Netting fish trapped in shallow water is a symbolic gesture that treats the symptoms and doesn’t solve the ultimate cause of the problem. The ultimate problem is that irrigation districts steal water from the fish and all other aquatic life to further their private profits.
LINK (via The Wildlife News)
Fish rescues are plain wrong unless folks have a holistic plan of the entire watershed and know, with certainty, that a) rearing habitat isn’t limited and such events aren’t natures way of achieving balance, or b) the O2 and other water quality parameters of the “isolated” side-channel habitat, which can be seasonally isolated but still valuable rearing habitat, that folks unwittingly yank juvenile fish out of at the wrong time of year.
I should add … where do folks relocate the fish and is the timing of the relocation going to give the fish an improved survival chance or are you stuffing them into a habitat already over-subscribed and potentially going to cause a negative depensatory effect? Or dump side-channel pre-overwinter fish back into a mainstem, or ???? So many factors have to be considered above and beyond a simple bucket brigade!