Ryan, your input here is invaluable. The most common reaction in fisherman is to react to protect traditional habits when conservation issues come to the table.

I'm personally lukewarm on most my feelings on the CBD, but thats another topic.

I think the DFG isn't going to put eradication on the table, as most reasonable folks seem to agree. Millions of dollars come from bass tournaments in Lake County. In many ways, its one of the few economies left in a rural area. Only fools would want bass to go away, and your point about Davis Lake and pike is right on. Not to mention, eliminating predatory species in one of the largest lakes in the Western US would be extremely difficult to achieve.

My thoughts:

Orchards are biological warzones. Much of the land on the north side of the lake where the hitch spawn is surrounded by pear and apple orchards. Orchards require an immense amount of pesticides to be viable. I think it likely that enough pesticides could deteriorate the fertility of hitch spawning streams. Further investigation of pesticides should be held.

As said before gravel blockage for stream crossings is a backward step. Most of these creeks are small, especially Kelsey and Adobe. I think a well thought out infrastructure plan for small bridges is viable. A carefully designed bridge can present a very small barrier to fish migrations, vs. a gravel dam.

I think water rights in California water law will be a barrier to stopping people from directly sourcing their water from tributaries or the lake itself. Water law itself is fairly archaic in California. User rights can be legally derived by the date of land titles in many cases. Also, Indian reservations have historically been accorded user rights based on cultural grounds and water access law has been firmly in favor of defending their rights for many decades. In the case of Lake County, much of the land has been owned since the turn of the century, and without a state ruling those residents would not likely give up water rights. (Obviously a house pulling water of out the lake to grow pot isn't the real issue for water rights lol)

What happens if you get rid of bass? Bass are predators, and efficient ones at that. But hitch are just part of the basses' diet. Silversides are extremely prolific at Clear Lake, and arguably a bigger threat to the hitch as they both compete for the same food sources. Bass at Clear eat far more silverside per annum than they do hitch. Would taking one source of predation out of the equation only increase the risk from silversides? And more importantly, where do protected species like Clark's grebes fall? I'm willing to bet grebes and other native birds capitalize on both juvenile and adult hitch alike when they can.

Thanks for the info and insight,

Chris