By

Joe Eaton
About the author

Joe Eaton writes about endangered and invasive species, climate and ecosystem science, environmental history, and water issues for ESTUARY. He is also "a semi-obsessive birder" whose pursuit of rarities has taken him to many of California's shores, wetlands, and sewage plants.

Articles by Joe Eaton

24
May

Joe Eaton

After a long stretch as a federal bureaucrat, Estuary News was a big part of an all-too-brief but rewarding second act as a freelance writer. While this gig had its aggravations, I generally enjoyed doing the research (Charles Darwin once said research was a lot more fun than writing, and I'm with him on that), talking to scientists and restoration professionals, and trying to make their work intelligible to a general audience; hope I got most of it right. In the process, I learned a lot about obscure species, out-of-the-way places, and hopeful projects. Hard to single out individual pieces but on balance I'm proudest of the articles (like one on smelt and one on Buckler) that irritated the right...
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15
Feb

Eyeballing the Fish

Longfin smelt were what hooked Jim Ervin when he first learned about the UC Davis South Bay Fish Survey through a presentation at the 2012 Bay-Delta Science Conference. “They were catching them right there in our effluent channel!” recalls Ervin, a self-trained naturalist and former compliance manager for the San Jose-Santa Clara Regional Wastewater Facility. Intrigued, he contacted the researchers, rode with them on their next survey, and has been part of the project ever since, devoting more time to it after retiring from his wastewater facility job in 2018. “I have a free ticket to ride on the boat with fish experts who’ve been doing this for years,” he says. He began his Fish in the Bay blog in...
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15
Feb

South Bay Trawls Show Fish Like Restored Shores

Twelve years ago, scientists at UC Davis began a survey of the southern end of San Francisco Bay — the Lower South Bay — to see how fish responded to the South Bay Salt Ponds Restoration Project. They discovered an unexpectedly diverse and robust aquatic community and a previously unknown spawning ground for the longfin smelt (Spirinchus thaleichthys), listed as endangered in California and a candidate for federal protection because of its declining numbers. The team, led first by Jim Hobbs and now by Levi Lewis, has complied an invaluable long-term dataset and enhanced our understanding of the surprising ecosystems of the bottom of the Bay. In addition to journal publications, their findings have been shared in blog posts by...
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15
Dec

Hot off the press, Sacramento County Breeding Birds: A Tale of Two Atlases and Three Decades of Change raises red flags for some of the county’s wetland species.

Breeding bird atlases use field observations to record possible, probable, or confirmed nesting in uniform-sized blocks within a county or state. Biologist/artist Tim Manolis led a Sacramento County atlas project in 1988-93, but the results were never published. When Edward Pandolfino of Western Field Ornithologists heard about it he suggested repeating the effort and packaging the two data sets together. The second Sacramento atlas, covering 2016-20, followed the lead of recent state atlases in the eastern US in using data uploaded to the birding app eBird to supplement targeted observations. “It’s a lot more efficient, and lets everybody get involved,” says Pandolfino, lead author of the publication.   Overall avian species richness didn’t change significantly, but distributions did for many...
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25
Oct

Transformative Green Infrastructure

At the summit, the BAAQMD’s David Ralson described three examples of redoing infrastructure to break down barriers separating human ecology and the natural environment.  Three such initiatives are underway in the area around San Leandro Bay, the locale of RBD’s Estuary Commons project. “The I-880 corridor from High Street to 98th Avenue contains the worst-off disadvantaged communities in the Bay Area in terms of health outcomes,” he said. “They are also subject to sea-level rise and groundwater inundation.” Former wetlands are now filled with gray infrastructure. Hidden urban creeks, like San Leandro/Lisjan Creek, offer a pathway to reconnection: “People will say, ‘We don’t know about this creek; we don’t have access.’ But their grandparents may have fished or played in...
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25
Oct

Breaching Season for Hill & Dutch Sloughs, Pacheco Marsh

In the life of a tidal wetland restoration project, the first levee breach is a major milestone, a kind of graduation. After years of securing funding, navigating the permit process, completing baseline biological surveys, filing endless reports, grading and sculpting the marsh plain, setting out plants—after all that comes the day when the earthen barrier crumbles, the water makes its move, and another marsh can start to regenerate. This fall, that’s happening around the Bay Area as three significant projects—Dutch Slough and Lower Walnut Creek in Contra Costa County and Hill Slough in Solano County—renew long-severed connections between water and land. The three projects involve two state agencies, a county district, and a nonprofit. Dutch Slough is a California Department...
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17
Jun

