Saving Seafood

Biologists use trucks to help shad reach spawning ground

September 23, 2021 — The long-running effort to get American shad back to their historic spawning grounds this year enlisted a tool that had been abandoned two decades ago: trucks.

With operation of the multi-million dollar fish lifts halted at Conowingo Dam, biologists resorted to capturing shad below the dam and trucking them upstream before releasing the fish back into the Susquehanna River to continue their spawning migration.

By the time the trucks stopped running on June 5, they hauled more than 6,300 shad upstream. That’s a fraction of the number that swam upriver during historic shad runs, but it’s the most that got past the first three dams on the river in more than a decade.

And it wouldn’t have happened without the trucks. Fish lifts at the 94-foot-high dam have not operated for two years because of concerns that invasive species such as northern snakeheads and blue catfish were moving upstream through the fish lifts, too.

“From a shad perspective, we feel like in the short term it is best to get as many to the spawning grounds as we can,” said Sheila Eyler, who coordinates fish restoration efforts on the Susquehanna for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

American shad definitely needed the helping hand.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

 

Shad recovery efforts not paying off, study shows

September 21, 2020 — The American shad’s Atlantic population remains at a historic low, despite longstanding commercial fishing bans in several states and millions of dollars invested in restoring the fish’s habitat.

That sober news comes from the most comprehensive survey yet of the species’ status on the East Coast and the first of any kind in 13 years. The sprawling assessment by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission designates the shad population as “depleted” from Maine to Florida.

“There should be a lot more shad than there are out there,” said Michael Bailey, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientist and one of the assessment’s authors.

In the Chesapeake Bay region, the study suggests that the rate of death among adult shad — a key measure of a population’s health — is “unsustainable” in the Potomac River but “sustainable” in the Rappahannock and York.

Once one of the largest commercial fisheries along the coast and around the Bay, shad catches have bottomed out at about 1% of their late-1800s levels. Although the shad fishery has all but disappeared in the Chesapeake, scientists contend that the species serves a critical ecological role in the estuary as a vital link in its food chain.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

ASMFC American Shad Benchmark Stock Assessment and Peer Review Report

August 24, 2020 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s American Shad Benchmark Stock Assessment and Peer Report, as well as the Assessment Overview are now available on the Commission’s Shad & River Herring webpage,http://www.asmfc.org/species/shad-river-herring, (under stock assessment reports).  Links to both documents are also below.

American Shad Benchmark Stock Assessment and Peer Review Report (Aug 2020)

American Shad Stock Assessment Overview (Aug 2020)

Regulators find shad, an important fish, are ‘depleted’

August 11, 2020 — Overfishing, dams and pollution are among the factors that have steeply reduced the population of an ecologically important fish on the East Coast, regulators have said.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission recently completed an assessment of the population of American shad and found it to be “depleted,” the commission said. Changing ocean conditions and climate change have also likely played a role in reducing the fish’s population from historic levels, it said.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

ASMFC: American Shad Benchmark Stock Assessment and Peer Review Find Coastwide Abundance Remains Depleted

August 5, 2020 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

The 2020 American Shad Benchmark Stock Assessment and Peer Review Report indicate American shad remain depleted on a coastwide basis. Multiple factors, such as overfishing, inadequate fish passage at dams, predation, pollution, water withdrawals, channelization of rivers, changing ocean conditions, and climate change are likely responsible for shad decline from historic abundance levels. Additionally, the assessment finds that shad recovery is limited by restricted access to spawning habitat. Current barriers partly or completely block 40% of historic shad spawning habitat, which may equate to a loss of more than a third of spawning adults. The “depleted” determination was used instead of “overfished” because the impact of fishing on American shad stocks cannot be separated from the impacts of all other factors responsible for changes in abundance. The benchmark assessment was endorsed by the Peer Review Panel and accepted by the Shad & River Herring Management Board (Board) for management use.

“On behalf of the Board, I want to commend the members of the Shad Technical Committee and Stock Assessment Subcommittee for their outstanding work on the 2020 Benchmark Stock Assessment Report,” stated Board Chair Dr. Michael Armstrong from Massachusetts. “This is a considerable body of work that substantially advances our understanding of the challenges facing American shad stocks along the Atlantic coast. It certainly has given the Board a lot to think about regarding next steps in management to improve population resiliency. Given the stock-specific nature of shad management, the Board has tasked the Technical Committee with identifying potential paths forward to improve shad stocks along the coast considering the assessment results.”

