Featured Scientist

Setting a trap on the West Fork San Luis Rey River.


Collecting sample for tissue analysis, San Diego River.


Creating spawning beds for rainbow trout, Sweetwater River.

Russell Barabe is a coldwater fisheries biologist based out of CDFW’s South Coast Region office in San Diego. Though he grew up San Jose, where his mom was a nurse and his dad was a facilities maintenance supervisor, Russell’s family frequently went camping and trout fishing in Shasta County. Russell was an Environmental Studies student at San Jose State University when a summer internship with the Student Conservation Association introduced him to researching fire effects at different national parks. He was hooked on the idea of working in the great outdoors as much as possible. A Master’s degree in fisheries biology at Mississippi State University put him on the path to becoming a CDFW biologist, where he’s been employed since 2009. His first duties included enforcing lake and streambed alteration regulations.

You’re a west coast guy – what was it like completing your education at Mississippi State?

It was really cool working in the Southeast and seeing fisheries from a whole different perspective. Down there, largemouth bass are native; same with bluegill, greenfish, sunfish, and catfish. I actually studied the recovery of catfish in the coastal rivers after Hurricane Katrina. We were tagging catfish and doing mark-recapture, and then we did a full-on age analysis of flathead catfish in the Pascagoula River, which is one of the largest, last remaining undammed watersheds in the lower 48.

As a fisheries biologist based in San Diego, what does your job entail?

My primary areas are San Diego and Orange County, and I was recently assigned to the Sespe Watershed, which is all the way up in Ventura County. I do a lot of monitoring of coldwater fish populations. That includes rainbow trout, both native and non-native. I also monitor other native species like Arroyo Chub. If something goes sideways, then we come to the rescue.

What’s an example of something going sideways?

Another fish population I monitor down here is the Unarmored Threespine Stickleback. Last year we had a really large storm event come through and this population of fish is right out on the edge of the Anza Borrego Desert. This storm came through and dumped a whole bunch of rain in a short period of time and ended up washing a lot of sediment into the stream. By doing that, it made the whole stream really shallow. Later in July and August, the water started percolating into the sand and there was no habitat for the fish. Because we were going to lose these fish if we didn’t do something, we got approval to do a rescue. We went out there and grabbed as many of the fish as we could and took them to another area where we can get them to water. Fully grown, that fish might be two inches long.  

San Diego is known for its ocean fishing opportunities. Do you find that people are surprised to hear there’s a coldwater fisheries biologist in the San Diego area? Can you describe the rivers and streams where you work?

San Diego is unique. I’ll talk with my colleagues up north who do work for the Heritage Wild Trout program as well. They have rivers that are 50 to 100 miles long and they sample little sections and then extrapolate the numbers out to get an idea of what’s going on. In my case, I have a section up in the mountains that still holds native trout but it’s only four miles long. I’ll decide to go camp out there for three days and snorkel everything, because I can. It’s also very difficult work because there are no trails, you're basically hiking in a stream with a full backpack and you often fall down. You’re fighting through brush and poison oak, and of course there are ticks, ants and rattlesnakes.

A snorkel survey is pretty much as it sounds, right? Face down, on your stomach, in a cold river, trying to count fish?

Correct. We just put on the mask and we have a wetsuit and we put our face in the water. With a flashlight we look under every rock to count them and try and put them into size classes. We try and do that every year so that we can track the population and say, okay, in 2017 we saw 400 and then in 2018, we only saw 30.

How do you guarantee you’re not counting the same fish over and over?

First, we always snorkel in an upstream direction. Second, if the stream is wide, we use enough snorkelers to cover the whole width. Down here, two is usually enough. Third, you only count a fish once it swims past you downstream. This way if a fish swims circles around you, you do not count it each time. If you get to the head of a pool and the fish have not swam past you, you then count those fish. This technique can be difficult if a lot of fish are present, but in Southern California, this is rarely a problem. If using more than one snorkeler, communication is important to discuss if the fish that swam between us was counted by me or the other person.

Don’t fish tend to go the other direction when you make yourself very present like that?

