Saving Seafood

In the Delaware River, climate change and invasive species threaten shad, ‘America’s founding fish’

October 13, 2025 — American shad were a major food source for early European settlers and Native Americans who lived along the Delaware River.

Known as “America’s founding fish,” the species were so abundant that it was said people could “walk across their backs.” In 1896, more than 4 million shad were caught in a single year. But by the 1900s, overfishing caused a steep decline.

A new study published this month indicates that American shad, as well as river herring, have failed to recover in the Delaware River, which could threaten the aquatic ecosystem.

Read the full article at WHYY

EPA announces commitment to protect fish in the Delaware River

April 2, 2025 — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Tuesday that it plans to finalize new water quality standards that aim to protect fish in a portion of the Delaware River.

The announcement comes more than a year after the protections were first proposed, and after environmentalists took legal action to speed up the process.

Some fish traveling the river between Philadelphia, South Jersey and Wilmington struggle to survive and thrive due to low dissolved oxygen levels caused by ammonia discharges from wastewater facilities.

This urban stretch of the Delaware River is the only section of the region’s waterways that isn’t fully protective of aquatic life, according to the EPA, and oxygen level criteria doesn’t meet Clean Water Act standards.

Read the full article at WHYY

NEW JERSEY: 1,500 Wind Turbines. 2,700 Square Miles. Offshore Wind in the Atlantic Will Be Big. Really Big

March 22, 2021 — Off the coast of New Jersey these days, surveillance vessels hired by European energy companies are taking measurements of the ocean depths, and underwater research drones are analyzing water temperatures to accumulate data on the Mid-Atlantic “Cold Pool.”

Onshore in places like the Port of Paulsboro along the Delaware River south of Camden and Philadelphia, labor unions, port officials and politicians are angling for new marine terminals to build and ship off massive steel monopiles.

And in weekly board meetings, state-appointed officials in charge of the Garden State’s public utilities are discussing massive overhauls to the power grid and many miles of new transmission lines.

Billions of dollars will be invested in the next several years — at sea and on land — to erect hundreds of wind turbines miles from the coast in order to bring New Jersey 7,500 megawatts of renewable energy. That’s enough to power half of the state’s 1.5 million homes.

Politicians, environmentalists and European companies have invested interest in the plans. Big issues still to confront include lucrative North Atlantic fishing concerns; ecological effects on what is known as the Mid-Atlantic Bight’s “Cold Pool”; and the fundamental remaking of power grids that bring the electricity into homes and businesses of 100 million Americans.

Every year off the coast of the eastern United States, from Cape Hatteras in North Carolina to Cape Cod in Massachusetts, forms a unique oceanographic feature called “the Cold Pool.”

It’s a layering of water temperatures that makes for breathtakingly cold water near the ocean floor and much warmer water near the surface and beaches. The effect is called stratification, and it is created each spring, peaks each summer and mixes up once again each fall.

The stark difference in water temperature during the late spring and summer months makes it one of Earth’s unique marine ecosystems. It gives the continental shelf off the northeastern United States a diversity of fauna that has persisted for centuries. Fishermen and scientists alike credit the Cold Pool with powering the renowned fisheries of New England, New Jersey and Maryland.

No one knows the extent to which thousands of wind turbines would have on the stratification process, or if the twirling horizon-scrapers will affect the Cold Pool at all.

Read the full story at NBC Philadelphia

Shell shock: Giant invasive mussels eradicated from U.S. ponds

December 2, 2019 — Most Americans know mussels as thumb-sized shellfish that occasionally adorn restaurant dinner plates.

But a colony of mussels as big as the dinner plates themselves has recently been wiped out from a New Jersey pond, where they had threatened to spread to the nearby Delaware River and wreak ecological havoc, as they already are doing in other parts of the world.

Federal wildlife officials and a New Jersey conservation group say they’re confident they have narrowly avoided a serious environmental problem by eradicating Chinese pond mussels from a former fish farm in Hunterdon County.

The mussels, in larvae form, hitched a ride to this country inside the gills of Asian carp that were imported for the Huey Property in Franklin Township and quickly began reproducing. Unlike the little mussels many Americans know, these ones can approach the size of footballs.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at WHYY

This iconic fish nearly disappeared from New Jersey Now it’s coming back

May 23, 2019 — Call it a poor man’s salmon.

Every year from February to June, the American shad run like 20-inch silver bullets up the east coast, pouring in from the Atlantic and swimming up rivers from Florida to Maine to return to their spawning grounds.

Hordes of anglers hit the water to chase them — for many Garden State anglers shad fishing in the Delaware River is as good as fishing gets.

“I’d rather crank on these things than a thousand-pound tuna fish,” said Dominic Troisi, the owner of Full Draw Bowfishing.

The fish are fighters, bounding in and out of the water as anglers of all ages try to reel them ashore. Most shad are released after being caught — the flesh is oily and full of bones, not so easy to eat — but some people still enjoy shad as a local delicacy.

Yet just a few decades ago, this scene was the stuff of dreams — these iconic fish had all but disappeared from the Delaware River.

