Saving Seafood

How Tearing Down Small Dams Is Helping Restore Northeast Rivers

February 4, 2025 — The glass eels, 3 inches long with skin so translucent it reveals the beating of their tiny hearts, writhe with unexpected strength in the palm of a hand. For a year they have ridden the tides from their hatching site, in the Sargasso Sea, to the mouth of upstate New York’s Saw Kill Creek, a narrow tributary of the Hudson River. That’s where a fyke net set out by biologists, counting migratory American eels as they seek clear and flowing creeks in which to mature, captures them.

Although not considered endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, American eels have for decades been tallied at historically low numbers throughout the Northeastern United States, the most heavily dammed region in the nation. Fishing regulators consider their stocks depleted. But they’re not the only species in trouble here. Alewife and blueback herring, shad, shortnose and Atlantic sturgeon, and Atlantic salmon are all on the decline in Northeastern river systems. In response, a range of government agencies, private landowners, and environmental groups have been collaborating to restore these populations — by removing the dams that block their passage.

Although dam removals have been happening since 1912, the vast majority have occurred since the mid-2010s, and they have picked up steam since the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which provided funding for such projects. To date, 806 Northeastern dams have come down, with hundreds more in the pipeline. Across the country, 2023 was a watershed year, with a total of 80 dam removals. Says Andrew Fisk, Northeast regional director of the nonprofit American Rivers, “The increasing intensity and frequency of storm events, and the dramatically reduced sizes of our migratory fish populations, are accelerating our efforts.”

Read the full article at Yale Environment 360

New York to study why dead bunker fish have been washing up on beaches

December 29, 2020 — Numerous reports of dead and dying bunker fish washing up on Long Island beaches in recent weeks have prompted state officials to collect samples for study.

Distressed fish — possibly sickened by low water oxygen levels or rapid changes in temperature — have been spotted from the lower Hudson River near Peekskill to Staten Island and beaches on Long Island’s North Shore and the East End, officials said.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation has sent fish samples and water quality data to Stony Brook University’s Marine Animal Disease Laboratory and Cornell University for examination, officials said.

Bunker, or Atlantic menhaden, are a popular bait fish that number in the billions from Nova Scotia to Florida. Hundreds of millions of the fish are harvested annually for fish oil, fertilizer and fishmeal, authorities have said.

Read the full story at Newsday

NEW YORK: Changes on the horizon to reduce striped bass fishing mortality

September 20, 2019 — The Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board of the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) has issued proposed changes to Amendment 6 of the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic striped bass.

The proposed changes — formally flagged as Addendum VI — were the subject of  comments at a public hearing Sept. 12 in New Paltz, at the Region 3 Headquarters of the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).

While the abundance of striped bass is declining along the entire Atlantic Coast, according to ASMFC studies, most of the people attending the hearing were honed in on what the changes would mean to the Hudson River’s striped bass fishery.

Read the full story at the Poughkeepsie Journal

Sturgeon, America’s forgotten dinosaurs, slowly coming back

July 10, 2019 — Sturgeon were America’s vanishing dinosaurs, armor-plated beasts that crowded the nation’s rivers until mankind’s craving for caviar pushed them to the edge of extinction.

More than a century later, some populations of the massive bottom feeding fish are showing signs of recovery in the dark corners of U.S. waterways.

Increased numbers are appearing in the cold streams of Maine, the lakes of Michigan and Wisconsin and the coffee-colored waters of Florida’s Suwannee River.

A 14-foot Atlantic sturgeon — as long as a Volkswagen Beetle — was recently spotted in New York’s Hudson River.

“It’s really been a dramatic reversal of fortune,” said Greg Garman, a Virginia Commonwealth University ecologist who studies Atlantic sturgeon in Virginia’s James River. “We didn’t think they were there, frankly. Now, they’re almost every place we’re looking.”

Following the late 1800s caviar rush, America’s nine sturgeon species and subspecies were plagued by pollution, dams and overfishing. Steep declines in many populations weren’t fully apparent until the 1990s.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

NEW YORK: Millions of Tiny Baby Eels Invade the Hudson River

April 25, 2017 — There are millions of really tiny, baby American eels swimming up the Hudson River and it’s an intriguing look at how species migrate like clockwork.

Every spring American Eel are born in the Atlantic Ocean and they migrate to the Hudson River. These eel are almost transparent and that is why they are referred to as “glass eels.”  Like many migrations and species in our world, the American Eel is slowly disappearing and the NYSDEC Hudson River Estuary Program is trying to find out what is happening to the glass eel.

I was hanging out by the river in Poughkeepsie last spring and I noticed a bunch of people standing in the Fallkill Creek, which runs into the river by the Children’s Museum. They were catching little eels and putting them in a bucket to study them. It was part of the Hudson River American Eel Project.

