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Delta smelt have hovered close to extinction for years, but biologists say they’ve never seen anything like this spring.

“There’s nothing between them and extinction, as far as I can tell,” said Peter Moyle, a U.C. Davis biologist who has studied smelt and other Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta fish species for nearly four decades. Last week, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife released the results of spring trawling surveys that track adult delta smelt. The surveys found just handfuls of fish across the huge area where they are known to spawn.

Southern California’s largest water supplier was temporarily blocked from buying sprawling farmland that could be used to help build twin tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a court ruled Tuesday.

The state’s 3rd District Court of Appeal in Sacramento granted a temporary restraining order the day before escrow was set to close on Metropolitan Water District’s $175 million deal for 20,000 acres. The ruling delays the district’s purchase by no more than a few weeks, Metropolitan attorney Catherine Stites said.

Sure enough, Clinton sprinkled a number of mentions of water into her standard stump speech, promising the crowd that if she’s elected president, “we’re going to get to work on water.”

Her proposals were vague. She noted the “water systems here [were] built before our time,” before pledging to invest anew in infrastructure. New water projects have been a top priority for Fresno’s agriculture industry, which has struggled to adapt to the state’s lingering drought. In another nod to the local industry, Clinton changed her standard riff promising to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws.

No surprise here, but an annual spring survey that is an important indicator of the Delta smelt’s ability to spawn shows the species has hit another record low.

“I am not optimistic that the smelt can make it through the next year or two. Love to be proved wrong,” California native fish expert Peter Moyle said in an email today after reviewing the survey results from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Sites Reservoir could be built sooner than anticipated — if it ever receives public funding,

Accelerating the construction timeline for the long-proposed reservoir project, as well as other proposed dams in the state, is the focus of a bill co-authored by Assemblyman James Gallagher, R-Plumas Lake. Assembly Bill 2551 recently passed the Assembly and will head to the Senate. It would allow water storage projects to use so-called alternative delivery methods, allowing several steps in construction, such as designing and building, to happen at the same time.