The surprising thing is that most fish will tolerate you when you’re snorkeling. They'll look at you a little warily but as long as you don’t try to reach out and touch them they’ll swim near you. But if you get too close, they take off and go hide under a rock.

Is there a particular project you are proud of, because you know that your work made a difference?

I would refer to some work I did on the only population of native rainbow trout left in San Diego County. There had been a report there were non-native bullhead (catfish) found in that part of the stream system. Everyone was worried about the bullhead competing with the trout, so we went out there to get genetic samples for a project to try and look at the heterozygous study of that population. (Low heterozygosity means a lack of genetic diversity. High heterozygosity means high genetic diversity.)

We were camping for the night and I said, “Why don’t we bring out a couple of traps that we have, and we’ll bait them with cat food, and we’ll throw them out just for the heck of it and maybe we’ll catch a bullhead or two.” I thought it might make a small difference. We threw out the traps and ended up catching over 30 bullhead. I thought, this is interesting, this works! When I got back to the office, I dove into the literature to see if I could find anything about anyone doing anything like that. I found a couple of projects, but no references to someone using this specific trap or using a similar technique. So we designed a study where we would use a lot of nets and cat food, and go out on trips of three days. We’d set the traps overnight because bullhead are nocturnal. On the first day, we’d set the traps in the evening. The next day, we’d walk down the stream and set our next set of traps, and camp for the night. The last day, we’d pull out the traps and then hike out. That first year we did that, we ended up removing 1,300 bullhead.

The next year, I figured we’d need to go back and do it again because the chances we’d removed everything were pretty slim. But when we went back, we trapped the entire stream and we didn’t catch a single bullhead. We went back the year after that, and we still didn’t catch anything. Removal of this invasive species is likely to benefit the native rainbow trout through a reduction in competition and possible predation.

I submitted a publication based on that bullhead work and is currently in press. It’s supposed to come out sometime this year in the North American Journal of Fisheries Management. 

In a 40-hour week, how many hours are spent in those river settings vs. sitting at a desk and writing up reports?

I’m usually getting out three days a week. Because traffic can be so bad down here, travel times to a lot of these places is really tough. To get to that population of native trout I mentioned, it’s a two-hour drive. And then there’s another a two-hour hike to get to where the fish are. So it’s an eight-hour day just to get to and from where the fish are. I’ll do 12- to 16-hour days on a regular basis. It’s easy to fall behind on your emails and reports!

How would your job change if you had unlimited time and an unlimited budget?

Well, I’d love to have a helicopter to make it easier for my back country trips. Just drop me off and pick me up, that would be a great start! Every year this job gets harder. I’m 47 and I have a tech who’s 20 years younger than me. I can usually keep up with him … he might hike a little faster than me, but I’m not far behind!  

CDFW Photos

Shoshone pupfish habitat in the Amargosa River.


Shoshone pupfish from the Amargosa River.


Nick in the Amargosa River following green sunfish removal.

CDFW environmental scientist Nick Buckmaster works as a biologist in the Heritage and Wild Trout program. Based in Bishop (in the northern part of Inyo County), he’s far from where he grew up in San Diego County, but he couldn’t be closer to what he loves: California’s natural resources.

As a member of the team managing heritage and wild trout, Nick helps protect and restore native trout and habitats through field studies and data analysis. He initially joined CDFW six years ago to work in habitat conservation, moving over to his current assignment about a year ago. He’s a graduate of UC Davis with Bachelor’s degrees in Wildlife Fisheries Conservation and Geology. His Master’s degree is in Ecology.

Tell us about your current assignment – what to you do?

I’m the heritage and wild trout biologist for Inyo and Mono counties; which is really about managing the Eastern Sierra fisheries in a sustainable fashion. Rather than relying on stocking, we work to manage the populations to ensure good fishing into the future. That allows me to work on two different threatened trout species that occur out here – Lahontan cutthroat trout and Paiute cutthroat trout – as well as manage some of the most iconic trout fisheries anywhere in California, if not the United States. On a day-to-day basis, I could be anywhere from 11,000 feet up in the High Sierra, to the desert streams of the Owens River Valley. It’s a pretty sweet setup. When I got the job offer to come out here, I didn’t think twice. I packed up and lived out of my car for a couple of weeks, until I found a place to rent.

