California is in the midst of a whopper of a fish tale — yet it’s all entirely true.
With riverways dry and a billion-dollar industry on the line, workers in Northern California are engaged in a massive, spring-long mission to vacuum 25.5 million baby salmon from five inland hatcheries and haul them, in trucks, to the coast.
They’re pumping the smolts into oxygenated vats then giving each fish a lengthy, one-way ride to the Pacific. They’re using highways to navigate past almond orchards, scrubland and golf courses, all to get the fish past the drought-stricken waterways that are the king salmon’s usual route to the ocean.
To get the job done, wildlife workers have adopted their own version of Noah’s Ark: climate-controlled tanker trucks that carry about 130,000 fish apiece.
“This is a Herculean effort,” said Andrew Hughan, spokesman for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. That agency is mounting the salvage operation in tandem with federal officials…
Read the full article at NBCNews.com.
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