Save Southern Steelhead From Extinction!
California Fish and Game Commission
Now is the time to raise your voice to protect an iconic native species from extinction! Sign your name by April 4 to help save Southern steelhead from extinction!
The evidence is undeniable: Southern California steelhead teeter on the brink of extinction. Southern steelhead serve as crucial indicators of watershed health and river ecosystem integrity. These fish play a role within the ecosystem that you, your family, neighbors, and friends are also a part of. If one piece of the ecosystem changes or disappears this ripples throughout the rest of the ecosystem affecting every other species - plant, animal, and human. Historically, Southern steelhead thrived, with tens of thousands of them swimming through Southern California rivers and streams. Today, it’s rare to see them in double digits. Their dwindling numbers stem from habitat loss, fragmentation, and the encroachment of urbanization. We must act urgently to prevent the irreversible loss of this species.
In 2021, conservation nonprofit CalTrout submitted a petition to the California Fish and Game Commission to fully protect Southern steelhead as endangered under California’s Endangered Species Act. Listing these fish as endangered would promote actions to protect them including removing obsolete dams, improving habitat, securing instream flow, and restoring watersheds. All of these actions would also benefit human communities. For example, improving aging infrastructure would reduce the risk of flooding and increase public safety and holistic watershed restoration would enforce and build strong relationships throughout the community.
In January 2024, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife submitted a peer-reviewed species status report to the Fish and Game Commission. Their extensive review came to the same conclusion as CalTrout’s initial petition – the Commission found the petitioned action to list Southern steelhead as an endangered species under California’s ESA to be warranted.
We need your help! The Fish and Game Commission needs to hear that allowing this species to disappear is not acceptable. Sign our letter below to tell the Commission that you fully support listing Southern steelhead as endangered under California’s ESA - by April 4, 2024.
Sponsored by
To:
California Fish and Game Commission
From:
[Your Name]
President Murray and Commissioners:
As a concerned California resident, I write to you today to express my full support for designating the Southern California steelhead as endangered under California’s Endangered Species Act.
Southern steelhead are an iconic native species, but without further protections we risk losing them forever. That’s not a California I want to live in. Do you? You must act immediately to put in place all precautions to prevent this species from total loss.
Recent research tells us that Southern steelhead populations are in danger of extinction within the next 25 to 50 years, if current trends persist. Since their listing as an endangered species in 1997 under the federal Endangered Species Act, Southern steelhead numbers have continued to decline to precariously low levels. In the past 25 years, only 177 adult Southern steelhead were documented in their native range! Allowing this species to disappear is not acceptable, and more protections are essential.
These fish play a key role in our ecosystems, and they can give us crucial information about the greater health of the watersheds they swim in (and that our communities rely upon). We can look to them for clues on how California must work to address bigger problems in our southern rivers and streams, watersheds that provide countless societal and economic benefits for the entire state. I believe that we prosper when rivers and waterways in key locations are thriving, and in many of these places there is work to be done.
These fish may also play a role in providing resiliency for ecosystems further north along the coast. Southern steelhead are uniquely adapted to Southern California’s warmer Mediterranean climate. As climate change continues to increase water temperatures and alter flow regimes along the entire West Coast, Southern steelhead could be critical to the long-term resiliency of their northern relatives.
For all these reasons, I wholeheartedly support California Trout’s recommendation that Southern California steelhead be listed as endangered in all waterways within historic range below natural or man-made barriers. CalTrout chose this delineation thoughtfully, so that fishing and continued management for rainbow trout, the freshwater form of this amazing species, would still be possible above these barriers.
It’s not too late to save the Southern California steelhead species from blinking out – but if you don’t act urgently, we may very well miss our chance. Please make protection of these amazing and important fish a conservation priority by listing them as endangered under the state’s Endangered Species Act.
Sincerely,
A Concerned California Resident