weren’t paying enough attention to sea level rise impacts. We weren’t really thinking about earthquake risks in, in the Delta. So there really is a sense that we need to figure this problem out this time.

That’s what makes the Delta debate so compelling. The Delta is an incredibly important ecosystem. It’s an incredibly important place for a quarter million people who live there. And it’s a tremendously important water supply for the state of California. There are a lot of reasons why our planning efforts today could fail, but it’s so important to the future of the state. It’s so important to the health of the Bay and the Bay Area, it’s so important to the future of the salmon industry, to the residents of the Delta. We can’t let that effort fail.

If you’re like most Californians, you’ve probably never heard of the Delta or why it’s important to the state’s economy and wildlife. In three minutes, we’ll explain how the Delta is a key part of California’s water supply and why it’s been the focus of a decades-long water battle.

Dusky grouper swallowing a person in a Roman mosaic; Bardo Museum, Tunisia

Groupers are enormous fish. Some species grow over two meters long and weigh hundreds of kilograms. Unfortunately for groupers, they are also delicious fish. Since prehistoric times, humans have been devouring all kinds of grouper species all over the world.

Such long-term fishing pressure tends to reduce fish size, as well as reducing the number of fish in the sea. Certain species, like the dusky grouper in the Mediterranean, have been fished for so long that we don't even know what a pristine population would look like.

Fortunately for groupers and for the scientists studying them, these fish are aesthetically appealing as well as huge and tasty. Dusky groupers can be recognized in Etruscan, Greek, and Roman artwork dating back thousands of years.

Paolo Guidetti of the University of Salento in Italy and Fiorenza Micheli of Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station studied this ancient art for biological clues. Frequent depictions of enormous fish in shallow water, including one swallowing a person, led them to conclude that today's small, deep-water dusky groupers are not the species' natural state.

This is a goliath grouper; dusky groupers may have been this big a couple thousand years ago. Photo: National Park Service.

Of course, as the authors point out, "there are no known instances of dusky groupers attacking human swimmers." Could the size of the fish have been similarly fabricated? Simon Blanford of Penn State University and Andrew Stoehr of Denison University took up this question with humorous gusto.

"Like Giudetti and Micheli, we too are biologists; however, the two of us additionally participate in a seamier pastime whose nature often involves–how can we put this?–a certain economy with the truth. We are fishermen." Having thus coyly introduced themselves, they express their concerns with the source material. "One can easily imagine a Roman painter, suffering from a bit of artist's block as he sits behind the virginal surface of a new amphora, slipping away from his garrett in the Bohemian district of Neapolis to do a bit of on-the-spot research . . . should the docks be barren, he would have been told he should have been there yesterday, when the quayside was so full of large fish they had to walk over them just to get about." They go on to cite Monty Python and Three Men In a Boat–it's far more amusing than I usually expect from a peer-reviewed journal.

But Micheli and Guidetti currently have the last word, having published a response in the most recent episode issue of the reality show journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. They point out that historical records and archaeology agree with the artistic evidence that dusky groupers were once larger and shallower. And while ancient art depicts many different kinds of fish, "when Roman artists wanted to represent a big fish (including a 'sea monster'), they frequently selected groupers as the subject."

That may be the end of the matter, but if not, I certainly look forward to the next installment.

I remember when the oil derrick blew off the Santa Barbara Coastline in 1969. Suddenly everything changed. The thick slicks surged shoreward, the beaches closed and the seabirds scattered like dead tar babies on the sand. The rich bird rookeries and marine mammals of the Channel Islands offshore suffered greatly. The loss of tourism hit the region hard.

Today, the remaining oil rigs remain as icons off the Santa Barbara Coastline, the constant sludge and thin brown haze reminding us of the costs of offshore drilling.

These islands are now part of the National Marine Sanctuary system but remain exposed to the threat of another large oil spill.

The potential for a domestic disaster has been underscored by the Gulf spill. Until the BP Gulf crisis reminded the nation that these accidents can be catastrophic, oil exploration off the Northern Coastline had been under consideration by the Obama Administration. Some prudent political backpedaling quickly shelved that idea, but there is an underlying movement to drill the reserves off the Mendocino and Sonoma coast, as well as expand exploration in Santa Barbara Santa Monica and La Jolla.

Sanctuaries Expansion

Last month Representative Lynn Woolsey renewed her push to expand the marine sanctuaries and thus permanently ban offshore oil drilling off much of the North Coast. Oil drilling is expressly prohibited in marine sanctuaries, but commercial fishing is allowed. Drilling is currently banned off the coast until 2017, but sanctuary status would make that permanent.