Coastwide adult mortality is unknown, but was determined to be unsustainable for some system‐specific stocks, indicating the continued need for management action to reduce adult mortality. Specifically, adult mortality was determined to be unsustainable for three stocks – Connecticut, Delaware, and Potomac – and sustainable for five stocks – Hudson, Rappahannock, York, Albemarle Sound, and Neuse (see table on page 2 for information by system). The terms “sustainable” and “unsustainable” were used instead of “not overfishing” and “overfishing” because fishing mortality cannot be separated from other components contributing to total mortality. Though adult mortality was determined to be sustainable for some system‐specific stocks, it is important to note that maintaining sustainable adult mortality will not result in favorable abundance status if juvenile mortality is unsustainable. Unfortunately, juvenile mortality status cannot be determined due to insufficient data collection in all systems; without these determinations, significant uncertainty remains in assessment advice for management of American shad. Thus, the recovery of American shad will need to address multiple factors including anthropogenic (human-caused) habitat alterations, predation by non‐native predators, and exploitation by fisheries. The assessment also highlights the need for stock composition monitoring data in order to separate the impacts of fishing from other factors driving American shad population dynamics in future stock assessments.

Read the full release here

Ocean Data Portal Maps Show Significant Shifts by Mid-Atlantic Fish Species

March 30, 2020 — The following was released by the Urban Coast Institute:

A series of interactive maps published on the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Data Portal illustrates the shifts that have taken place over the last five decades by several commercially and recreationally important fish species living along the East Coast.

Users of the free and publicly accessible Portal (portal.midatlanticocean.org) can automatically animate or toggle through hundreds of maps representing fish distributions during the spring or fall seasons in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s or 2010s. These maps can be activated in combination with any of the Portal’s 5,000 map layers showing data for commercial fishing hot spots, marine life habitats, zones being examined for offshore wind development and much more. 
 
The Fish Species Through Time map collection was made possible by a grant from the Virginia Coastal Zone Management Program (CZM) to The Nature Conservancy. It was created based on an analysis of federal Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) bottom trawl survey data collected between 1972 and 2017. 
 
Many of the maps show a trend in fish moving to waters further north and further offshore from the 1970s to the present day. Some fish species that showed little presence off the New England coast decades earlier have since migrated past Cape Cod and established themselves in the Gulf of Maine. 
 
“Our analysis and the maps make no assumptions as to the factors causing these shifts,” said Chris Bruce, GIS manager at The Nature Conservancy in Virginia and a member of the Portal’s technical team. “However, there is no shortage of scientific research to refer to on how factors like climate change and increasing water temperatures are impacting marine habitats.”
 
The fish species analyzed were alewife, American shad, Atlantic mackerel, black sea bass, blueback herring, bluefish, butterfish, longfin squid, monkfish, northern shortfin squid, red hake, sand lance, scup, spiny dogfish, spot, summer flounder, winter flounder and yellowtail. In addition to individual species, a pair of summary maps was created to illustrate shifts by demersal fish and forage fish. “Overlap Area” maps were also created for each species showing the places where fish were consistently present each decade. 
 
The Portal also added a collection of maps projecting future shifts by the fish species through the year 2100. Users can animate these maps, which are based on data previously released by OceanAdapt (https://oceanadapt.rutgers.edu/), a collaboration between the Pinsky Lab of Rutgers University, NMFS, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
 
Users can access these maps in the Portal’s Marine Planner application by clicking on the Marine Life theme and then clicking on the dropdowns for Fish Species Through Time (for the data showing the 1970s-present) or Fish Species Future Projections.
 
“These maps tell an important story about the challenges our region’s economies and communities face due to the rapid changes taking place in our ocean,” said Laura McKay, program manager with Virginia CZM and the chair of MARCO’s mapping and data team that manages the Portal. “We hope that they help the region’s ocean stakeholders and decision-makers understand the trends so they can plan and adapt accordingly.”
 
The Portal is an online toolkit and resource center that consolidates available data and enables state, federal and local users to visualize and analyze ocean resources and human use information such as fishing grounds, recreational areas, shipping lanes, habitat areas, and energy sites, among others. With financial support through The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Portal is maintained by a team consisting of the Monmouth University Urban Coast Institute, Ecotrust, The Nature Conservancy and Rutgers University’s Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis under the guidance of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council on the Ocean (MARCO). Established by the governors of the five coastal Mid-Atlantic states in 2009, MARCO is a partnership of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Virginia to enhance the vitality of the region’s ocean ecosystem and economy.
 
