Peter Moyle has been documenting the status of California native fishes for as long as the United States has had an Endangered Species Act. That would 40 years, as of this month. In today's California Water Blog post, the UC Davis professor of fish biology makes a case for removing the Central Valley steelhead from the federal government's list of species threatened or endangered with extinction - based on new information that became available because of the law.

Today's rainbow trout-steelhead may harbor characteristics of the Central Valley steelhead deep in their genome, but overall, Moyle says, "they're simply not the same fish we had historically."

Moyle is associate director of the university’s Center for Watershed Sciences.