Currently the Monterey, Gulf of the Farallones, and Cordell Bank Marine sanctuaries protect almost 8,000 square miles of ocean. The Woolsey proposal would expand the sanctuaries up to Point Arena in Mendocino County to permanently protect this important region from oil exploration.

But the head of the oil industry's most powerful trade group challenged the Obama administration's decisions last year to preclude oil and gas leases off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

A report released by the American Petroleum Institute estimates that there are 10.5 billion barrels of untapped oil reserves on the Pacific coast. It calls on Congress and the White House to “re-examine and reconsider limits” on drilling.

However, the Outer Continental Shelf off of Northern California is only estimated to hold 5% of the technically recoverable undiscovered oil reserves that are already available for leasing in the Gulf of Mexico. If all these reserves were recovered, it would only amount to about 100 days of US oil consumption.

A Major Upwelling Zone

The reason the Northern coast is so abundant with marine life is the phenomena called upwelling,

At Point Arena upwelling occurs at the edge of the Continental Shelf. Cold, nutrient rich water from the deep sea rises, creating plankton blooms which in turn feed fish, birds and whales. This nutrient rich current is carried south along the Sonoma and Marin coastlines creating an abundance of rockfish, crabs and other commercial species. Although less than 1 % of the ocean, over half of fisheries occurs in upwelling regions such as the one north of the Cordell Bank. This natural conveyor belt supports sea life and the lives of fishermen in our communities.

In 2006, commercial fishery landings in Crescent City, Eureka and Fort Bragg totaled $39.8 million dollars. Across California, commercial fishing and associated businesses accounted for almost $10 billion in sales, $5 billion in income and almost 200,000 jobs in 2006. Roughly 1.5 million recreational anglers took 4.5 million fishing trips that year, supporting over 20,000 jobs and accounting for almost $4 billion in sales and $2 billion in value-added services.

Protecting this upwelling zone form catastrophic damage will protect more than fish: it will protect jobs.

The Sanctuary Bill Will Protect Fishing

Woolsey has called for bipartisan support of the sanctuary measure, saying it would “help the economy by preserving jobs in the fishing industry and creating new ones in the tourist industry.” It will also protect the sensitive upwelling regions so vital for fish and fishermen. If the area does become a sanctuary, fishing will still be permitted. Fishing advocates like the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen supports the Sanctuary Expansion idea.

Protecting this source of nutrients and larvae will protect fisheries at the source. Pollution from offshore platforms, the risk of invasive species being introduced by oil rigs brought from overseas, harmful effects of seismic air guns used for exploration, and the possible catastrophic damage from an oil spill are too great of a risk to fisheries and to the nearby National Marine Sanctuaries for the minimal economic benefits of drilling.

In a similar upwelling zone south of Point Conception rows of oil derricks line the Santa Barbara Channel. Forty years after the spill, ships ply back and forth, flares burn in the night sky and a thin film covers the water. A few miles beyond, the Channel Islands break the horizon, an invisible line dividing the Sanctuary from the oil.

The Gulf can happen here. The question is will we allow it or will we act to protect our natural resources and our jobs from harm.

The Sanctuary expansion would be a legacy for our coastline, and ensure future generations the enjoyment of fish and all marine life.

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Got Crabs? It's opening day for San Francisco’s favorite crustacean: the Dungeness crab.

Got Crabs? Dungeness Crab: San Francisco’s Favorite Crustacean.

The Giants, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Crab of Fisherman’s Wharf – these images are all icons of the City by the Bay. Of the three listed, the crab fishery surpasses all in age, and rival the others in importance to our heritage and history. From the Italian Feluccas who founded Fisherman’s Wharf to the current skippers of family owned crab boats, the Dungeness crab fishery defines our maritime heritage. Today, the local crab fishery is the single-most important commercial fishery left to our local fishermen.

Last week I joined a crew and went crab fishing. A small chop crossed the bar. With the summer fog gone, the day was bright and clear. Backing the small vessel to the blue and white buoy, Captain Steve Shirley leans over and snags the buoy among others of various colors just ten yards from Baker Beach. Grunting with exertion, Steve hands over hands sixty feet of polypropylene yellow rope. Eventually a large round cage emerges from the brine and heaving the cage aboard, fifteen crabs squirm inside the mesh. “Nice haul!” Steve grins and taking a metal gauge measures the width of the shell and sorts the crabs. To protect fisheries, California requires fishermen to return small crabs and females back to the ocean.

