But the delta smelt couldn’t be as powerful as all that. The latest California fish population survey in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which along with San Francisco Bay is the species ...

A Delta smelt is shown at the University of California, Davis, Fish Conservation and Culture Lab in Byron, California. | Rich Pedroncelli/AP.

“Delta smelt are at the lowest levels we’ve ever seen,” said Carl Wilcox, delta policy advisor for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The ruling, made Friday evening by U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger, was an attempt to help the delta smelt, a tiny fish once plentiful but now facing extinction.

By the mid-1980s, however, the delta smelt was on the road to extinction, the victim of numerous changes in its habitat. Water diversions from the delta to farms in Northern California and ...

The Delta smelt is on the brink of extinction in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. A UC Davis lab works to save the endangered California fish.

The delta smelt is a small, slender-bodied fish native to California's San Francisco Estuary. Listed as endangered under state and federal laws, ...

The delta smelt was also the subject of a memo that Trump published on his first day in office, in which he directed the Interior and Commerce departments to route more water from the delta “to ...

The Delta smelt has declined to the point of near-extinction in the wild due to several factors, including big changes to the Delta ecosystem resulting from water exports, the impact of invasive ...

The smelt — which is nearly extinct and endemic to the Delta — can’t hit back. But Newsom’s press office did, writing Tuesday on X : “The only thing fishy are Trump’s facts.” ...