American shad are in trouble along the Atlantic Coast and once again we find ourselves in “Crisis Fisheries ‘Management”” mode which only leaves me shaking my head, sadly, again. Scientists are saying that in the Susquehanna River, where anglers have enjoyed yearly spring fishing, the shad population has dropped more then ninety percent (90%) over the last seven years. They can determine these counts by counting fish that take a ride on the fish ladders that have been installed at the Conowingo Dam.The fish ladder at the Conowingo Dam was built in 1991. By 1996 approximately37,516 fish were lifted, by 2001 that number increased to 193,574. This suggested that shad were once again not only returning to the Susquehanna River system, but were also having a high rate of spawning success in past years.  I remember the years of 2001 and 2002, the fishing on the Susquehanna Flats for the spring catch and release striped bass fishing was nothing less then spectacular. I think I fished twenty seven or twenty eight days of thirty day 2001 season. To miss the type of action that was happening would have been sinful.  Was it a coincidence that the shad population was increasing at the same time? I think not. Shad are not the primary diet of the striped bass during the spring run on the Susquehanna Flats as as stripers (or Rockfish as we commonly call them here in the Chesapeake) are primarily following the herring that move into the upper Chesapeake Bay waters, infesting rivers such as the Northeast and Elk River to spawn. However, I am sure it did not hurt to have an additional food source in the area that attacked more stripers. And I was lucky to have Wayne Blottenberger (probably one of the best shad anglers on the Susquehanna and Deer Creek) take me out a few times in 2001 and 2002. The shad fishing was spectacular, so much so that at times it was worth giving up a morning or evening of striped bass fishing to hit the shad. Hook up a big shad on light tackle or a fly rod and your in for a fight.

Unfortunately since those years were the good years over the last decade as since that time the shad numbers have significantly decreased. In 2006 the number of shad going through the Conowingo ladder decreased to 56,000 and then in 2007 it fell to 29,000. This year it’s estimated that the ladder lifted only 16,000 shad.

Erica Robbins, a fisheries management plan coordinator at the Atlantic Sates Marine Fisheries Commission,  was quoted in a recent article that I read saying,”We’ve seen decreases in American Shad at fish lifts all along the East Coast, suggesting it’s not just at the Conowingo Dam.” Some people and even fisheries managers have suggested the striped bass population has expanded and say the striped bass are eating the shad and putting a dent in the population. I am open to a lot of things, but I have to call bull&^%$ on that one. Dale Weinrich, manager of the fin fish program at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, agrees with my take, although he said it a little more diplomatically by saying, “Striped bass are probably not causing the precipitous decline along because the two species coexisted for thousands of years before humans arrived”. I am glad he said that because it saved me having to go back and recount history here about how striped bass and shad have in fact co-existed together in great numbers for a very long time.

A Quick Lesson on American Shad
American shad, like the salmons, is a classic an adromous fish-that is, one which is born in freshwater, goes to sea to grow to maturity and returns to freshwater to spawn. Males arrive on the spawning grounds first, followed closely by the females. Spawning begins when water temperatures exceed 12°C and peak activity occurs between 16 to 20°C. Spawning usually takes place in deep areas of a river where there are moderate to strong currents. During the spawning act, which occurs at night, a single female is accompanied by several males and they swim close to the surface, splashing and rolling. The eggs are released in open water where they are fertilized by the males. A single female may release up to 400,000 eggs, but the average is about 130,000 per female. The eggs are 2.5 to 3.5mm in diameter, transparent and slightly heavier than water. They are non-adhesive so they settle singly and are carried along by the current. Hatching takes place in eight to 12 days at temperatures of 11 to 15C or six to eight days at 17C. After spawning, the surviving, spent adults drop back to salt water and rejoin the ocean migratory population.

Larvae are about 10 mm long when they hatch, transparent and very slender. They spend their first summer in the river feeding on insects and planktonic crustacea. By autumn they are between 7 to 10 cm long, and when water temperatures drop to 15°C they move downstream and out to sea.

Shad remain at sea until they mature at age four or five years and attain a length of 40 to 50 cm. Most males mature at age four, most females by age five. Adults may spawn up to seven times and live to be 13 years old. The life history of an individual shad can be determined from its scales. Growth changes between fresh and salt water, winter and summer and at what age and how often the shad spawned can all be interpreted.

