Ep 21: Saving the Paiute Cutthroat, with Bill Somer
Until his recent retirement, Bill Somer was a Sr. Environmental Scientist with the CA Department of Fish and Wildlife. Much of his career was spent working on the conservation of a native species of cutthroat trout, the Paiute. Once on the brink of extinction, this fish has made an impressive comeback thanks to the hard work of folks like Bill and his colleagues. In this episode, we talk about the history of the Paiute cutthroat, the threats this species has faced, and the recovery efforts by the Department of Fish and Wildlife.
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Katie
You're listening to the Fish Untamed Podcast where we talk all things fishing conservation and the outdoors today on the show I'm joined by Bill Somer, a former senior environmental scientist with California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Alrighty folks, welcome to episode number 21 of the Fish Untamed podcast. Today I got a chance to have a really interesting conversation with Bill Sommer, who until recently was an environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. And as you'll hear in the conversation, Bill is recently retired, but he spent most of his career working on the conservation of the Paiute cutthroat trout, which is a very localized, small population of cutthroats in California that until recently was on the brink of extinction. And although the project isn't fully wrapped up yet, as you'll hear, Bill says that he has a pretty positive outlook on how things are going and things are looking up for the fish. There's no angling season on the Paiute cutthroat yet, but in an ideal world, that will be something that comes not too far down the road as long as things keep progressing as they are right now. So we go through a history of the Paiute, what caused the population decline in the first place, and then Bill's work trying to bring the population back to its former glory. We do go down quite a few rabbit holes along the way too, which it was pretty hard just because he kept bringing up things that I couldn't resist following up on. So you'll have to excuse my derailing of the conversation throughout, but I'm guessing quite a few of you will find these topics pretty interesting as well. One last thing, I do want to throw out the fact that I record most of these podcasts pretty far in advance. I don't want to fall behind or be rushing to get a conversation scheduled or anything like that. So I tend to record a couple months out. And because of that, I realized it's a little weird. Right now we're in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic. And listening back to these episodes that I'm editing, it's almost eerie how much different things are today than they were back in January when we recorded this episode. That kind of goes for the next couple episodes as well. Obviously, we don't really know how long this is going to go on. So for all I know, in two or three months, when some of the episodes that I'm recording now are coming out, maybe we'll be referencing it and it'll be a thing in the past. Or, you know, maybe it will still be going full force the way it is now. But I just kind of wanted to toss that out. You know, if people are listening to podcasts and things don't seem to be as timely as you'd expect, it might just be because people are recording ahead. And that's the case for a lot of mine. So you'll probably be hearing a lot of coronavirus references in a couple months when the episodes I'm recording now are coming out. But back when we recorded this, coronavirus had just been mentioned briefly in the New York Times, and that was all we knew of it. So that's probably why it seems a little different than some of the other shows you might be listening to and hearing references to it. So just wanted to throw that out. But apart from that, we can continue on with the conversation. So without further ado, here is my chat with Bill Somer. But do you have much of a fishing background, or are you more on just the biology side?
Bill
Yeah, I do. I started fishing as a kid, actually, but more of a spinning rod kind of a setup. I started out going into marine biology, actually, at UC Santa Barbara. And then when I went into grad school, I got introduced to fly fishing. And when I was younger, I did a lot of backpacking and mountaineering. And I was kind of focused on climbing things rather than fishing. But when I was up in the Pacific Northwest in grad school, I did a lot of salmon and steelhead fishing. And then that translated to fly fishing up in the High Sierra. And, you know, I spend so much time up there for work. I still enjoy going there my time off, but probably over the years, the amount of fishing I did declined. But that's one of the things I plan to get back into.
Katie
Yeah, I bet retirement's great for picking up old passions.
Bill
Yeah, I have half a dozen fly rods. I need to get them out there.
Katie
Maybe the next logical point, since you said that you kind of got into your position through the interest in the biology side of fish, maybe talk a little bit about how you got interested in that and how that led you to your recent position.
Bill
Well, as I said, I guess I didn't say that, but I grew up in Southern California, and I was interested in biology and the ocean. Originally, my interest was in marine biology. I went to Santa Barbara, University of California there. I was really interested in intertidal ecology, but there's no work in intertidal ecology. Well, a little bit. I actually worked there for a research assistant job. and then I applied the jobs in fisheries and aquatic biology in grad school. And so I ended up going up to Humboldt and working on a master's in fisheries biology. Then I worked at the Fish and Wildlife Service. I was actually what they call a cooperative research unit grad student. and it's related to the Fish and Wildlife Service. And it's a really good program because they have these units on a number of campuses around the country. And this one was just fisheries, but a lot of them are fishery and wildlife. And so then you get in there with other grad students and help them on their projects and they use. So you get exposed to a lot of different types of work. And it's a good program. It's been threatened with extinction a few times over the years with budget cuts, but it seems to persist, so that's good.
Katie
So what kind of work were you doing at that time?
Bill
When I was in grad school?
Katie
Mm-hmm. Like, what were you studying?