So you’re checking on the health of a fish in a particular body of water to make sure it’s doing well, and that tells you other fish in that area are doing well?

Fisheries monitoring can include a number of things. A lot of it can be quick reconnaissance assessments -- looking at population structure and relative weight of the fish. From there you can drill down into habitat specifics and stream production. What’s the stream temperature, are your pools deep enough, is there enough food for the fish to grow, are they growing fast enough, are they reaching the size we want? Are there other potential stressors, like drought, flood or upstream water diversions?

How did you come to decide on ecology – and fisheries, specifically – as a profession?

I grew up in a small town (Descanso) playing in the mountains and hills every day, hunting and fishing. When I took biology in high school, there was a brief section on ecology, where we talked about lakes and how the various fisheries are supported, and I was a huge fisherman when I was younger, and it just clicked. All of a sudden, fishing became a science for me. Science was something I was already passionate about. I always loved the outdoors, ecology and nature.

How do you balance the need to preserve our resources in their natural state, and the idea that we can or should take action to assist species?

One of the things I did previously out there was work a lot with pupfish in lower elevation areas. Those are species that only persist because of human intervention. The Owens pupfish was rescued by a fish and game biologist from extinction in 1969 – if he hadn’t put them in a bucket, they would have blanked out. At the end of the day, conservation always requires some measure of management.

In 1910, humans brought largemouth bass into the Owens Basin. That drove the Owens pupfish to the brink of extinction. If humans hadn’t also stepped in and removed the bass, the Owens pupfish would have been wiped out. There was a similar situation with cutthroat trout in the Walker Basin (Kern County), where a lot of the habitat had been impacted by logging in the late 1920s. The habitat still hasn’t recovered, so it’s up to us as a management agency to go in and try to take that ecosystem-based approach to restore the stream and the fishery.

Almost every habitat I’ve encountered out here has been so profoundly impacted by humans … it’s not necessarily a question of whether to intervene, but how to intervene in the most appropriate way.

Is there a particular project you’ve worked on in which you saw the results and realized you made a difference?

Last August we had green sunfish invade the Shoshone Springs on the other side of Death Valley. Springs in the desert are a lot like islands in the ocean. They’re the only habitats like them for tens or hundreds of miles. In this case, Shoshone Springs has an endemic pupfish called the Shoshone pupfish. All pupfish, at least in the desert southwest, are highly susceptible to non-native predation. These non-native predators can eliminate a pupfish population in less than six months in some cases. So in early August, we had the non-native green sunfish show up in the only known habitat for Shoshone pupfish. They had washed down from Crystal Reservoir in Nevada during a heavy rain season – typically it’s a dry riverbed. Another employee and I went out and worked in 110 degree weather, for two weeks, to remove the sunfish from the pupfish habitat. Within the course of just two weeks, we removed what can only be described as an existential threat to the Shoshone pupfish. Those efforts secured the species going forward. At the end, I don’t think I’ve ever felt more satisfied with my job.

If you had an unlimited budget and unlimited time, what project would you like to tackle?

I’d probably try to restore cutthroat trout in the Walker Basin. It’s one of the most distinct cutthroat trout on the face of the planet. They’ve been in that basin for millions of years. They’re very rare at this time, but if left to their own devices they get really large. They’re fantastic fish to catch – they’re just beautiful. I would probably put them back. We all love catching big cutthroat trout at Pyramid Lake (Nevada), and I’d like to see that in Eastern Sierra. A project like that would fit with my passions of conservation, native fish management and recreation.

Can you describe a typical day of work?

Today I’m working from home on a couple of reports involving analysis of fish population data. On a field day, I would be hiking into the high country or back country to conduct some level of fisheries assessment. Office days involve typical tasks like answering emails, data analysis or writing summary reports. To be honest, I really like the balance that I have. While it’s critical to do field work in order to collect the information necessary to make decisions as natural resources agency, it’s also important to answer emails and maintain relationships with the public, co-workers and management. If you collect all the data in the world, and don’t share it, you might as well not have collected it at all.

CDFW Photos