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., ....u..,:~~~.. . ''~ 56 CHANGE ,~ . 3. State legislation, such as the Wild Rivers Bill (1972) and the Coastal Intiative (1972) have done much to slow down the development of particularly fragile watersheds, giving conservationists achance to acquire desirable natural areas now in private hands, and giving local, state, and federal agencies more time to develop comprehensive management plans. 4. The California Department of Fish and Game has established an endangered species program which has been effective in identifying rare and endangered fishes, promoting studies of their biology, and establishing management programs for them. Considering that the program was only officially established in 1972, the progress already made has been remarkable. 5. Management techniques used by fisheries biologists of the California Department of Fish and Game are becoming increasingly sophisticated, especially for trout and salmon streams. Native nongame fishes are no longer universally regarded simply as competitors of gamefishes that must be eliminated at all costs. As a result, large-scale stream poisoning programs, such as took place on the Russian River in 1957 (Pintler and Johnson, 1958), are much less common. 6. The continuing construction of artificial spawning channels and hatcheries may eventually reverse the downward trend in Pacific salmon and steelhead populations. 7. State and federal agencies that manage large chunks of public land in California are showing increasing interest in the management of the fisheries resources of these areas. The U. S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management in particular have been conducting inventories of their fisheries resources in recent years and have been actively cooperating with the Department of Fish and Game in setting up management programs for rare or endangered fishes. 8. The deliberate introduction of new species on a "let's see what will happen" basis is no longer possible under regulations by the California Department of Fish and Game. A species has to be carefully evaluated by the department before even an experimental introduction is made into a closed system (e.g., the introduction of white bass into Nacimiento Reservoir). A number of potentially harmful species, such as piranha and golden orfe, have already been banned, even to aquarists, and many more species are likely to join the list. 9. A refuge for native fishes, complete with a barrier to prevent the immigration of introduced species, has been established in the Owens Valley (Miller and Pfister, 1971). Hopefully, this is the first of many such refuges. 10. Attempts are now being made to propagate Colorado squawfish and humpback sucker in an Arizona hatchery, in order to reintroduce them into the lower Colorado River. 11. In recent years there has been a marked resurgence of studies of the freshwater nongame fishes of California. Research is underway at most of the state universities and colleges, as well as at the University of California, by independent investigators. Around the turn of the century such research was largely confined to what has been called the Stanford School of Ichthyology, under the aegis of David Starr Jordan and his disciples, especially Charles H. Gilbert and John O. Snyder. There was a resurgence of studies from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. Most of this research was done by Paul R. Needham and his students at U.C. Berkeley but, unfortunately, much of the