Bill
I was a research assistant, and I was studying a project on suction dredge mining in the Trinity Alps. It used to be a big issue in California as far as the concern about the impacts of the stream and the environment from the mining. We found that in general the impacts were fairly localized. Most of the miners did their dredging on a very seasonal basis in a small area with a small dredge. There would be some fairly localized impacts, but over the big picture of the stream, it really wasn't causing much of an impact. But there were a few commercial outfitters out there, or miners, that actually did quite a bit of damage in a short reach of stream. Well, you know, they were looking at regulations and how to manage the mining industry. And that was back in the early, mid-1980s. And since then, it's really changed with legal challenges. And it pretty much went away in California. There might be some professional miners operating under specific permits. but the industry largely isn't there like it used to be.
Katie
So is that when you transitioned out of that work toward what you ended up doing afterward, or was there more of a transitioning period in between where you were doing something else?
Bill
I worked with the Fish and Wildlife Service after grad school on the Trinity River, and we were doing what was called an in-stream flow study there. And I actually got an aquatic macroinvertebrates, worked quite a bit in my thesis, and then for the Fish and Wildlife Service. And so we were looking at the impacts of the flow regimes out of the Trinity Reservoir on the fish life and the stream. From there, I got a job with the state California Fish and Game. And I was working as what they call a district biologist. I had a couple of different jobs on that, one in the Sacramento Valley and then on the foothills, or actually the Sierra Nevada too, two different districts. And that's the kind of job where you don't have a lot of time to do anything in specific, but you get a lot of things thrown at you at once. And you're kind of the, you are the department contact for the public. So you get involved in all sorts of things, which can be good. But if you want to focus on a specific project, then that can be frustrating. So in the early 70s, the department started the Wild Trout Project, which the focus of that is to manage fish populations using regulations and protecting habitat rather than using fish stocking. And that just seemed like a more logical approach to me and a more focused program, if you will. So I took one of those jobs that was created. They created regional positions in the early 90s. So I've pretty much been on that ever since, although the focus of it has changed over the years. And I started out doing more recreational-based wild trout management and kind of moved in native fish restoration and restoration of federally threatened species. and that's kind of where the work evolved on the Paiute cutthroat trout and also LaHan cutthroat trout.
Katie
Yeah, so that actually kind of answers what my next question was going to be, which was it sounds like that program wasn't just for native fish. It was also for the sport fishery.
Bill
The Wild Trout Project?
Katie
Mm-hmm.
Bill
Most definitely, yeah. And then it actually morphed. It started out as the Wild Trout Project, and then it became the Heritage and Wild Trout Project. as the state recognized the value of the native trout species. And so the heritage trout part of the program emphasized native fish such as golden trout and steelhead and, you know, red bands and other native forms.
Katie
Now, you mentioned the— Go ahead. Oh, I was going to say, you mentioned the Paiute and the Lahontan. Was that just the two that you were focused on? There were more fish that the state was focusing on as a whole?
Bill
Right.
Katie
Okay.
Bill
Right. As I was saying, we have a Paiute in Lahontan, and there's also a couple of golden trouts and rainbow trout and the steelhead, too. Kern River rainbow trout.
Katie
So are the Paiutes just in your area? Is that what caused you to get connected to that program specifically?
Bill
Yeah.
Katie
Okay.
Bill
I went out when I was a district biologist. I helped some of the other biologists working on the project. And so I actually, the first time I went up there was 1988. But when I got into the wild trout project, I became more involved in the restoration. And I took over the lead on the project in 1993.
Katie
Do you want to quickly talk a little bit about the Paiute Cutthroat just as a little bit of a background before we keep talking about kind of their struggle and the restoration effort that you were working on, just as a background of the fish itself?
Bill
Yeah, it was thought that the Paiute trout was actually a form of Lahontan trout and that they were isolated from the Lahontan trout about 8,000 years ago. And this was Bob Benkhe had based this on myristic characters of the fish. And, you know, the isolation could happen in a number of ways. It could have been a landslide or, you know, the stream eroding down and exposing bedrock falls that kept fish from swimming upstream. What's curious is the only thing in the upper basin there in Silver King was a Paiute trout. There weren't any other fish there. But more recent studies suggest that they have been isolated for much longer periods of time. And it could be that they were derived from another form of, an earlier form of Lahontan trout. You know, the Lahontan basin basically had a number of lakes in it that expanded and contracted over millennia. And, you know, the fish populations adapted to that and colonized and withdrew from various basins. It could have been an earlier form of Lahontan that the Paiute separated from. Like I said, they used to be thought of as just a color variant of Lahontan, but genetic data, genetic tools have increased in depth, and specificity have found more unique markers in the Paiute. One thing about this trout is that as an adult fish, it has no body spots. It has spots on the fins, but not on the body itself. And they retain kind of the big blotchy marks, the par marks on the sides of the fish in adulthood. And they have a kind of a reddish hue or a purplish hue in color. And it's really hard to get a good picture of that coloration. When you have the fish in hand, you see it. But to me, it's really reminiscent of like the golden trout because it's really vivid color that you see in kind of the higher elevation trout. And I think it helps in making their presence less visible from above with a bright coloration and clearer streams.
Katie
Do they get to the large size? The Lahontans are the ones that get very large. Is that correct?
Bill
They do. They have in Pyramid Lake and Tahoe. Yeah.
Katie
But I assume the Paiutes don't get that large. I don't know if it's from their habitat. Would they have the capability to get that large if they're kind of just a deviation from the Lahontans?