Read the full story at WPDH

DNA used to track fish in Hudson and East rivers

April 14, 2017 — For the first time, scientists have recorded a spring fish migration by conducting DNA tests on water samples.

The work was a collaboration of Rockefeller University and the Urban Coast Institute at Monmouth University.

According to the study’s report, environmental DNA called eDNA, collected from one-liter samples drawn weekly from New York’s East and Hudson rivers over six months last year, revealed the presence or absence of several key fish species passing through the water on each test day.

The bits of DNA recovered found the presence of menhaden, herring species, black sea bass, striped bass, tautog (blackfish), mummichog, bay anchovy, bluefish, oyster toadfish, Atlantic silverside, and conger eel. In total it found the presence of 42 species.

Using eDNA is a way to monitor fish migrations that involves a fraction of the effort and cost of trawling, all without harming the fish, the study said.

It also said it can be used to estimate the abundance and distribution of diverse fish species and other forms of marine life in the dark waters of rivers, lakes, and seas.

Read the full story at the Asbury Park Press

Expert: More Whale Sightings May Mean Less Pollution In NY Waterways

December 19, 2016 — RYE, N.Y. — It’s a majestic sight — a living creature, larger than a city bus,  breaching, frolicking in the the water close to shore.

Whale sightings are on the rise in the New York area, with sightings along the Long Island Sound, the ocean beyond the narrows and occasionally along the Hudson River.

In November, a wayward humpback whale dazzled spectators with binoculars as it swam up the Hudson near the George Washington Bridge, WCBS 880’s Sean Adams reported.

In October, several whales were spotted swimming off the shores of Rockaway Beach in Southern Queens, and back in August, a mother and daughter had a close encounter with a 24-foot whale off the Jersey Shore.

Whales have also been returning to the Long Island sound.

The whales are following their stomachs — searching for fish that thrive in local waters.

Read the full story at CBS New York

Whale visit good sign for healthier Hudson

December 5th, 2016 — When a humpback whale swam all the way to the George Washington Bridge last month, it became a brief media spectacle, with the creature’s massive tail breaching the Hudson River while skyscrapers loomed in the background.

But for some,  the whale’s presence also signaled that the Hudson is slowly coming back from decades of pollution. The waterway is indeed healthier than it has  been since scientists began recording its demise a century ago from sewage, street runoff and industrial pollution, all of which have been curbed substantially in recent decades.

“People need to change their perception of these waters,” said Debbie Mans, executive director of the NY/NJ Baykeeper, a clean water advocacy group. “It has taken a lot of time, but it has slowly improved.”

Most experts think the whale, nicknamed Gotham, was  probably drawn up the Hudson in late November by schools of small bait fish called menhaden, or bunker, whose numbers along the Eastern Seaboard have soared in recent years.

Cleaner waters allows plankton to flourish closer to shore. That, in turn, provides a food source for fish like menhaden. And whales like nothing more than to munch on menhaden.

The fish have been so abundant this summer and autumn in the Hudson that Tom Lake, a consulting naturalist for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, said he saw schools of the fish 128 miles north of Bayonne.

Read the full story at The Record 

NEW YORK: Why researchers think humpback whale swam up the Hudson

November 22, 2016 — The whale spotted in the Hudson River Thursday in Friday was likely led there by food, the head of a local whale research group said.

Photos of the humpback whale showed it “lunge feeding,” said Paul Sieswerda, president of Gotham Whale.

“That’s when they come up and break the surface and consume these bait balls of menhaden,” he said.

Predators drive menhaden, sometimes known as bunker fish, into tight balls. This allows whales to open their mouths and eat them all at once.

Read the full story at NJ.com

NEW YORK: For The First Time In Decades, Herring Are Spawning In A Hudson River Tributary

June 13, 2016 — Herring are spawning in a tributary to New York’s Hudson River for the first time in 85 years after a dam was removed from the tributary’s mouth.

The spawning in the Wynants Kill tributary is seen as an environmental success, as NPR’s Nathan Rott tells our Newscast unit. He says it was previously “closed off to fish by a 6-foot dam at the side of an old mill there.” Nate explains:

“With the removal of the dam earlier this month, river herring and other ocean-going fish are making their way up the tributary to spawn. Those fish spend the bulk of their life at sea, but need smaller tributaries off of rivers like the Hudson to spawn and reproduce.”

There are more than 1,500 dams affecting Hudson River tributaries and “there’s a wider push to remove ones that no longer serve their intended purpose,” Nate adds.

“Every dam should have an existential crisis,” said John Waldman, a biology professor at Queens College, tells The Associated Press. “These are artifacts of the Industrial Revolution that are persisting and doing harm.”

Read the full story at NPR