Estimating the influence of temperature on the survival of chinook salmon smolts (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) migrating through the Sacramento – San Joaquin River Delta of California

Abstract

Data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are used to investigate the relationship between water temperature and survival of hatchery-raised fall-run chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) smolts migrating through the Sacramento – San Joaquin Delta of California. A formal statistical model is presented for the release of smolts marked with coded-wire tags (CWTs) in the lower Sacramento River and the subsequent recovery of marked smolts in midwater trawls in the Delta. This model treats survival as a logistic function of water temperature, and the release and recovery of different CWT groups as independent mark–recapture experiments. Iteratively reweighted least squares is used to fit the model to the data, and simulation is used to establish confidence intervals for the fitted parameters. A 95% confidence interval for the upper incipient lethal temperature, inferred from the trawl data by this method, is 23.01 ± 1.08 °C This is in good agreement with published experimental results obtained under controlled conditions (24.3 ± 0.1 and 25.1 ± 0.1 °C for chinook salmon acclimatized to 10 and 20 °C, respectively): this agreement has implications for the applicability of laboratory findings to natural systems.