Bill
Yeah, that's a good question. In Silver King, they probably get up to about, we've seen 14-inch fish.
Katie
Okay.
Bill
Which is a pretty good-sized trout in an 8,000-foot elevation stream. They have tried to put them in lakes a few times. and those plants generally failed. So it's kind of an unknown question. If you were to put them in something like a big reservoir, how big could they get? I don't know. It could be that they've lost that through time, but it's just unknown.
Katie
And whereabouts are we talking here? I did look up where the location was on a map, but just describe for people roughly the area of California you were talking about.
Bill
The Paiute trout occupies Silver King Creek, and it's a headwater tributary of the Carson River, the East Carson River. And the Carson River starts in the High Sierra south of Lake Tahoe, and it flows into Nevada and ends up in the Carson Sink. So the lower part of the Carson and both forks were known to be occupied by Lahontan cutthroat trout historically. And we still have populations of Lahontan trout and some of the headwater tributaries. But they've been largely displaced by non-native fish too, or non-native trout.
Katie
Okay. So you get into this field kind of focusing on the native fish of California. And is that just where you stayed then since then, just finding a love for the Paiutes?
Bill
Well, yeah, that's just one of many things I worked on, but it was a central focus, definitely. Like I said, I worked on Lahontan cutthroat trout quite a bit as well, but with that it was harder to make progress. And then we got sidelined with things like the introduction of northern pike and lakes in northern California. and that was several years in eradication efforts there to get rid of the pike. And I also worked on habitat restoration, and I worked closely with engineers and other biologists on developing stream habitat restoration projects, like bank projects or acquiring land and water for fish, all kinds of projects, really. But nevertheless, the Paiute was a central focus.
Katie
So do you want to talk about, what do you think makes sense to kind of dive into next? Do you think just kind of the history of what they were, what threats they were facing before kind of getting into the actual recovery effort that was made recently?
Bill
Sure. Some of the early settlers in northeastern California hiked up in the Silver King, And these were cattlemen and sheepmen and also the French-Canadian loggers who went up there in the 1860s to collect wood for the Comstock mines in Nevada and Virginia City. So they logged the wood in those upper basins, and they'd build dams, and then they'd blow them up with dynamite and deliver the wood downstream that way. It's kind of hard on the streams. In some places off trail in the woods there, you can still find huge stacks of wood that they stacked up to deliver down and never sent down the creek. And it's thought that some of these folks moved the fish from Silver King up into Crowell and Coyote Creek, probably around the 1860s or so. And over in Silver King, the sheep herders were thought to have moved them up in the early 1900s. There were no fish above Llewellyn Falls in Upper Fish Valley, but there were Paiute trout below that. So they moved them up there. It just seemed to be the thing to do to them, you know, to put some fish up there. Maybe it was so they could have a source of food when they were moving the sheep around through the pastures.
Katie
Do you happen to know how they moved fish back then?
Bill
Yeah, they just caught them angling and then put them in a bucket.
Katie
Okay. I wasn't sure what kind of methods they had back then. I mean, it's not that far off from loading them on a mule, I guess.
Bill
Yeah, it's not a long distance. They could just put them in a bucket and hike them up around the falls and pour them in the stream. And a few times with that was all it took, apparently.
Katie
All right. Yeah, just curious.
Bill
Yeah, we actually, when we do fish movement, there's a number of ways it can be done. Some of it's pretty high tech and some of it's still pretty low tech. And we use these fish cans, I call them. They're actually designed for this. They're like the old metal milk cans, except instead of being round, they're more oval-shaped. So they had straps that they'd fit them onto a mule, or you can put them in a pack bag. With water, cold water, you add a little ice, and the fish slosh around in there, and it keeps it well oxygenated and cool. And they put a canvas over the outside, or burlap, and you wet that down. And the evaporative cooling also cools the can. So it's actually a pretty efficient way to transport fish.
Katie
And is there much loss in that?
Bill
If it's done right, there can be no loss. We did a project in 2017. We moved fish up from Cottonwood Creek to stock back in the Upper Fish Valley. And so we had the cruise electrofish and collect the Paiute trout that were stocked there in 1947. And we collected them, held them in the stream overnight, and then at first light the next morning they loaded them up on the pack animals and they rode out three miles or so out to the roadhead and then they poured them into a tank on a fish truck and then they drove them from out of the White Mountains, which is down by Bishop, California, all the way up to the pack station for the Little Antelope Pack Station going in the Silver Canyon. And then we reloaded them in the same fish cans and put them on mules and took them in the upper Fish Valley, which was like an eight-mile ride in. And we didn't lose the fish.
Katie
That's really impressive.
Bill
There was a lot of moving parts on that, yeah. It went really quite well. there was a lot of planning involved too and a lot of people and you know it's like everybody had a role you know and just kind of got in there and got it and it was a long day but it worked.
Katie
Yeah I um for my senior thesis I I ended up having to move a bunch of fish just because I was transporting them to put in fish tanks and um you know I most of them survived but there were obviously a couple casualties and it's it's surprising to me that um I mean I lost those in a drive between the hatchery and the tanks I was taking them to. And it's really impressive to throw a bunch of fish basically in a backpack and hike them in and not lose any. That just seems inconceivable.