Bay Fish Still Not Good Eating

After decades of efforts to clean up San Francisco Bay, its fish still carry a toxic load that makes them unfit for human consumption. A new Regional Monitoring Program (RMP) report on its 2019 sport fish survey contains some positive news: an overall decline in polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE), hopeful trends in polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxin, and continued low selenium levels. But no downward trend was found for mercury. Then there are per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which the RMP only began monitoring in 2009 and for which no human consumption advisory levels have been established in California. These chemicals, used in stainproofing, waterproofing, and many other applications, are a new cause for concern. The 2019 survey was the...
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moss ball oregon USFWS
21
May

Invasions

Almost two months after invasive zebra mussels were discovered in imported “moss balls” (actually algae) in a Seattle PetCo store, federal and state agencies are still trying to track the Trojan moss balls and keep the mussels out of vulnerable water bodies, including California’s. So far, contaminated moss balls have been found in 46 states (Virginia, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Hawaii are the exceptions) and most of Canada’s provinces. The US Fish & Wildlife Service has issued detailed guidance for getting rid of the moss balls, summarized as “Destroy, Dispose, Drain,” and the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council has followed suit.  The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), Customs and Border Protection, and the US Geological Survey are also...
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23
Mar

Invasive Mussels Hide in Aquarium Moss Balls

A few weeks ago, someone working in a big-box pet store in the Seattle area informed the U.S. Geological Survey that they had seen suspicious mollusks in ornamental aquarium plants that were being offered for sale. Federal scientists confirmed the presence of zebra mussels tucked away in a clump of Aegagropila linnaei, a green alga marketed as moss balls or marimo balls, and issued a warning through the Nonindigenous Aquatic Species Alert System on March 2. The national Aquatic Nuisance Species Task Force, co-chaired by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, swung into action, bringing in regional networks and state wildlife agencies. On March 3, Martha Volkoff at the California Department of Fish...
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23
Mar

Dutch Slough Laboratory

For a hawk’s-eye view of one of the Estuary’s most ambitious restoration efforts, visit the Dutch Slough Tidal Marsh Habitat Restoration Project’s YouTube channel. Drone-shot footage shows what the Department of Water Resources has been doing on 1,200 acres of former wetland, converted to pasture and subsided up to 15 feet, in the West Delta between Big Break and Jersey Island. After moving millions of cubic yards of soil to elevate the marsh plain, a team of engineers, scientists, and contractors led by project managers Katherine Bandy of DWR and Mark Lindley of Environmental Science Associates has carved channels and created a basin-and-range landscape on the Emerson and Gilbert parcels, the western two-thirds of the project site. “We spent a...
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23
Mar

Fixing a Dysfunctional Marsh on Sonoma Creek

Restoration projects, like species, evolve. The Sonoma Creek Enhancement Project, originally about mosquito control, has shown itself to be a boon to special-status tidal marsh wildlife as well. More than a decade of adaptive management actions made that happen.  The existing marsh, formed rapidly beginning in the 1960s by deposited sediment, lacked the dendritic channels of a mature marsh. High tides brought in water that pooled in a central basin and didn’t drain out, providing breeding habitat for mosquitos. The disadvantages of chemical treatment prompted land managers to look for alternatives.  So in the 2000s, the Marin-Sonoma Mosquito and Vector Control District teamed up with the US Fish & Wildlife Service (the land manager), Audubon California, and environmental scientists Daniel...
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15
Dec

Tallying Bird Populations Then and Now

How many ducks and geese used the Estuary before the Gold Rush? The numbers are beyond conjecture, but they must have been mind-boggling. Observers writing about a hundred years ago noted major decreases during the era of market hunting, when waterfowl were shot to supply the restaurants and stores of California’s emerging cities, but offered no hard numbers. However, they recorded their observations of the abundance and seasonal presence of different species. Since then, government surveys, Audubon Society Christmas Bird Counts, and sport hunting records show a mix of change and continuity, with some duck species either scarce or common in the last century and now, and other common species becoming rare or vice versa. The US Fish and Wildlife...
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22
Sep

Heavy Lifting for Fish

Ted Frink recalls watching Jacques Cousteau’s television specials when he was growing up in coastal Orange County. “I envisioned myself as Cousteau,” says Frink, a fisheries biologist with the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) now approaching retirement. “My folks encouraged my interest in science. I knew I could be a biologist.” That early inspiration sparked a long and varied career, culminating in his work as chief of DWR’s Special Restoration Initiatives Branch and his role in mitigating obstacles to salmon and steelhead passage in streams all over the state. Frink focused on salmonids and other anadromous fish early on, graduating from Humboldt State in 1984 with a degree in fisheries ecology and a minor in hydrology. His first professional...
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22
Sep

Makeover for Delta Weed Patch & Salt Trap?

