Tragedy or irony?

(updated 10:15 PM 4/14/10)

Today’s vote on Jean Fuller’s (R-Bakersfield) AB 2336, otherwise known as the striped bass eradication bill, is yet another expression of the ironies at play in the Delta.

Defending the striper is the Delta’s sportfishing community, which believes the fish should be granted status as a naturalized indigenous Delta species.

The bill turns the tables on sportfishing advocates, putting them on the defensive, shifting their legal expenditures to the defense of their beloved game fish and from threatened ones. Clever, those SJ/Antelope Valley folks. And now the Met is beginning to weigh in, too.

This drawing below, done by Peak Water studio student Angela Enman, is called “the tragedy,” but the story it tells is more an irony. Like the irony of a snipe and a clam.

The protagonist of the drawing, the Delta smelt, is a threatened fish indigenous to the Delta. The antagonist, the striper, who preys on the smelt fry as they try and make it out to the Bay.

Unfortunately, the out-migrating smelt are fooled by the immense pull of the State and Federal pumps at Tracy into thinking that downstream is in the direction of the redirected Delta water flow.

Since the fish are protected by environmental laws, the pumps are forced to work at reduced capacity so that the little creatures can make it out to the Bay. Needless to say, downstate water users are not very happy about this.

But the DNP has covered this particular narrative elsewhere, and instead wishes to redirect attention to the ironies of the relationship between smelt and striper.

For this we need to describe another way that the fish are protected, this time by environmental infrastructure, not policy.

Angela’s drawing describes the how the wayward smelt are captured by fish screens before they are ground into fertilizer by colossal pumps, measured by biologists, and put in a tank on the back of a truck.

They are then driven to a dock at Emmaton on Sherman Island, where they are dumped back into the Sacramento River at a place where the direction of downstream is not influenced by pumps or the Delta Cross Channel.

Stripers await this easy snack. Ask the fisherman who also await the stripers there.

Like the Delta itself, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario that doesn’t lead the smelt to extinction. The striper, whose Delta population has also declined in recent years, suggesting deep ecosystem problems given its hardiness, win!

Death of a species, then of a landscape.