Bill
Yeah, we moved, we did a fish rescue earlier. We thought we were going to be doing a treatment back in 2004, I believe. We moved 500 rainbows out of Long and Lower Fish Valley and stocked them in the East Carson. I think we lost five out of those. And they were put in ice chests with oxygen.
Katie
What's funny, too, is I don't know if there's any basis to this, but I picture rainbow trout being a little bit hardier than cutthroats. Maybe that's just because rainbows are everywhere and they seem to thrive everywhere. So I've just gotten the impression that they do well in whatever circumstance they're put in. But I would have expected cutthroats to not do as well as rainbows in some sort of stressful situation like that.
Bill
Yeah, I'm not sure that's true. That's an interesting perspective. I think they, you know, you're right. The rainbows will outcompete the cutthroat and, you know, interbreed with them and hybridize. And then we'll lose the cutthroat that way as well. But in other cases, I think the cutthroat can handle warmer water temperature and harsher water quality situations. Like in Pyramid Lake, for example, a rainbow can't persist there.
Katie
Oh, really?
Bill
Because of the water quality.
Katie
Yeah, I guess maybe I'm just using my localized anecdotal evidence of it seems like all of the kind of degraded waterways we have around here, they all hold rainbows and all of the pristine alpine lakes that no one ever sees they all hold cutthroats so I just I think I have this you know impression in my mind that the crystal clear mountain streams and lakes have cutthroats and the you know polluted South Platte running through Denver has rainbows y
Bill
Yeah well it's probably more in that case that the rainbows out competed them or they were displaced through the process of hybridization.
Katie
Fair enough. I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves. I know we kind of jumped ahead a bit, which is fine, but do you want to go back and keep talking about kind of like the progression of the decline of the Paiute cutthroat back in the day?
Bill
That's a good point. Thanks for getting us back on track. So the fish was first described in 1934 by Snyder, a biologist from the Smith's, no, the, I can't think of the name of the institution, but anyway, he came out and he found the fish were pure above Llewellyn Falls, but they were already becoming hybridized below the falls. And this had come about from rainbows being stalked in the lower part of the stream and also on cutthroat. And so these earlier stalkings of the fish above the historic range led to their salvation because by the time they were known in the scientific community, they were already displaced out of the historic range.
Katie
Oh, so the place that was still holding the pure strain was one of those areas that they had been transported to by the sheep herders?
Bill
Right, and the loggers.
Katie
So that was just an inadvertent lucky chance, basically.
Bill
For the fish, yes.
Katie
Now, I was reading an article from the Department of Fish and Wildlife that mentioned the word poachers, And I thought that was an interesting word because I don't often hear the word poachers associated with fish. Not that you can't poach a fish, but it's not a word I usually see. And so it stuck out to me. Do you know what they're referring to? Because it doesn't seem in the story you've told so far that anyone had done anything maliciously against the Paiute. It was more an unfortunate set of circumstances where they were hybridizing with other species or being out-competed by them, but not directly killed off by poachers.
Bill
Well, actually, the Paiute trout are fairly vulnerable to angling. It could be that they're just so remote and isolated that they're just unaccustomed to it. some of the early visitors mentioned catching quite a few fish. There was a time when we had a hybrid fish in Upper Fish Valley. We'll get to that here in a bit. They opened it up to fishing and they found that the fish were really vulnerable to angling. There were some cases of poaching that happened up there. Across the ridge is the Mountain Warfare Training Center where the Marines trained for high elevation war, basically. And they'd come over into Silver King on occasion and do survival training, and sometimes they would poach the fish. That's really a matter more of communication with the base and making sure they know where they are when they're doing these exercises so that they aren't angling for an endangered species, if you will.
Katie
That makes more sense. I just wanted to ask you about that because I feel like more often than not when I hear about a threatened fish species, it's usually from, like you mentioned, kind of just over time either being outcompeted or from grazing or just kind of a slow burn over time versus a direct poaching impact. So I just wanted to ask you about that, if you knew anything about it. So that clears that up.
Bill
No, you're right, though. The biggest impact on the fish, obviously, was the introduction of non-native fish, non-native trout, primarily rainbow. And also the area that had been heavily grazed for over 100 years between sheep and cattle grazing. And that really impacted the stream and the habitat in a variety of ways through sedimentation and destabilization of the stream banks. And this caused a wider, shallower stream channel and shallower pools. So the big thing there was the degradation of the overwintering habitat for the fish. You need deep pools where the fish can get away from ice and so forth in the stream.
Katie
So is this something they were still struggling with even above the falls, the grazing erosion? Or is that kind of a sanctuary once they got up above those falls and they were protected from all these impacts?
Bill
They were grazing there until, I believe, 1994.
Katie
Okay, so it's still not a fully intact, healthy population. It was still pretty threatened above the falls.
Bill
Well, it's done a lot of recovery since then, actually. The stream looks much better. You know, that's still a couple of decades, and it will take more time, especially in the lower Fish Valley. I think it was maybe a little more impacted by the grazing. But, you know, another deal is climate change. and the effects that has. Maybe we can kind of save that a little bit and come back to it.
Katie
Sure.
