April 23, 2012 – More than a century ago, Delaware Bay was one of the world’s biggest centers for caviar production. Back then, “this would have been a small one. The average female in the 1800s was 350 pounds,” said Matt Breece, a DSU graduate student, as he prepared to anesthetize the fish before extracting a tissue sample and implanting a tracking device.
At the height of the spring migration, New Jersey fishermen are catching, tagging and releasing up to two dozen Atlantic sturgeon every day off the Delaware beaches, helping to track the endangered species and build a body of scientific data so five East Coast breeding populations can be better protected.
The Delaware may have had a native population of 700,000 sturgeon in the 1800s, compared with today’s estimate of 500 animals, Fox said.
“It was the largest sturgeon producer in the world,” Fox said. “When the fishing was at its peak (in the 1890s) they were shipping caviar and sturgeon all over the world.” At a processing center dubbed Caviar — today’s Bayside in Salem County —“they built a railroad spur and shipped 12 to 15 cars to the markets in a day, and four to five cars of caviar.”
After taking that huge hit, sturgeon suffered from pollution as industry grew along the Delaware. The sturgeon’s own life cycle means any recovery is a slow process, said Ellen Pikitch, a professor and executive director of the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University on Long Island.
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