A delightful write-up of scientific surprise, and a rare bit of news on West Coast salmon that’s not about the fishery’s collapse and recent closure, ran in the Bee Thursday by Matt Weiser. It started when a scientist with the state water dept. teamed up with colleagues at the Univ. of California to figure out why salmon fry got fatter faster in flood years – when a big piece of farmland called the Yolo Bypass was opened to take the overflow. They took some bypass dirt, watered it, and up sprouted a crop of midge flies. New ones, not in the book. Now they are: Hydrobaenus saetheri , apparently delicious to salmon.
*UPDATE: A query to Weiser reveals how he got the story. It’s by an old fashioned beat check, not by dependance on a press release. He keeps his eye on “Estuary,” the newsletter from water management agencies in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. An item in the April issue got him moving. See Grist.
Grist for the Mill:
From “Contributions to .. A Tribute to Ole A. Saether” scientific article.; Estuary April 2008 Issue ;
-CP
Leave a Reply