Bill
So after they had identified the fish, the department moved pretty quickly to close it to fishing. I think it was closed, check my notes here, 1935 or so to angling. And 1934, yeah. Snyder described it in 1933 and then found the hybrids below the falls in 1934, and they closed it to fishing. So then they started, you know, they tried moving some fish around in various places to try to expand, you know, their populations. And they tried, you know, putting them in various other places, like I mentioned, the White Mountains and the Central Sierra. And most of all those transplants failed for one reason or another, although the one in the White Mountains and the Cottonwood Creek is probably one of the more successful ones. And it was neat because we were able to go up there a couple of years ago and draw from that population to bring back some genetics into Silver King and help restore that. So then in 1949, there was an authorized plant of rainbow in these headwater tributaries in Silver King. and that just unraveled the populations that were above the falls at that point because they got the rainbows in there, and they hybridized and displaced the pure Paiute. So at one point, we only had pure Paiute and two headwater tributaries in the Silver King Basin, and there was only a few hundred adults there. And so all the populations in Silver King were eventually restored from those two, and they were restored by a number of methods. They did chemical treatments primarily, but they also tried electrofishing and removing the hybrids. But that did work in a couple of the tributaries, but primarily, or for the most part, it didn't work because you can't always tell a hybrid fish just by eye. So, you know, now, of course, we use genetic markers to look for hybridization. But in some cases, it is readily apparent. In one case, you'll have a Paiute trout with no spots on the body, and the other, you'll have hundreds of them. That's clearly a hybrid fish.
Katie
And so they kept the—where were the two populations? You said North Cottonwood. Where was the other one?
Bill
Well, there were two in the Silver King Basin. That was Four Mile and Fly Valley Creek.
Katie
Oh, okay.
Bill
And so then all the populations in the Silver King watershed were restored from those two, or a combination of those two. And that's why, again, we went back to Cottonwood and drew from that one for Upper Fish Valley, because we just wanted to bring back some other genetics. When they made that plant back in 1947, they collected fish from all they thought were the most pure populations in Silver King. So it's really kind of interesting. There's a long history to all of this and all of the biology and restoration work that's gone on. Like I said, they did a number of chemical treatments that failed for a variety of reasons. And then eventually they figured out what that was and were able to correct it and then successfully treat it.
Katie
Do you know what those reasons were?
Bill
Yeah, one of them was like I said earlier about when they thought they had pure fish, but they actually had hybrid fish. so like they treat a section and then allow it to recolonize and officially thought we're pure we're not or they didn't get a complete kill on the treatment of the rainbow of the rainbow hybrids so the chemical treatment was an evolving science you know we have better ways to monitor the use of the chemicals than we did in those days although it's still So we have to take water samples and take them back to a lab and analyze them. That's probably a whole other phone call to talk about all that.
Katie
Yeah, I do have one quick question on the use of chemicals. When they use those, is it selectively picking out fish, or is it kind of like wiping the entire habitat within the water clean, and you're wiping out insects and everything like that as well?
Bill
Yeah, that's a good question. And those are those that are opposed to the use of piscicides or chemicals for restoration. That's one of their major concerns is what are called non-target organisms. So basically the will affect animals that are gill breathing and they take up their oxygen through the water. And so they take up the rotenone that way as well. And then it comes down to different organisms having different tolerances to the rotenone, which can vary widely, say, in aquatic insects. Some are very susceptible to it, and some aren't at all. It'll get earthworms, and we're concerned with amphibians, too.
Katie
So it's somewhere between targeted and wiping clean the entire stream. Like there's some things that make it through, but it's definitely not very, very targeted.
Bill
Oh, it definitely kills aquatic insects.
Katie
Okay.
Bill
But, you know, you've got to keep in mind, too, that they have a variety of methods to recolonize. And the bugs will drift down from upstream. And also the adult forms of aquatic insects will fly upstream from downstream to do their egg depositions. They're really adapted to disturbance, and they have wide dispersal and recolonization powers. Another thing is they're in what's called a hyporheic layer of the stream, which is the rocky layer below the surface or the bottom of the stream. And the aquatic larva will penetrate several feet down into that layer where the rotenone doesn't penetrate. So it won't kill. It's not like it just wipes out all of the bugs in the stream. So there's a variety of these mechanisms that they have to recover. And the literature largely shows that the invertebrates recover fairly quickly. Now, if there are a unique species that are adapted just to a certain habitat, then that would take some extra precautions. And I was going to mention with the amphibians, we timed the treatments later in the season when they have metamorphosis into adults. so then they're not susceptible of the road now. Some of the frogs have more than one year in the stream in their life stage, so we did surveys to see if there were any of that species, primarily in this case a Sierra yellow-legged frog, and we didn't find any in the treatment area. So if we had it, we would have moved them out of the treatment area upstream.
Katie
So there are precautions being taken, even if you can't stop every non-target species from being hit, it's not just dump it in and hope for the best. There are quite a few precautions being taken to minimize unwanted downtime.
Bill
Exactly, yeah, exactly.
Katie
All right, awesome. Well, I keep running as off track here, but you just keep saying things that are really interesting that I want to follow up on. But back to the mildly successful, mildly unsuccessful Paiute recovery.
