Wading through flooded rice fields, a team of UC Davis students and researchers release thousands of shimmering fish into the water. These small golden shiners hold the promise of significant contributions to the dual challenges of climate change mitigation and sustainable food production.

After nearly a century of people building dams on most of the world’s major rivers, artificial reservoirs now represent an immense freshwater footprint across the landscape. Yet, these reservoirs are understudied and overlooked for their fisheries production and management potential, indicates a study from the University of California, Davis. 

It’s 2020 and aquarists just discovered how to breed seadragons in-house: a combination of proper lighting, noise, tank size, and more. 

The McCloud River redband trout, or O. mykiss calisulat, is newly identified as its own distinct subspecies of rainbow trout in a study from the University of California, Davis. It is the first newly identified subspecies of Pacific trout since 2008 and the youngest rainbow trout subspecies by more than 100 years.

Levi Lewis, one of Peter Moyle’s many former undergraduate students, now runs the Otolith Geochemistry and Fish Ecology Laboratory at UC Davis. His previous research has taken him to wetlands, seagrass beds and coral reefs around the world.

Peter Moyle is widely considered the “godfather of California fish biology.” The UC Davis professor emeritus has been conducting native fish surveys here for more than 50 years. He also played a major role in restoring Yolo County’s beloved local stream, Putah Creek.

From art to religion to land use, much of what is deemed valuable in the United States was shaped centuries ago by the white male perspective. Fish, it turns out, are no exception.

For a truly sustainable fishery, more needs to be considered than just the abundance of the harvested species. Harvesting even abundant species can create indirect extinction cascades down the food web that can harm the long-term economic and ecological sustainability of a fishery. 

That is according to a study from the University of California, Davis, published today in the journal Science Advances. 

The gene-editing technology CRISPR has been used for a variety of agricultural and public health purposes — from growing disease-resistant crops to, more recently, a diagnostic test for the virus that causes COVID-19.

In a remote section of campus west of Highway 113, Matthew Stone and a few students are looking after the well-being of thousands of fish at the UC Davis Center for Aquatic Biology and Aquaculture. Stone is the assistant facilities manager at CABA.

“We have quite a large number of fish that we’re trying to take care of and they all have different needs that we need to address,” he said. “These are things we simply cannot skip over during a time like this.”