Harbingers of a diminishing ecosystem, the smelt are almost extinct. Now, forces within the Trump administration could usher them into oblivion
On a warm November morning, John Durand squints over the stern of a small research boat, and gestures toward gray-blue water, and the chaotic tangles of tube-like tule reeds.
“Cache Slough right here had been known as a hotspot for delta smelt,” he says. But it’s been four years since Durand and his team of researchers from the University of California, Davis, have found the finger-length fish that gleam golden and “smell kind of like cucumber” in the brackish streams and sloughs of northern California’s bay delta.
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