Steelhead trout rescued from Palisades fire successfully spawn

Wildlife officials feared critically endangered steelhead trout rescued from the Palisades fire burn scar might not be up for spawning after all they’d been through over the last few months.

After their watershed in the Santa Monica Mountains was scorched in January, the fish were stunned with electricity, scooped up in buckets, trucked to a hatchery, fed unfamiliar food and then moved to a different creek. It was all part of a liberation effort pulled off in the nick of time.

“This whole thing is just a very stressful and traumatic event, and I’m happy that we didn’t really kill many fish,” said Kyle Evans, an environmental program manager for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which led the rescue. “But I was concerned that I might have just disrupted this whole months-long process of getting ready to spawn.”

But this month spawn they did.

It’s believed that there are now more than 100 baby trout swishing around their new digs in Arroyo Hondo Creek in Santa Barbara County.

Their presence is a triumph — for the species and for their adopted home.

However, more fish require more suitable habitat, which is lacking in Southern California — in part due to drought and the increased frequency of devastating wildfires.

Steelhead trout are the same species as rainbow trout, but they have different lifestyles. Steelheads migrate to the ocean and return to their natal streams to spawn, while rainbows spend their lives in freshwater.

Steelhead were once abundant in Southern California, but their numbers plummeted amid coastal development and overfishing. A distinct Southern California population is listed as endangered at the state and federal level.

The young fish sighted this month mark the next generation of what was the last population of steelhead in the Santa Monica Mountains, a range that stretches from the Hollywood Hills to Point Mugu in Ventura County.

They also represent the return of a species to a watershed that itself was devastated by a fire four years ago, but has since recovered.

It’s believed that there are now more than 100 baby trout swishing around their new digs in Arroyo Hondo Creek in Santa Barbara County.

(Kyle Kusa / Land Trust for Santa Barbara County)

The Alisal blaze torched roughly 95% of the Arroyo Hondo Preserve located west of Santa Barbara, and subsequent debris flows choked the creek of the same name that housed steelhead.

All the fish perished, according to Meredith Hendricks, executive director of the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County, a nonprofit organization that owns and manages the preserve.

“To be able to … offer space for these fish to be transplanted to — when we ourselves had experienced a similar situation but lost our fish — it was just a really big deal,” Hendricks said.

Arroyo Hondo Creek bears similarities to the trout’s native Topanga Creek; they are both coastal streams of roughly the same size.

And it has a bonus feature: a state-funded fish passage constructed under Highway 101 in 2008, which improved fish movement between the stream and the ocean.

Spawning is a biologically and energetically demanding endeavor for steelhead, and the process likely began in December or earlier, according to Evans.

That means it was already underway when 271 steelhead were evacuated in January from Topanga Creek, a biodiversity hot spot located in Malibu that was badly damaged by the Palisades fire.

It continued when they were hauled about 50 miles north to a hatchery in Fillmore, where they hung out until 266 of them made it to Arroyo Hondo the following month.

State wildlife personnel regularly surveyed the fish in their new digs but didn’t see the spawning nests, which can be missed.

A steelhead trout swims in Arroyo Hondo Creek in Santa Barbara County. (California Department of Fish and Wildlife)

Then, on April 7, Evans got a text message from the Land Trust’s land programs director, Leslie Chan, with a video that appeared to show a freshly hatched young-of-the-year — the wonky name for fish born during the steelheads’ sole annual spawn.

The following day, Evans’ team was dispatched to the creek and confirmed the discovery. They tallied about 100 of the newly hatched fish.

The young trout span roughly one inch and, as Evans put it, aren’t too bright. They hang out in the shallows and don’t bolt from predators.

“They’re kind of just happy to be alive, and they’re not really trying to hide,” he said.

By the end of summer, Evans estimates two-thirds will die off.

But the survivors are enough to keep the population charging onward. Evans hopes that in a few years, there will be three to four times the number of fish that initially moved in.

The plan is to eventually relocate at least some back to their native home of Topanga Creek.

Right now, Topanga “looks pretty bad,” Evans said.

The Palisades fire stripped the surrounding hillsides of vegetation, paving the way for dirt, ash and other material to pour into the waterway.

Another endangered fish, northern tidewater gobies, were rescued from the same watershed shortly before the steelhead were liberated.

Within two days of the trouts’ removal, the first storm of the season arrived, likely burying the remaining fish in a muddy slurry.

Citizen scientists Bernard Yin, center, and Rebecca Ramirez, right, join government agency staffers in rescuing federally endangered fish in the Topanga Lagoon in Malibu on Jan. 17.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Evans expects it will be about four years before Topanga Creek is ready to support steelhead again, based on his experience observing streams recover after the Thomas, Woolsey, Alisal and other fires.

There’s also discussion about moving around steelhead to create backup populations should calamity befall one, as well as boost genetic diversity of the rare fish.

For example, some of the steelhead saved from Topanga could be moved to Malibu Creek, another stream in the Santa Monica Mountains that empties into Santa Monica Bay. There are efforts underway to remove the 100-foot Rindge Dam in Malibu Creek to open up more habitat for the fish.

“As we saw, if you have one population in the Santa Monica Mountains and a fire happens, you could just lose it forever,” Evans said. “So having fish in multiple areas is the kind of way to defend against that.”

With the Topanga Creek steelhead biding their time up north, it’s believed there are none currently inhabiting the Santa Monicas.

Habitat restoration is key for the species’ survival, according to Evans, who advocates for directing funding to such efforts, including soon-to-come-online money from Proposition 4, a $10-billion bond measure to finance water, clean energy and other environmental projects.

“It doesn’t matter how many fish you have, or if you’re growing them in a hatchery, or what you’re doing,” he said. “If they can’t be supported on the landscape, then there’s no point.”

Some trout will end up making their temporary lodging permanent, according to Hendricks, of the Land Trust.

Arroyo Hondo is a long creek with plenty of nooks and crannies for trout to hide in. So when it comes time to bring the steelhead home, she said, “I’m sure some will get left behind.”