Bill
Well, so the final phase of the, let's just say the first part of the restoration, which was restoring the Paiute back in the upper Fish Valley from this 1949 rainbow transplant, We did, from 1991 through 1993, a series of three chemical treatments there, two each year for three years. And when we got that done, we started restocking, and it was like the time to go, what is our next move to recover this fish? At the time, actually, in the recovery plan, they'd identified this Cottonwood Creek out-of-basin population and the White Mountains was expanding that for recovery. And to me, that just didn't make much sense because it's a small stream at a high elevation and has some water quality, just some, I guess, some heavy minerals in there that's just not ideal for a Paiute trout. And so another biologist and I went and explored this Silver King Canyon, and found a series of waterfalls through there. We believe that had led to the isolation of the fish. What was the presumed historic range, which was from the Silver King Canyon up to Llewellyn Falls. Then we started working on that project, even as we were finishing restocking the upper fish valley treatment from 93. We started doing electrofishing surveys and surveys on all the streams to see the distribution of the non-native fish and the Paiute trout historic range to see how we would be able to remove them and restore the Paiute trout there. So that took several years of surveys and then we were doing aquatic invertebrate monitoring. Some of that was from the older treatments and some of it was done to evaluate grazing impacts. And so we had a pretty good database of aquatic invertebrate work. And it'll be interesting because that has gone forward. I think their final year is this summer to collect from the treatment we did back in 13 through 15. So we'll have decades of aquatic invertebrate data to look at.
Katie
And what will they use that data for? Or is it just there as a resource when needed, if and when needed?
Bill
Well, yeah, it'll help us evaluate how rapidly the aquatic macroinvertebrates recolonize after the treatment. And some really large treatments, it has taken years for them to recover, but eventually they did. There's some large treatments done in Utah. I don't remember the mileages, but I think they were like 20 or 30 mile treatments. and especially there's some life forms or aquatic insects that have aquatic phases of a year or longer. And so it might take them a little longer to recolonize these reaches. But eventually they did. So these kinds of things, and like I said earlier, just to evaluate the recovery of all the different taxa in the system.
Katie
And so you said that there were concerns about the mineral content. Was it North Cottonwood that that was the issue?
Bill
Well, I don't know that I'd really say concerns, but it's just not as good of a situation as Silver King in terms of the habitat. For example, they found when they handled the fish in Cottonwood, they suffered from fungal infections, And we never saw that in Silver King.
Katie
Okay. But did they end up using this population to restock Silver King?
Bill
Well, we did, and again, we brought some over in 2017 from Cottonwood to help restore the genetics there. And so, again, after 93, we rebuilt the Upper Fish Valley population. so by around year 2000 all of the headwater populations had been restored and tested for well over a decade and found all to be pure so that's when we decided to try to start moving forward with restoring the fish back to the historic range we actually were in a position to start the project in 2003 and there was a relatively unorganized group that was in opposition to it. But they kind of started building their support. And they were able to stop us there for 2003, 2004, and 2005. And in 2005, they actually had a restraining order issued in federal court against the Forest Service. And they ended up getting a preliminary injunction issued requiring an EIS-EIR be completed for the project. So that kind of sent our agencies back to the drawing board. And we found the funding to go and complete these documents.
Katie
Why was there opposition?
Bill
um well again it was people that were opposed to the use of rotenone and strain okay and it wasn't it wasn't necessarily that they were opposed to the Paiute reintroduction but the use of the piscicide although there were some people that were opposed to restoring the Paiute in the historic range
Katie
and why is that was it a sport fishing motivation?
Bill
it was yeah that was a nice little rainbow fishery in there but they weren't the interesting thing was is they weren't real large they um they were very populous but so if you went down there with your fly rod you'd have a hard time getting the three to four inch fish out of the way to get a seven or nine inch fish
Katie
yeah I just never understand I mean, I can totally appreciate the desire to have lots of fish to catch, but it just boggles my mind that that would be a priority when you can catch a rainbow in pretty much any city in any state you go to, it seems.
Bill
Well, true. That was my thinking, too, especially the fish as rare as this. But the folks that filed the lawsuits, they were very persistent. And we got the environmental documents done in 2010, and they came back again and again filed lawsuits and had the project blocked until 2013. The timeline here I'm looking at. So when that happened, they dissolved the injunction, and we were able to move forward. And we completed the treatments in 2013, 14, and 15. And we had a lot of water quality monitoring going on within the treatment area and also downstream, which was very helpful to help us evaluate the toxicity and there's a number of ways you evaluate a chemical treatment to make sure that it's successful. Put live cages in the stream with fish on them to make sure you get all those fish or kill all of them. And then look at the concentrations of the chemicals in the stream. And then also the observations of the crews, seeing dead fish in the stream and making sure they don't see any live fish swimming around. And that's kind of the ugly part of the business, if you will. And that's all kind of receding into the past now. and now we're in the restocking mode, which is really kind of more of the fun, positive part of the project.
Katie
And how long do you have to wait between treatment and restocking?
Bill
Well, we waited three years on this project to evaluate the success of it.
Katie
Oh, so is that less because it takes that long, you know, to actually clear out and be viable again and more just to make sure that you've gotten everything out of it?
