The fires that the Los Angeles area experienced in January 2025 cut a swath through two beloved neighborhoods and left devastation in their wake. Animals, both domestic and wild, were in the path of the disaster alongside humans. There's so much grief to process and so much rebuilding to do but one good news story struck us and we thought it was important to share.
Lila Seidman is a Los Angeles Times reporter focused on California wildlife and the outdoors. She recently reported a story on steelhead trout living in the Palisades.
Evan Kleiman: I found this story so fascinating because I had no idea that there were fish living in this area to begin with. Why don't you tell us a bit about this particular fish and what their habitat is. Where were they living?
Lila Seidman: You're definitely not alone in expressing surprise when people hear that there are steelhead in Southern California or in the Santa Monica Mountains, and that's because they're very, very rare. In fact, the population of steelhead trout that were living in the Santa Monica Mountains when the Palisades Fire came through was the only known population. I think they estimated there were about 400 to 500 in this stream. Historically, the steelhead trout lived in streams up and down the coast, coastal waters that connect to the ocean because these fish are kind of like salmon. Some of them travel to the ocean. They go through a change, and they grow bigger, and then will return to their natal streams to spawn.
It's so interesting. So the fires didn't completely wipe them out, apparently.
What happened is that wildlife officials and some other partners went in and actually saved them. They knew that basically, what happens after a fire for aquatic areas that are in their path, like streams or rivers, is that the fire itself will not kill what's in the water, but it strips hillsides and allows a bunch of sediment or ash to flow into those waterways after it rains, and that is often lethal, especially for fish which cannot leave the water.
Knowing this, a rescue effort led by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife occurred literally in the nick of time. Days before the first storm of the season happened, they went in with biologists and basically scooped up a bunch of the trout from Topanga Creek, which is a diversity hotspot in the Santa Monica Mountains. They brought them to a hatchery for safe keeping and they eventually moved them to a new stream.
With the fish being moved to a new stream, was there any concern that they wouldn't fulfill their biological destiny of procreation because they were disrupted.
Yes, there was. I spoke to Kyle Evans of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, who has been filling me in about this whole rescue effort, and he said, after everything that they had been through, they were worried it had possibly disrupted their spawn, for their reproduction. He told me that this goes on for quite some time, like the process probably began in December, if not earlier, before the fires happened. Because the fires happened in January, and taking the fish out, putting them in trucks to get them, they had to stun them with an electrical current. So with all of that, he said, we were worried that might have disrupted this very energetically consuming process for the fish. But as you mentioned, this is a happy story, and they were able to reproduce.
It's amazing that they're so resilient. How many were rescued compared to this very small population that you said was around 400 to 500 individuals.
530 of the rare Southern California steelhead trout were counted last November, and they were able to rescue just over 270 of them. It actually represented a large proportion of the population, almost all of them made it to their new home, which is in Santa Barbara County. But a couple died. So I think it was roughly 260 or a little over that ended up in the new stream.
When there are fish in these streams, in our local mountains, are people allowed to fish them?
That's a really good question. There's a distinct Southern California population of steelhead trout, which is listed as endangered in both federal and state law. You cannot fish those fish because they're endangered. So these rare steelhead that they took from the Santa Monica Mountains and brought to Santa Barbara County, those are protected fish.
Oftentimes, when I write about steelhead, people say, "What do you mean?" You could just go to the market and get steelhead in other parts of the state, potentially, and maybe in the Pacific Northwest, but these are protected fish, rainbow trout. If they're not able to get to the ocean and go through this change is very strange, but they are not protected. So you can fish rainbow trout.
You have such an interesting beat.
It's really fascinating. There are so many things happening with wildlife and this is just one of the infinite narratives that I have become fascinated with. It's funny because I actually don't fish but growing up in LA, I didn't really realize that some of our streams have fish in them. People fish in the Arroyo Seco and in the LA River. Other people do enjoy doing that, and I just became fascinated with it.
I understand you've actually eaten fish that were caught in the LA River.
I ate one fish, yeah. I was writing about fishing in the LA River because I was so fascinated by people who were going out there, especially during the pandemic. It became very popular. I'm not a great angler. A little girl saw that I was struggling. She was there with her dad, and she just brought a fish over to me because she could see I wasn't catching anything. I thought, "You know what? I have to accept this." I lived very close to the river near Frogtown at the time, and I grilled it that night.