Yes, the Delta Smelt Is a Ridiculous Fish

By Rich Lowry

Sunday, January 19, 2025

 

If you’ve followed Donald Trump’s attacks on California water policy in the mainstream media, you’ve been told how preposterous it is that he’s criticized the delta smelt.

 

A column in the L.A. Times was titled, “With attacks on the lowly delta smelt, Trump and the GOP launch baseless claims about fire and water.”

 

A headline in Politico read, “Trump’s big vendetta against the tiny delta smelt.”

 

A piece in Vox asked, “Why does Trump hate this tiny fish so much?”

 

The smelt is, indeed, small — about three inches. It is inedible and, in the normal course of things, would be of no interest to anyone. But about 30 years ago, it was listed as a threatened — now, endangered — species and became the occasion for limiting the water available in California to cities and agricultural areas.

 

It is in this context that Trump has a history of deriding the “essentially worthless fish,” most recently in his criticisms of how California has responded to the wildfires.

 

Despite the sneering headlines, there’s good reason that the smelt is Trump’s least favorite pelagic fish (that we know of). In a nutshell, California’s inherent water challenge is that rainfall and runoff occur in places where most people don’t live or farm. The northern and eastern parts of the state get the rain, while the coastal cities in the south are arid, and the agriculturally rich Central Valley is in the middle.

 

Well, how about distributing the water from the north to serve the needs of cities and farms to the south? Good idea! That was the plan — literally, the California Water Plan in 1957.

 

As Edward Ring and Steve Hilton point out in a comprehensive paper for the California Policy Center, which I rely on extensively here, California’s officials wanted to build the infrastructure to support delivering 51.1 million acre-feet of water to cities and agricultural areas annually.

 

That would, as it happens, have fulfilled California’s contemporary needs nicely. But a funny thing happened on the way to a rational water policy — the environmentalists blew it up.

 

California essentially stopped building reservoirs; it has completed only one major reservoir, back in 2000, since 1979.

 

It’s not as though California doesn’t get rain. According to Ring and Hilton, relying on data from the California Department of Water Resources, 180 million acre-feet of rain fell annually on average from 2011 to 2020. But there aren’t enough reservoirs, and so-called “in stream” reservoirs can’t retain the water from storms early in the season without risking floods if there is more significant rainfall later in the season.

 

Ring and Hilton note diversions for urban and agricultural use averaged about 41 million acre-feet per year. More than 34 million acre-feet a year have been for environmental purposes, a huge proportion of the available water.

 

This brings us to the infamous delta smelt and other native species of fish.

 

The idea has been that the fish benefit from “unimpaired flow,” i.e. letting water flow out to the ocean unimpeded. Also, pumping stations haven’t operated at capacity for fear that they will harm the fish (another concern is that pumping stations can suck in salt water from the San Francisco Bay). These policies have especially affected the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, denying the Central Valley farmers the diversions they need for their livelihoods.

 

When it comes to the fundamental interests of people and of fish, the tie should go to people, every single time.

 

But California’s policy hasn’t just been destructive; it’s been pointlessly destructive.

 

Despite all the exertions in behalf of the delta smelt, it has, for all intents and purposes, disappeared in the wild.

 

Why? Well, it needs the right temperature (it’s been dying off in large numbers come every June in recent years), turbidity, and salinity; it would also help if, for instance, invasive clams weren’t depleting its food supply. The mistake here has been a one-dimensional focus on water diversions and pumping to the exclusion — or relative neglect — of these other factors.

 

As Jeff Payne, an official with the Westlands Water District, told Politico: “Flow-centric regulations that have been used in the past and are still used today are intended to protect these species but have failed to effect any measurable positive change in the status of our native fisheries while causing catastrophic effects on Central Valley agriculture.”

 

Then, there’s predation. It’s important to realize with regard to California’s policy that not all fish are created equal; certain native fish are valued more than others.

 

So, it’s not that all fish are disappearing, but the wrong fish are thriving. Non-native species were already roughly 80 percent of the fish population 20 years ago and now are about 98 percent.

 

Worse, non-native fish eat the endangered fish. For instance, non-native bass consume prodigious amounts of endangered salmon.

 

Ring and Hilton suggest smarter, targeted efforts to preserve the endangered species, such as locating hatcheries in wetlands where the predators are excluded. It also might help to reduce restrictions on bass fishing to give more salmon a chance. As it is, the water policy helps the bass, which is protected from overfishing, which, in turn, works to the detriment of the salmon that is supposed to be one of the main beneficiaries of keeping water from farms and urban areas.

 

You can’t make it up.

 

A group of biologists wrote in a 2016 paper, “The Delta smelt is well adapted for an estuary that no longer exists.” Instead of perverting water policy to try to reestablish conditions that aren’t going to be recovered, it makes more sense to be creative. It’s not as though we don’t have any delta smelt; there’s no reason that lab-raised smelt can’t replenish the population.

 

It is correct, as Trump’s critics say, that the smelt didn’t have anything directly to do with the availability of water to fight the Los Angeles fires. But, surely, California’s stinting provision of water over time played an indirect role. Why would L.A. build the infrastructure to store and handle water that it’s not getting in the first place?

 

In general, California’s water policy exemplifies the same contradiction as its fire policy — a lack of urgency and seriousness that doesn’t match the predicted catastrophic effects of climate change. If you really believe that extreme drought is California’s future, you should be embracing what Ring and Hilton call an “all of the above” approach to capture, store, treat, and provide abundant water, rather than adhering to the current policy of self-sabotaging scarcity.

 

Trump’s critics are right in one sense. The delta smelt is kind of a scapegoat; the stupidity and ruinousness of California’s water policy goes much deeper than this little fish.