Shad at sea feed on planktonic organisms such as copepods, mysids and euphasids. During spawning migrations, adults eat little.

Shad are powerful swimmers and in feeding studies they have seldom been found as prey in the stomachs of large piscivorous animals. Seals follow the spawning runs into the mouths of rivers and take their share, and it is believed that sharks, such as the porbeagle, prey on shad. During recent studies, tags originally placed in shad were found in stomachs of cod and dogfish. These shad may have been weakened by the tagging and become more susceptible to predation.

Tagging studies in the early 1950s revealed that shad have an extensive northward migration in summer, then return to the southern part of their oceanic range in winter. The majority of shad were found to migrate between North Carolina and the Gulf of Maine and later analysis indicated they followed or selected particular ocean temperatures during migration. By swimming north in spring and summer and south in fall and winter, shad are able to maintain themselves in the 13 to 18°C ocean isotherm. This appears to be their preferred temperature. During the course of this migration a shad from the St. John’s River, Florida would travel 4,500 km in a single year.

Perhaps even more exciting developments have occurred during the last six years. Scientists from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, working in the muddy waters of the upper Bay of Fundy, an area once thought to be almost devoid of fish, found large numbers of ocean-feeding shad occurred there during summer. Tagging studies revealed these shad originated from rivers along the entire east coast of North America, and for two or three months every summer a good portion of all east coast shad at sea were concentrated in this one small area. Rather than stopping in the Gulf of Maine as was originally thought, the main body of ocean-migrating shad move either into the upper Bay of Fundy or along the eastern coast of Canada into the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, and as far north as Nain, Labrador. Of the three regions where shad occur in summer (all in Canadian waters) the upper Bay of Fundy is apparently most important. Just as salmon born in eastern Canadian rivers go north to Greenland for the summer, American shad from eastern United States rivers come north to the Bay of Fundy. One reason they are obvious in this region is the turbidity of the water. In clear ocean water, shad usually remain at depths of 100 to 200 m, where they find their preferred level of light intensity. Since they are in deep water they are seldom encountered. In the upper Bay of Fundy the extreme turbidity of the water moves the preferred light intensity zone in to shallow depths (less than 10 m). This makes the shad accessible to fishermen and their presence obvious.

The migration of American shad in the Bay of Fundy is complex. Shad destined to spawn in the local rivers (Annapolis, Shubenacadie, Saint John) arrive first in late April. During late May and early June immature, mature and spent ocean-feeding shad arrive in large numbers. The shad migrate around the Bay of Fundy in a counterclockwise direction, occurring off Nova Scotia in spring, at the head of the bay during summer, and off New Brunswick in the fall. Duration of the shad run in Minas Basin is from June to August, in Cumberland Basin, June to October.

Tag returns indicate these shad represent all the river populations of eastern North America. Shad have an acute sense of homing, similar to salmon returning to the river where they were born. Of 12,000 shad tagged and released in the upper Bay of Fundy, there were 55 (8.3 per cent) tag returns from Canadian marine locations, 175 (26.4 per cent) from coastal United States, 69 (10.3 per cent) from Canadian rivers and 365 (55 per cent) from United States rivers. As many as one million shad may occur in an embayment like Cobequid Bay at high tide during the height of the summer run. It is estimated that five to 10 million shad may migrate through the upper Bay of Fundy during a summer.

  CommercialFishing for American Shad
The major commercial fisheries for shad are found in the large spawning rivers on the east coast (Saint John, Miramichi, St. Lawrence) and in the embayments of the upper Bay of Fundy. No substantial commercial fishery developed on the Canadian Pacific coast after the shad introduction, but large landings are now made to the south in the United States.

Riverine commercial fisheries are usually concentrated in or near the estuary to exploit mature shad returning to spawn. The fishing season is only for a short period in spring. Shad are captured using drift or fixed gillnets, trap nets or scoop nets (Annapolis River, Nova Scotia). These are valuable fisheries since female shad “roe” or “eggs” are the most sought-after item. During the spawning season, landed value of female shad is often over $2.50 per kg.