Bill
Well, some treatments, some biologists have restocked the fish in the same summer. And I think that might be a little too fast because you need to give, it's probably best to give at least a year to allow the aquatic biota to recover. But, you know, again, here there are no fish in the stream, So there's no predators on the macroinverts other than other macroinverts. So their recovery might be enhanced from that aspect, at least in terms of a rapidly recolonizing species.
Katie
Okay. But the actual chemical is washed out fairly quickly?
Bill
In a matter of hours.
Katie
Okay. And at that point, it's just waiting for the stream to become viable enough as a fish habitat before we get fished back in. and then also making sure that you actually killed everything that you were trying to kill.
Bill
Exactly. And the other part that I didn't mention was we only want to treat a specific part of the stream. So at a certain point, we set up what we call a neutralization station, and we apply potassium permanganate that breaks down the road now. So below that point, it's not killing fish.
Katie
I didn't even think about that. Just throwing a bunch of toxic chemicals in and then just letting that flow downstream to wherever that stream leads.
Bill
Right. Although it'll break down with oxidation by the sun and uptake by the stream itself, the biota in the stream, and also through dilution as other streams enter the system. But nevertheless, you want to keep it fairly focused where you do the treatment. It definitely could kill fish. If you just let it go, yeah, it could kill fish for miles. That wouldn't be good.
Katie
I'm sure that would anger even more people when it comes to the sport fishery.
Bill
Right. There's no reason to do anything like that. So the reason we waited three years to begin restocking was, again, to evaluate the treatment. And we used a relatively new technology on that, the environmental DNA or eDNA. And so we had crews go in and sample every 100 meters through the whole basin, collecting water samples that were evaluated to see if there's any presence of rainbow trout in them. And then we also had crews electrofishing through the stream. So we used these methods along with just their observations to see if any non-native fish were found in the system. And so we did not find non-native fish in the system and began the restocking this last September.
Katie
Oh, that was just this past September?
Bill
When we moved fish into the treatment area, yeah, into the historic range.
Katie
Maybe I was mistaking that for the 2017 move.
Bill
Yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't make that clear. The fish in 17 were stocked above Llewellyn Falls in the Upper Fish Valley.
Katie
Okay, and this is down where they had way early on been taken out of by the herders. This most recent restocking was down where they had originally been moved from.
Bill
Yeah, that's right, back in the historic range.
Katie
Yeah. And so now they're at this point, they are both below and above the falls. Is that is that second population?
Bill
OK, that's that's still there as well. So they they occupy or they will occupy more water than they did historically.
Katie
OK. And then have they opened up a fishery on it since then?
Bill
Well, not yet. So getting back to the climate change, another reason, well, we wanted to wait the three years to evaluate the treatment. But in that interim, we had a fairly severe drought in California, and it impacted the populations of Paiute trout pretty dramatically in the large meadows that they occurred in, like, Upper Fish Valley. And also, Four Mile Canyon Creek was hit hard. And basically what happened was that with a drought and no precipitation, there was no snow blanket put over the stream. And we ended up suffering severe anchor ice on the stream, which is a process by which the stream literally freezes from the bottom up. And it's just solid ice except for some watercourses through the ice that really don't provide any habitat or resting for the fish. So it was a fairly dramatic impact to the population. That's why we went to the Cottonwood Creek and brought back fish and planted them in Upper Fish Valley to give that population a boost.
Katie
Okay, that makes more sense. I was getting confused between the above the falls population and the true historic population below.
Bill
Yeah, there's several moving parts here, and I kind of have to get through the whole thing for it to make sense, I think.
Katie
Yeah, it kind of seems like there have been Paiutes somewhere at every moment, but they have not always been in the same place for very long before the whole pure strain population is existing somewhere entirely other than where it had been before.
Bill
That's right, yeah. Hopefully now they can be restored back to their historic range. As I mentioned, we made that plant this past September, but they were dribbling down from the headwater populations already. Actually, when we did the eDNA, we detected them in that. We also saw in our electrofishing, we collected fish here and there, but not in great numbers. They're just beginning to reoccupy the stream.
Katie
So how are things looking now?
Bill
Well, I think it's looking very bright for the fish as long as they keep up the restocking. And at some point, they'll get the numbers restored back to the presumed historic level. And we had some fish population data on the rainbows in the treatment area. And that gives us some idea at least what kind of biomass or numbers we might expect to have with the Paiute trout. And my guess would be if things go smoothly, that could be five to eight years in the future from now.
Katie
Is that a relatively short-term number, or is that longer than average for a project like this?
Bill
As far as restoring it?
Katie
Yeah, like is this, is that optimistic, or is that, how do I want to phrase this? in any similar situation, would that be considered a quick recovery, or is that a more slow recovery?
Bill
Well, it's really hard to pin down that tightly. For example, in the Upper Fish Valley, we treated it in 93, and the numbers had recovered there in 2000 to the historic level, so that was a seven-year interim there. However, in 97, we had an historic 100-year flood happen that just ripped apart the place. So that set the fish back there a year or more. So you can have these events that occur that can cause setbacks. So I'm saying it could be five years or longer, depending on what kind of... If we have another big drought with anchor ice, that could set them back, again, another two or three years at least.