“Regional coordination on ocean use planning is essential to ensure the long-term health of our invaluable ocean resources, and an important piece of this coordination is data accessibility,” said Kisha Santiago-Martinez, chair of MARCO and deputy secretary of state at New York’s Department of State. “Information on the Portal is available to anyone who wishes to view data for any reason, such as ocean planning, education, or decision-making.”

ASMFC American Shad Stock Assessment Workshop Scheduled for November 18-22, in Charleston, SC

October 10, 2019 — The following was released by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission will hold the American Shad Benchmark Stock Assessment Workshop at the Francis Marion Hotel, 387 King Street, Charleston, SC.  The stock assessment, which is scheduled for completion in the summer of 2020, will evaluate the health of stocks along the Atlantic coast and inform management of this species.  The Commission’s stock assessment process and meetings are open to the public, with the exception of discussions of confidential data*, when the public will be asked to leave the room.

The Commission welcomes the submission of alternate analyses or assessment models.  For alternate models to be considered, the model description, model input, final model estimates, and complete source code must be provided to Jeff Kipp, Senior Stock Assessment Scientist, at jkipp@asmfc.org by October 18, 2019. Any models submitted without complete, editable source code and input files will not be considered.

For more information about the assessment or attending the upcoming workshop (space is limited), please contact Caitlin Starks, Fishery Management Plan Coordinator, at cstarks@asmfc.org or 703.842.0740.

* Each state and federal agency is responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of its data and deciding who has access to its confidential data. In the case of our stock assessments and peer reviews, all analysts and, if necessary, reviewers, have been granted permission by the appropriate agency to use and view confidential data. When the assessment team needs to show and discuss these data, observers to our stock assessment process are asked to leave the room to preserve confidentiality.

A ‘long, creeping change’: As climate warms, Virginia fisheries struggle to adapt

June 24, 2019 — George Washington had few dietary preferences, save one: he was “excessively fond” of fish.

Luckily for the president, his perch at Mount Vernon afforded him an easy opportunity to indulge.

The Potomac, he recorded in 1793, was “well-stocked with various kinds of fish in all Seasons of the year, and in the Spring with Shad, Herring, Bass, Carp, Perch, Sturgeon, etc. in great abundance. … The whole shore, in fact, is one entire fishery.”

Today, Mount Vernon still overlooks the Potomac, but the species that call Virginia waters home are increasingly different due to something Washington couldn’t have foreseen: climate change.

“It’s hard to manage fisheries to begin with, [and] in the past we’ve always considered the climate stable,” said Patrick Geer, deputy chief of fisheries management for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission. “But now that theory of a stable climate and environment has been taken out.”

As global air temperatures warm, so too do global waters. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the temperature of the ocean’s surface has risen an average of 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit every decade since the beginning of the 20th century. And the Chesapeake Bay is estimated to be warming even faster, at an average rate of 1.2 degrees every decade since the 1980s.

Increasingly, that is making environments inhospitable for fish. In reaction, populations on the East Coast are shifting northward and eastward, leaving commercial fishermen and states who have long relied on their presence with lighter nets — and fears of lighter coffers.

Some of those fears are justified. The classic cautionary tale is that of New England’s northern shrimp fishery, which crashed precipitously around 2012 and was closed in 2014 by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the governmental body that oversees the management of fisheries in state waters from Maine to Florida. In February 2018, the ASMFC extended the moratorium to 2021 in an announcement that linked the collapse to warming ocean temperatures and broached the possibility of a future in which “the stock has no ability to recover.”

Such regional collapses may become more frequent in coming years, while at the same creating more favorable environments for other species.

“In any one region, some species will experience improving environmental conditions that may result in increased available habitat and increased species productivity, while other species will experience the opposite and perhaps decline in abundance,” the National Marine Fisheries Service declared in its 2015 Climate Science Strategy.

Or, as Geer put it, “For any given area and for any given species, there will be winners and losers.”

Read the full story at The Virginia Mercury

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

NEW JERSEY: ‘We don’t put up with shad-haters.’ N.J. town throws oily fish its own festival and people are here for it

April 29, 2019 — Shad – Is it the tofu of the sea?

Not known as a delicious fish by itself, some people resort to mixing it with other ingredients to make it more palatable. In recent years at Shad Fest in Lambertville, Bell’s Tavern offered Shad & Shrimp Fritters. This year Caffe Galleria had Shad Tacos on their menu, but as of lunchtime on Saturday, had no takers.

We’re not trying to throw shade at shad, but let’s face it, who really hungers for the taste of this particular bony, oily fish?

Actually, we ran into some folks who do.

Read the full story at NJ.com