May 27, 2008 8:04 am US/Eastern
Shad Counts Fall In Conowingo Dam
CONOWINGO, Md. (AP) ―
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Researchers are reporting a significant drop in the number of shad migrating up the Susquehanna River.
CBS 3
American shad are in trouble, and on the Susquehanna River, scientists say the fish population has dropped more than 90 percent over the last seven years.
The shad's decline up and down the East Coast has alarmed biologists and led to calls for new fishing limits or moratoriums to protect the silvery, oily fish once so common it was a staple of the Colonial-era American diet.
Researchers in Maryland count shad in April and May as the fish swim through a fish elevator that allows them to pass over a dam in Harford County to go upstream to spawn.
"We've seen decreases in American shad at fish lifts all along the East Coast, suggesting it's not just at the Conowingo Dam," said Erica Robbins, fisheries management plan coordinator at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.
Fishing for the species is already banned in Maryland and Pennsylvania, but not in New Jersey, Delaware, North Carolina and other states. The fisheries commission is planning public hearings to consider whether uniform restrictions are needed.
The shad's decline illustrates the delicacy of underwater ecology. As conservation measures have restored striped bass, biologists have seen a resulting decline in shad, which bass eat.
Around the Conowingo Dam, striped bass seem to be gobbling up the shad, said Dilip Mathur, a fisheries biologist who has run the annual shad count at the dam for decades.
"There wasn't really a large population of striped bass until 10 or 15 years ago, and since then the population has exploded -- and now the organisms are trying to reach a balance," Mathur told The (Baltimore) Sun.
Pollution and fishing are also blamed for the fish's decline. The fish lift at Conowingo Dam was built at a cost of $15 million more than a decade ago, after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sued the dam's owners for blocking the shad's migration upriver.
At first, it worked well. The number of fish lifted over the dam by an elevator-like mechanism rose from 37,516 in 1996 to 193,574 in 2001.
But since then, the shad population has been falling, to 56,000 in 2006, 29,000 last year, and about 16,000 so far this year, according to the federal agency and the dam's operators.
Dale Weinrich, manager of the finfish program at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, said striped bass are probably not causing the precipitous decline alone because the two species coexisted for thousands of years before humans arrived.
Weinrich told the newspaper he said he suspects that fishermen off Canada or elsewhere in the Atlantic might be netting too many shad.
"Someone is perhaps targeting the shad for fishing," said Weinrich. Or fishermen pursuing other species might be catching shad in their nets accidentally, he said. "But once you get them in a net, they're dead."
Anglers along the base of the dam told The Sun they've noticed the decline. Travis Habecker, 29, said he has caught and released about 50 American shad this year, compared with about 100 last year.
"A lot of times, you're catching a shad and trying to reel it in -- and a striper will just come up and eat it before you can even land it," Habecker said.
(© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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