On opening day last week (following a shark tagging trip), I joined my colleagues of Team Fish Finder on the Tiburon and helped pull traps off Baker Beach. In truth, having an interest to make a documentary on local fisheries, I malingered and filmed the whole affair. Steve and his crew hauled several more traps, some disappointing, and others containing several legal sized crabs. Fishing seasons are built around the “3 S’s”: size, sex and season. The males with shells over 6.25 inches in width went into the cooler as the smalls, fresh molts and all females went back into the water. We also pulled in the smaller rock crabs that Steve returned to the water. The traps – or pots as they are called – are composed of wire mesh, equipped with an odorous mixture of fish guts and heads and two doors sized to allow big crabs in I but small crabs out. With an average haul, we steamed back beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, joining a fleet of small boats heading home with the first season’s crabs.

Crabs are based not only on size but also the fullness or fat content. The test crabs are looking a little thin so the California Fish and Game delayed opening the commercial season for the Central Coast region until today. While we are thinking of fresh cracked crab or a Crab Louie, the commercial fisherman depending on a good haul for most of their annual income are likely wondering, "Will it be good year?"

It’s a cyclical fishery and important economically. In the last ten years, San Francisco’s open-ocean crab catch has varied from a high of six million pounds in 2009-2008 to a 10-year low of 1.1 million in 1999-2000.

The 1.1 million tons of Dungeness crab harvested off the coast of San Francisco was less than one-third of the average annual local catch recorded over the past decade, Department of Fish and Game figures show. However, last year’s catch rebounded to 14.7 million tons worth 33 million dollars. With the salmon closure and the crash of the herring population crab season has grown increasingly important for Bay Area fishermen.

It’s the Pots. Out-of Town Fishermen Impacting Local Fishery

There are more complicated issues than seasonal variability affecting the local fishery. Aside from the Cosco Busan disaster seriously impacting the fishery in 2007, there are regulatory and market forces at work. The Central California crab season opens two weeks earlier than in Oregon and Washington State and both those states have large commercial crab fishing vessels who can set hundreds of traps at a set.

These larger vessels steam down and fish the season opener in the Bay (typically the best haul of crabs), and return with full holds to fish their own opener. While some sell locally and lower the price by saturating the market, still others are fishing heavily and offloading in the northern ports.

Unlike Washington and Oregon, California has no limits on the number of traps or pots that each boat can set, meaning that the large boats can catch huge amounts of crab in just a few days. The best quality crab is a live crab. The crabs caught in the large vessels sit in a hold and are off loaded damaged, dead and dying. Where our local industry is small and family owned, fishing each day and providing fresh crab to local buyers, the large boats can stay out for days in rough weather and get 30,000 to 50,000 pounds per trip. Much of this crab is exported and canned.

Besides the increased pressure on the crab population, there are other problems introduced by the increased number of pots. The opener has the best catch, creating a race to fish. This forces the smaller boats to put themselves at greater risk in an already dangerous fishery. Also, despite built-in design for small crabs or other animals to escape, pots break loose in storms becoming “ghost traps” which keep fishing and killing crabs without potential to recover. Mariners also are concerned that the large numbers of pots are a navigation hazard.

The Dungeness Crab Task Force: Legislation to Limit Crab Pots

Local crabbers would like to see a limit on traps set. In recent years two bills have been passed to limit the number of traps but were vetoed by the Governor. Currently, there is new hope that a solution may be coming. State Senator Pat Wiggins (Second District representing North Bay to Eureka) has authored legislation (SB1690) establishing a Dungeness Crab Task Force. Composed of crabbers and crab processors from around California, the task force has made several recommendations including limiting pot limits, pot design and other measures to help local fishermen. The task force proposed additional amendments to the pending legislation which will impact pot limit proposals. Until this legislation works its way through committees and is signed by the governor these limits will not be in effect.

With the loss of salmon, rock cod, halibut and tuna, our local fleet depend on a healthy crab fishery to maintain their livelihood and the fishing heritage of San Francisco. Until limitations are applied, our local crabbers will be setting pots alongside the larger out-of-state vessels.

Until the legislation makes its way through committees, we can support our local fishermen by buying fresh local crab in season only from local boats or from local fishmongers who purchase directly from San Francisco Bay fishermen. Like all seafood choices, we should avoid buying unsustainable seafood from large warehouse chains (starts with a C- ends with an o) and question where our fish comes from and how it was caught.

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Pacific sardines at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Photo: Adventures in Librarianship.

