Not a drop to drink: What do fish do during a drought?
By Rosemary Hartman, Brian Mahardja, and Vanessa Tobias
We are now half-way through Water Year 2021 (which started in October of 2020) and it seems likely that California will experience another dry year. The frequency of prolonged drought events is projected to increase due to climate change and the San Francisco Estuary system is expected to have more wild swings between floods and droughts. This was in the mind of a handful of IEP scientists back during the last California drought of 2012-2015. They were wondering, which fish species are negatively impacted by drought, and would they rebound in numbers after the drought is over? Brian Mahardja, Vanessa Tobias, Shruti Khanna, Lara Mitchell, Peggy Lehman, Ted Sommer, Larry Brown, Steven Culberson, and J. Louise Conrad published the results of their study in a recent journal article.
The Delta’s fish community is unique, with a melting pot of native fish and introduced fish. The native fish evolved with California’s regular cycles of droughts and floods. Some of the non-native fish come from ecosystems that are usually less volatile, so may have a harder time resisting the negative effects of drought and bouncing back. However, other introduced fish are considered “weedy” species that take advantage of disturbance. They might be particularly good at bouncing back after a drought.
The IEP researchers used data collected covering previous droughts in California to test these hypotheses. They compared fish abundance as measured by the CDFW Fall Midwater Trawl and the USFWS Delta Juvenile Fish Monitoring Program Beach Seines before, during, and after the droughts of 1976-1977, 1987-1994, 2001-2002, 2007-2010 and 2012-2016 (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Periods of drought in the Sacramento San-Joaquin Delta over the past 50 years. Figure is copied from Mahardja et al. 2021.
Though it sounded simple, the process ended up not being very straightforward. Even the definition of what a “drought” was turned out to be complicated. If you’re from the East Coast of the US, five months without rain is a “drought”. But in California, we would just call that “summer”. For Californians, we need lower-than-normal precipitation for multiple years in a row before we start worrying. Drought is often defined by its impact on people – dry soil conditions, low water storage, and water supply problems – but what does drought mean if you are a fish? The team had to make decisions. They also had to decide which components of the ecosystem to look at. At first they wanted to look at everything IEP monitors – water quality, phytoplankton, zooplankton, and fish, but decided that just doing fish was hard enough!
It was a big team working on the project, and they each brought skills to the analysis. Brian, Lara, Vanessa, and Shruti had a lot of experience with complex statistics and data analysis. Lara was “an R Wizard” who streamlined the data processing. Ted and Larry brought their fish expertise and deep knowledge of the system. Steve and Peggy provided hydrologic and water quality knowledge. Louise was the lead of the IEP synthesis program and organized the overall drought synthesis effort. Even though several authors changed jobs midway through the project, the great thing about working in the IEP community is that the new employers were supportive of seeing the project through, since they knew it would help the IEP community as a whole.
The team found that many fish species declined in abundance during the drought (they had “low resistance to disturbance”), particularly pelagic species such as Delta Smelt, American Shad, and young Striped Bass (Figure 2). Many of these species had the ability to “bounce back” after the drought (they had “high resilience”), however some species never returned to their former abundance (such as the Delta Smelt). Other fish species didn’t decline during the droughts (they had “higher resistance”). These included many of the fish of the littoral habitat, including Largemouth Bass, Redear Sunfish, and Chinook Salmon. A few of the non-native littoral species even increased in abundance during some of the droughts, particularly Mississippi Silversides and Bluegill.
Climate change is likely to increase the frequency and severity of droughts. If these results hold true, we could see a shift in the fish community away from native pelagic fish and towards more non-native littoral fish. Because freshwater flow is a tightly managed commodity, particularly during drought conditions, finding a balance of water use for people and water use for native species will become increasingly difficult.
Figure 2. Fish populations have different responses when it comes to drought. Many of the pelagic species decline, but bounce back. Some don't bounce back quite as well. Many littoral fish don't decline, or even increase in population during droughts. Fish photos from US Bureau of Reclamation.
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- Durand, J. R., F. Bombardelli, W. E. Fleenor, Y. Henneberry, J. Herman, C. Jeffres, M. Leinfelder–Miles, J. R. Lund, R. Lusardi, A. D. Manfree, J. Medellín-Azuara, B. Milligan, and P. B. Moyle. 2020. Drought and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, 2012–2016: Environmental Review and Lessons. San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science 18(2). DOI: 10.15447/sfews.2020v18iss2art2
- Department of Water Resources Drought Activities
- Kimmerer, W., F. Wilkerson, B. Downing, R. Dugdale, E. S. Gross, K. Kayfetz, S. Khanna, A. E. Parker, and J. K. Thompson. 2019. Effects of Drought and the Emergency Drought Barrier on the Ecosystem of the California Delta. San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science 17(3). DOI: 10.15447/sfews.2019v17iss3art2
- National Integrated Drought Information System.
- Mahardja, B., V. Tobias, S. Khanna, L. Mitchell, P. Lehman, T. Sommer, L. Brown, S. Culberson, and J. L. Conrad. 2021. Resistance and resilience of pelagic and littoral fishes to drought in the San Francisco Estuary. Ecological Applications, 31(2): e02243. DOI: 10.1002/eap.2243
- Singer, G. P., E. D. Chapman, A. J. Ammann, A. P. Klimley, A. L. Rypel, and N. A. Fangue. 2020. Historic drought influences outmigration dynamics of juvenile fall and spring-run Chinook Salmon. Environmental Biology of Fishes 103(5):543-559. DOI: 10.1007/s10641-020-00975-8