The marine fisheries in the upper Bay of Fundy and the St. Lawrence estuary exploit non-spawning, ocean-feeding shad during the summer. These summer fisheries for shad are unique and occur only in Canada because of the combination of ocean habitat (turbid water) and the northward migration of all east coast shad. Shad are captured here using drift or fixed gill nets or large intertidal fish weirs.

The shad fishery has existed in Atlantic Canada since the earliest arrival of Europeans. The weir fishery on the tide flats of the upper Bay of Fundy started before 1750. Many writers have described the abundance of shad in this region and the relative ease with which primitive or simple capture methods could take up to 100,000 shad on a single tide. During the late 1800s a large export trade in salt shad existed between the upper Bay of Fundy and the Eastern United States. At the time it was one of the most valuable fisheries in the Maritimes.

Between 1870 and 1900, annual shad landings for the upper Bay of Fundy were 200 to 400 metric tons (t). Landings in peak years were as large as 1300 t. This was about two-thirds of the total Canadian shad landings. After 1900, landings declined drastically as a result of decreased shad abundance and have remained at low levels to the present. Originally it was thought the decline was due to overfishing and the fishery was closed between 1919 and 1923. This action did not result in regeneration of the fishery and the recent work linking these ocean shad to eastern United States stocks indicates the decline was due to the loss of habitat in the major United States rivers. Pollution and damage of major rivers like the Delaware and Susquehanna caused their shad populations to decline to negligible numbers.

Landings from Canadian rivers have fluctuated widely during the last 100 years. The majority of landings have been from the Saint John and the St. Lawrence rivers. In some years, landings have exceeded 300 t, but the average is usually about 100 t.

Since the 1960s, however, landings have been uniformly low in all shad fisheries, marine and freshwater. Unfortunately, a large part of the perceived decline is due to a lack of demand for shad in the marketplace rather than a lack of abundance. The bony nature of the flesh and increased availability of other fish has led to decreased acceptance by consumers. Demand for the roe, however, is increasing and fishing effort probably will increase to meet this demand.
(the above lesson on shad was taken from Fisheries and Oceans, Canada)

Fishing for and/or keeping American Shad has been banned in Maryland and some Pennsylvania waters, but not in New Jersey, Delaware or other Atlantic States. So I have to ask why in the world is keeping shad not banned in these other states. I spare the bandwidth and your time and save that long explanation for another time; short version, you guessed it, politics leading to mismanagement. What is happening to the American Shad? I’d suggest that it’s a combination of things, 1) pollution and loss of habitat, 2) overfishing somewhere. Somewhere I would bet shad are being commercially fished for or are a victim of being by-catch for another species being targeted where these shad happen to be during that time.  Marine fisheries biologists and fisheries conservationists agree.  I always say this to people, the math is simple here folks, so easy my nine year old niece says its not even a hard question for her third grade Friday math tests. Visualize a graph, if pollution and loss of habitat is going up/increasing and we continue to harvest at current levels, generally fishing right at the total maxim yield (which is also ridiculous, but another story for another day’s blog), fish populations will decrease. Once that cycle starts the decrease will not be linear, but rather exponential in subsequent years. Take the Chesapeake Blue Crab situation we have here in the Bay right now as a case in point.We harvested 60% of the population every year for several years (that is 20% above the total allowable maxim, but hey thank the fisheries “managers” for that). Guess what happened, you guessed it, we have basically a total collapse of the Chesapeake Blue Crab population. Another crisis by management deal, but at least they are doing something. See my post on the Chesapeake Blue Crab deal here

Where are we today, well I am told the fisheries commision is planning public hearings to consider whether uniform restrictions are needed. Due process and the red tape assocaited can do what it needs to do, but the answer is pretty simple; shad are migratory, we know that, it’s a fact, of course uniform restrictions are needed. Just as we do with waterfowl, we manage this migratory population as a whole. We need to do the same thing with shad. Otherwise we are doing nothing other then re-allocating the catch to another area and/or user group. That is not management of the population, well maybe it’s an attempt at management, but if it was a paper on management and I was asked to grade it, I’d give it an “F”. The shad decreasing population writing was on the wall, why we have waited until now to do something is just another train wreck,but at least we are doing something now. I just hope it’s not too late.

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