OROVILLE, United States — With chronic drought drying up rivers earlier than usual this year, California is scaling up a drastic operation to help its famous Chinook salmon reach the Pacific — transporting the fry by road in dozens of large tanker trucks.
The tasty migratory fish are typically born in rivers, swim to the ocean where they reach maturity and can remain for several years, before returning to their native rivers to spawn and die.
But drought-hit rivers with too little flow or unusually warm water can fatally disrupt that cycle, causing California’s fish and wildlife department to take “the proactive measure of trucking millions of hatchery-raised” juven…
Keep on reading: Drought-hit California scales up plan to truck salmon to ocean