Read the full story at NJ.com

DELAWARE: Fish and Wildlife Service to support watershed conservation efforts

August 8, 2018 –The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation announced on Aug. 7 the launch of the Delaware Watershed Conservation Fund, a competitive grant and technical assistance program of $4.3 million that will provide new support for the protection, restoration and conservation of fish and wildlife habitats in the Delaware River Watershed, which provides drinking water for more than 15 million people.

Congress provided funds to the FWS in fiscal 2018 to leverage public and private funding to support the environmental and economic health of the Delaware River Watershed for boots-on-the-ground conservation projects — as outlined in the Delaware River Basin Restoration Partnership and Program Framework.

Covering 13,539 square miles of land and water, the Delaware River Watershed is home to native brook trout, red knots, river herring, freshwater mussels, oysters and other wildlife. Headwaters and streams located in rural, forested and agricultural areas play a major role in the ecosystem, as do urban and suburban waterways such as those in Trenton, Philadelphia and Wilmington.

Work supported by the DWCF will take place in a variety of landscapes and habitats across the Delaware River Watershed, from the beaches and tidal salt marshes of the Delaware Bay to the farms, cities and towns of Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, to the cold-water rivers and streams of New York. The DWCF will expand and further facilitate restoration and conservation efforts in the basin to restore and conserve fish and wildlife habitat; improve and maintain water quality for fish, wildlife and people; manage water volume and improve flood damage mitigation for fish and wildlife habitat; and improve recreational opportunities consistent with ecological needs

Read the full story at the Smyrna-Clayton Sun-Times

Trump has proposed offshore drilling in the Atlantic. Here’s what it means for N.J.

January 24, 2018 — When President Trump’s administration announced plans earlier this month to reconsider drilling off the Atlantic coast, officials and community leaders up and down the Jersey Shore began digging in for a fight they thought they’d won in 2016. Here are the basic facts behind the plan and the reasons why so many groups are against the proposal.

Trump’s plan: Drill baby drill

Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke proposed opening nearly all federal waters to offshore drilling. The federal waters would be divided into sections and then the leases to those sections would be auctioned off to oil companies. Under the proposal, 25 of the government’s 26 planning areas would be opened up for 47 potential lease sales.

New Jersey would be part of the North Atlantic section, and leases for areas off the Jersey Shore would be auctioned off in 2021 and 2023.

“Responsibly developing our energy resources on the Outer Continental Shelf in a safe and well-regulated way is important to our economy and energy security, and it provides billions of dollars to fund the conservation of our coastlines, public lands and parks,” Zinke said in a press release announcing the plan.

Who supports this plan?

Only one governor on the Atlantic Coast — Paul LePage of Maine, pictured above — has expressed approval of the plan. The Maine governor has said that he supports the plan because he believes it will bring jobs to his state and lower energy costs for Maine residents.

In a December 2013 report, the American Petroleum Institute — a group that advocates for the expansion of oil and natural development nationwide — estimated that offshore drilling could bring more than 8,000 jobs to New Jersey and bring in $515 million in revenue for the state government.

Uncertain potential for profit

Oil and gas companies could stand to profit from drilling off the Jersey Shore, but only if they find enough oil out there.

The last offshore exploration near the Garden State was in the 1970s and 1980s, when companies like Texaco and Tenneco drilled wells near the Hudson Canyon, a little less than 100 miles east of Atlantic City.

According to reports filed with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the exploration found no significant oil deposits and small amounts of natural gas reserves.

Has there been drilling off of the shore before?

Technically yes, but the exploratory drilling of the 1970s and 1980s was the farthest that the process has ever gotten. No lease sales have occurred in the Atlantic since 1983.

In 2017, a BOEM assessment estimated that the Atlantic contained an between 1.15 billion and 9.19 billion barrels of oil, a fraction of the estimated 76.69 billion to 105.59 billions barrels throughout all federal waters. According to the same assessment, the North Atlantic is estimated to hold between 0.06 billion and 5.11 billion barrels.

Read the full story at the NJ.com

 

Delaware River’s American shad population showing signs of rebound

May 4, 2017 — After years of declining American shad runs on the Delaware River, it looks like things may be trending in the right direction for the anadromous fish that makes its way up the river each spring to spawn. For the past few years, anglers have reported solid runs of the popular sportfish, with this year’s run being described as the best in decades.

“I’m here in the boat and I just had a double on while the phone was ringing,” said “Shad Pappy” George Magaro, explaining why he couldn’t immediately grab the phone when contacted. “This year has been fabulous.”

For Magaro, considered by many to be a legend among shad anglers, there are few days, if ever, he goes without latching onto at least a few shad. This year, however, his catches have been off the charts as he hauled in 191 fish in six outings, an average of 32 per trip.

“There are guys who’ve caught 150 in a day,” Magaro said. “The way the shad have been running this year, it’s like déjà vu from the late 1980s and early ’90s. The fish are here in good numbers.”

Magaro isn’t alone in his assessment. Eric Fistler, who runs the recently completed Bi-State Shad Fishing Contest, says the 2017 season has produced the best fishing he has seen in his lifetime. Angling before the 2017 shad fishing contest began, he and partner Mike Hinkel of Phillipsburg landed 80-plus shad in one afternoon. The next day, Fistler returned to the Delaware and had an experience most anglers only dream about.

Read the full story at The Morning Call