What began as a project to convert a submerged Delta island into habitat for endangered native fish has morphed into a multi-benefit package with additional payoffs for water quality and recreation. The collaborative design process for the Franks Tract Futures project brought initially skeptical local stakeholders on board and is being hailed as a model for future initiatives. Yet major uncertainties remain as interested parties explore the challenges of implementing a complex redesign of a big chunk of the Delta. The proposed project would take a big shallow lake full of weeds, deepen some parts, fill in others with new lands and fish habitats, add beaches and recreational amenities, and stanch the spread of salt water from the ocean toward...
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13
Sep

Yet another non-native aquatic species may have made itself at home in the Delta.

As described by US Fish and Wildlife Service fish biologist Brian Mahardja and his co-authors in San Francisco Estuary & Watershed Science, the newcomer is an inch-long, minnow-like fish called the bluefin killifish (Lucania goodei), indigenous to Florida and adjacent southeastern states. It was first detected in the Delta Cross Channel during a beach seine survey in October 2017, and subsequently found in Beaver and Hog sloughs and at Decker, Sherman, and Brannan islands. With surveys curtailed by the coronavirus pandemic, current data is sparse, although 13 were caught before March and one was caught in June. Bluefin killifish are popular in the freshwater aquarium trade, and the authors suspect the founders of the Delta population were released by a...
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05
Aug

Two recent exercises in modeling the hydrological effects of forest thinning and wildfire are yielding intriguing insights.

Hydrogeologist Fadji Maina and colleague Erica Siirila-Woodburn of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ran simulations of wildfire effects in the Cosumnes River watershed (see map). “We chose the Cosumnes because it’s one of the largest rivers that has no dam in California,” explains Maina. The most significant findings concerned the way wildfire affects groundwater recharge and storage. “It depends on where the wildfire occurs,” says Maina. The underlying rocks—foothill volcanics or High Sierra granites—make a difference. Consistent with earlier studies, the model also showed more snow accumulation after wildfire, but unexpected results include a post-fire increase in evapotranspiration in some downslope areas. Another study focused on the effects of forest thinning on snowpack on the west side of Lake Tahoe. A team led by...
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06
Jul

Should the striped bass be a suspect in the decline of the Delta smelt?

Writing in the March issue of San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, US Fish and Wildlife Service biologists Matt Nobriga and Will Smith suggest that the smelt’s baseline might have shifted long before anyone was paying attention, and striped bass predation may have constrained its numbers before recent water diversions and food web changes added their effects. The smelt’s historic abundance is unknown; systematic surveys didn’t begin until 1959. But it’s thought to have evolved its boom-and-bust life history in response to predation pressure from native fish or birds. Was the bass, introduced in the late 19th century, one predator too many, or too effective? Nobriga notes that Delta smelt don’t respond predictably to changing flows: “From what we know...
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18
Jun

Parks and Cities Seek Shore Resilience

For Alameda County, climate vulnerability is no abstraction. The county feels the bite of both edges of the climate sword: fire and flood. There’s a lot at risk here, and cities, the East Bay Regional Park District, and other entities are engaging with climate adaptation on multiple fronts.
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19
Mar

Kinky Fish Spines Linked to Selenium

Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are using new tools to track selenium, with the Sacramento splittail, a California-endemic fish, as an indicator species. In some sampled splittail, selenium levels exceeded the proposed EPA protective criteria for fish ovaries.
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19
Mar

Tracking Curlews Cross-Country

This winter, Jay Carlisle, director of the Intermountain Bird Observatory, teaming with Nils Warnock of Audubon Canyon Ranch and netting expert David Newstead of Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Program, caught two long-billed curlews and outfitted them with transmitters. Those birds may reveal where the wintering curlews on the California coast and Bayshore are coming from.“It’s such a habitat generalist that adapts well to humans,” Carlisle notes...
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