July 10, 2013 — A fish kill along the south shore of the Neuse River on Wednesday is one of those good news-bad news situations, according to Rick Dove.
The good news? As fish kills go, it was pretty small.
The bad news? It could be a harbinger of bigger things to come.
Dove, who is president of the Coastal Carolina River Watch, reported thousands of menhaden washed up along the river shore between the Flanners Beach area and Slocum Creek.
He noted the last major fish kill, which happened in October 2012, resulted in an estimated 200 million dead fish. He thinks the tiny menhaden, which are highly sensitive to changes in water quality, have not been able to fully recover from the previous event. He has been looking for the reappearance of schools of them and hadn’t seen many yet.
“They showed up yesterday and I was overjoyed,” he said. “But today they’re dead. They didn’t last a day.”
Read the full story at the New Bern, North Carolina Sun Journal