Napa River

California

DNA from four young salmon in the Napa River showed their parents had come from the Klamath, hundreds of miles up the coast.

naturalfishingdisaster

In 2010, biologists scooped four juvenile chinook salmon out of the Napa River. A genetics study three years later showed all four were siblings. Their DNA matched Klamath River chinook, not local fish. Two adults had wandered down from the Klamath, found the Napa, and spawned there successfully. That matters, because the federally endangered Coastal California Chinook population does not officially include the Napa River, or any stream in the Bay Area. Nobody has ever proved chinook were native here in the first place. The habitat suits them, and the river sits close to the mouth of the Sacramento and San Joaquin, so salmon almost certainly nosed in over the centuries. What is certain is that they come now. Monitoring began in 2003, and the fall run has counted somewhere between four hundred and a thousand chinook in recent years. They start arriving in late October and keep coming through January.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
a genetics study of Napa River chinook salmon revealed that two adults migrated from the Klamath River and successfully spawned in the Napa River

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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