It’s back to school—for students, and for Pacific sardines. Pacific sardines, Sardinops sagax, were once wildly abundant along the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington. From the 1920s to through the 1940s, they supported the largest fishery in the United States—millions were caught in and around Monterey Bay. (In fact, the Monterey Bay Aquarium was once a sardine canning factory.) Though the Pacific sardine population crashed in the mid-1940s, it’s on the rise again.

While overfishing may have played a role in the population crash in the 1940s, oceanographic conditions were also very influential. The size of the Pacific sardine population fluctuates; their numbers increase when water is warm, and decrease when water is cold. This has been happening for quite some time; fish scales from sediments in the Santa Barbara Basin show that the sardines have been going through a boom-and-bust cycle for the past 1700 years.

In recent years, Pacific sardine numbers have been increasing steadily. Fishing started up again in California in the 1980s; by 2000, fisheries had been re-established off the coasts of Oregon and Washington, too. These days, Pacific sardines are doing fine. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Guide lists sardines as a “best choice.”

However, another schooling fish, Atlantic Herring isn’t doing quite as well. Many species of schooling fish are caught not for human consumption, but to feed poultry, livestock, and fish in the aquaculture industry. They’re processed into fishmeal and fish oil. This is a bit of a problem. Schooling fish (called clupeoid fish, for all of you aficionados) are an important part of the food web. They eat plankton, and in turn are eaten by larger predatory fish, marine mammals, and birds. Taking schooling fish out of the ocean, so they can be food for our other food, has serious repercussions for the marine food web.

Fish swim in schools to protect themselves from predators. But this strategy doesn’t really work when humans are the major predator, with our purse seines and spotting planes. Pacific sardines have recovered because of good fisheries management and favorable ocean conditions. Hopefully other fish will have a similar opportunity to go back to school.

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"One of my favorites is this one here," says my host, Senior Wildlife Forensic Specialist Jeff Rodzen, "we have a bird who choked to death on the head of a lizard." Hmm. A favorite? Maybe compared to the others lining the wall: jars filled with parasitic worms, a tule elk fetus, a see-through rabbit where you can see every bone.

Add in the bighorn sheep skull among the modern equipment, and the paws sticking up in the back of the evidence and it made for a surreal day of reporting.

Welcome to the autopsy and necropsy room at the California Fish and Game office in Rancho Cordova, about 12 miles east of Sacramento. This is the place where blood and hair and small fibers from wildlife crime scenes are DNA-matched for all the poaching cases in California.

This is a fascinating place, if a little macabre. And it was the starting point for a QUEST radio story that had many more story lines than I could possibly pursue in one feature.

• I learned about a canine program designed to track down poachers, and an offshoot of that program that actually sniffs out invasive species like Quagga mussels.
• I found out how dangerous the job of Game Warden actually is, and the reasons it’s so hard to recruit new officers.
• And I found out how complicated poaching can become, and how endemic it is in California.
• I discovered there’s a subculture of poaching.

Some poachers hit the country backroads late at night, right after the bars close, and Game Warden Todd Tognazzini said those are the easier ones to catch. But the ones who are good at it use sophisticated communications equipment, night-vision sights on their guns, and small, strong flashlights to stun wild pigs or deer into standing still. This is called "spotlighting." Some poachers will black out their brake lights, run on roads without headlights, and use other ingenious ways to keep a low profile while they illegally hunt wild animals.

Game warden is one of the most dangerous law enforcement jobs around– after all, you're going into a remote area, with no backup, to confront people who are carrying guns and knives. Would any urban police officer do that? There is a dearth of game wardens in California, partly due to decades of budget cuts. Last thing I found: The newest high-tech method of tracking down poachers is actually pretty low-tech. Dogs. A new canine program helps game wardens find illegal animal kills. Not surprisingly, poachers hide their contraband, and it's not easy for game wardens to find it. Lieutenant Kristie Wurster is stationed in Alpine County, near Placerville. She’s one of 18 wardens in the canine-training program, and she uses her dog Wrigley to sniff out illegal fishing and hunting. .

Wurster estimates the dog saves about 800 man-hours of work a year. "We are so small in numbers and we just tip the iceberg of how much poaching is going on," she says. "That’s why I’m so excited about the program, to have another set of eyes and ears – and nose – to be able to detect the issues."

Listen to the "Wildlife CSI" Radio report online, and check out our photo set on Flickr which includes: photos of a game warden at work tracking poachers in the foothills of southern Monterey County, as well as deer, boar, abalone and other illegally killed animals.

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