California Fish Tracking Consortium – Real-time Network Report Archive

Fish Friends,

Apologies for the delay in this report. This week (3/13 @ 13:30 - 3/18 @ 11:15 non-adjusted PST [yesterday]), we had detections of four "new" Green Sturgeon and detections of nineteen White Sturgeon, seven being detected for their first time in 2016.

All four Green Sturgeon detected this week were new and were first detected at the Cap. City Fwy (CCF) Bridge. These were subsequently detected moving upstream. First detections for these four were on 3/13, 3/14, 3/16 and 3/16. The first three have moved up to Knights Landing, arriving 3/17, 3/17 and 3/18 respectively. The fourth fish, entering 3/16, was heard last at the Tower Bridge later 3/16.

Of the nineteen White Sturgeon, twelve were returning customers. Nine of these re-detected fish were heard at Lisbon Weir, where they had previously been detected. All three of the other re-detections appear to be moving upstream from their previous location (which was not Lisbon Weir for any of the three cases). The previously least progressed of thes was last detected 3/10 at Tower Bridge and is now, as of 3/18, at Knights Landing. Also ultimately detected at Knights Landing (3/15-3/16) was a fish that had last been heard at Feather River on 2/28. The final of the re-detected fish was previously last heard 3/11 at Knights Landing and is now (3/18) at Tisdale Weir.

Of the seven newly detected White Sturgeon, only two were detected at Lisbon Weir (3/14-3/15 and 3/16-3/18). The other five were heard moving up the main stem of the Sacramento River, being first heard at the CCF Bridge. These five were first detected 3/14 (*2), 3/15 (*2) and 3/17. Four of the five - the exception being one of the 3/15 fish - have been subsequently detected at the Tower Bridge within 24 hours.

As previously promised, there are jpg-format charts to go along with this report. All of these were generated in MS Excel and pasted into and exported from GIMP2 without alteration. The first, Green2016 plots the Green Sturgeon heard thusfar during 2016 with their dates of detection at our real-time listening stations on the x-axis (abscissa) and the river kilometer of the station on the y-axis (ordinate). As the full-year view tends to compress the fish moving upstream too much to discern anything useful, especially for the recent arrivals, Green2016Mar has just the fish detected so far this month. Green2016Mar also has our real-time stations labeled for the first fish of March, which conveniently not only entered our network March 1st, but also has visited all of the 69 kHz real-time listening stations in the mainstem Sacramento River. As there have been many more White Sturgeon detected by the real-time network this year, White2016 summarizes how many of these fish were seen at a particular detector in a given week. Keep in mind that if a transmitter was detected at multiple locations within a week, it "counts" for each of the stations for that week. Each group of one week should be ordered such that the lowest river kilometer (rkm) station is at the left and the highest, or furthest upriver, at the right. One other note: as this chart plots by one week increments, counts of fish may not exactly match those given during the report periods.

It was also suggested to me last week that I provide an archival version of these reports, available for viewing/download at any time. It is an excellent suggestion and one that I intend to implement. I was hoping to be able to work out the details of that this week, but other projects took higher priority. Sometime next week I intend to put these reports online and provide the link via e-mail. At minimum I will archive the 2016 reports-to-date, but I may also provide any reports that I have in my inbox that Ryan Battleson created for the 2014-2015 season.

Tabular version of the detections for this reporting period will be e-mailed shortly to those who have made explicit requests.

If I'm not required in the field this coming week, the next of these reports will be delivered on Tuesday afternoon.

--Matt