Thursday May 8, 2025
SeafoodSource —
The U.S. House of Representatives has voted to remove the endangered species status of San Francisco Bay longfin smelt – a fish that recently came into the crosshairs of U.S. Republicans seeking to blame California’s water policies for the state’s forest fires.
“The Biden administration and activist judges have used this listing as a political tool to block progress on California water policy,” U.S. Representative Doug LaMalfa (R-California), who sponsored the bill, said in a statement after the House vote. “It adds yet another layer of conflicting regulations that dump tens of millions of acre feet of water out to the Pacific Ocean, with farmers receiving only 40 percent to 50 percent of their promised federal and state water.”
Once an abundant fish species in the San Francisco Bay, the longfin smelt population has dropped roughly 99 percent since the 1980s. Conservation groups have long argued that the decline is due, at least in part, to California’s water policies, which divert freshwater that would naturally flow into the ocean toward industrial agriculture, creating drought-like conditions for ocean-dwelling fish.
Those groups first petitioned for the fish to be granted Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections since 1994, but it took two decades and a lawsuit from Baykeeper of San Francisco Bay to finally secure an ESA listing, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) acknowledging that “the reproductive success and survival of longfin smelt depend on adequate freshwater flows for spawning and food.”