Katie
Well, it sounds like overall successful against the odds. Like you said, there's so many moving parts that it's just shocking that it seems to have worked. I mean, obviously, it's not complete, like you said, five to eight years, but all things considered, It seems like there are a lot of times when something could have gone majorly wrong and it didn't.
Bill
Yes, that's true. That's true. A lot of planning, a lot of work, a lot of people involved in it in various capacities and disciplines really help keep it on the rails, if you will. So in the future, once the restocking is done, I'm sure the agencies will start to work on the delisting of the fish, which that'll be very cool when they get it removed from the endangered species listing. It was originally listed as endangered and then it was downgraded to threaten to allow for easier management by the state if you will. An endangered listing requires a lot of permitting by the federal entities and it also allows us to um authorize angling so it's very strange you know you can you can have an endangered species here at least a listed threatened that you can fish for I assume it's just catch and release at that point um not necessarily but I i think with the piute it likely the Paiute trial would likely be a special type of fishery you know probably catch and release would be my guess.
Katie
Now, do the populations that were used to stock, to restock, do those populations still exist, and will those continue to be managed the same way?
Bill
Yeah, all the headwater populations of Paiute Trout and Silver King have been restored, and then there's another four out-of-basin populations that exist as refuges, if you will. And they're in very remote places, generally closed to angling. I would think that the treatment area at some point could be open to fishing, but that's going to have to go through a whole process at some point down the road. And I think the way to look at it is, here we are, we've been engaged in this project to restore a really rare native fish. That in itself is the end goal. Providing a fishery is kind of an added benefit or plus if they decide to do that at some point. They can probably do that before it's delisted because the act and some of the laws allow for that. I mean, it could take some time to get the fish delisted once it's determined that we have a safe, stable population.
Katie
And I'm sure even determining that would take a while in itself.
Bill
Right.
Katie
Well, as much as I would, you know, love to down the road be able to fish for the Paiute, I and I hope most other people would feel that it's more important to have them there, regardless of whether you can fish for them, over just trying to create a population specifically for fishing. So, you know, as much as I'd like to, it matters more to me that they exist just for the sake of existing. And I'd hope other people would feel the same way.
Bill
Exactly. And it's a beautiful animal.
Katie
Yeah, I saw some pictures and they do look, I know you said that the pictures don't really do them justice, but they do look unique to other cutthroats that do have a lot of the spots. Most of the cutthroats we have out here are pretty heavily spotted. And if not over the whole body, at least their tails are heavily spotted. And like you said, it's just kind of a blank screen, but just like kind of an iridescent color. Yes, yes. Well, Bill, I don't want to take up too much more of your time because I know you've already gone over an hour now, but I really appreciate you coming on to talk about this. I know you're no longer actively working on this, but I'm sure it's something you still think about a lot. And I appreciate you taking time out of your day to come chat about them.
Bill
Yeah, that's a good point we need to point out is that I'm retired and some of my views may not be the official views of the department at this point. I hope to be involved at some really background level, at least for a while, to help them keep the course going, if you will. But right, I'm not going to be really actively involved in a lot of the project anymore.
Katie
And that's actually a good point that maybe I should ask about. Do you happen to know if there are any sort of volunteer opportunities that people could get involved in to support the Paiute recovery?
Bill
Well, there have been over the years. It's kind of spotty, if you will, because of the nature of the work. In other words, like some of the work, the chemical treatments is really you have to have people trained, and it's not really a volunteer kind of work. But we're past all that now. And in the 80s, for example, we did a lot of habitat restoration work in various places in the basin up there. And that was done with the help of Trout Unlimited. And they had hundreds of people up there working on building bank protection structures and other structures in the stream. And so there was a lot of work done by volunteers. And then fish rescue, I mentioned, that we did back in 2004. That was, again, the TU chapter came out and helped us. And a lot of volunteers were in play on that one. So it just kind of depends on what's going on and what kind of projects might be needed. But the relative access of the place makes it difficult. In other words, you have to hike in eight to ten miles to get into the country there. the kind of limits who might be able or want to volunteer and, you know, being out in the wilderness.
Katie
Of course, a lot of folks would jump for that. Yeah, that isolation probably keeps them pretty protected just in itself, too.
Bill
Well, it does, you know, and it's all in the wilderness area, so it's pretty well protected from that aspect.
Katie
Yeah, we've got a couple populations like that in Colorado, too. Obviously not that species, but just a couple areas when you're there and you think you know logically you know that someone's been there before you but it's it's easy to convince yourself that you're the first person that's ever been somewhere in some of those you know way back pockets of the wilderness
Bill
that's part of the idea of wilderness, right? it's just the discovery
Katie
all right Bill well I will let you get going uh for the evening but um once again just thanks thanks for taking your time to uh to come chat with me about this I really enjoyed learning about them.
Bill
Yeah, well, I enjoyed talking with you, too. That was fun. I look forward to hearing what you put together.
Katie
All right, and that'll do it. As always, if you liked what you heard, go ahead and go over to Apple Podcasts or wherever else you listen to podcasts and subscribe to Fish Untamed there. I'd also love a rating and review if you've got a couple extra seconds, which I hope you do since you just spent an hour here. You can also find me on social media under my name, Katie Burgert on Go Wild or @fishuntamed on Instagram. And I will be back here in two weeks, so I hope to see you all then. Bye, everyone.
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