Jon Hurdle reports for NJ Spotlight:
The iconic shad, a fish that fed George Washington’s army and sustained later generations of Americans, is breeding in the Delaware River in numbers not seen in almost four decades, indicating that water quality has improved and dams have been removed to allow many more of the fish to return to their spawning grounds.
The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection said Monday that the number of juvenile shad counted at various location in the Upper Delaware this summer was at its highest in 38 years of monitoring. The approximately 24,500 young shad were about three times as many as a year earlier, and almost 10 times the number recorded in 2013.
In this year’s spring shad run, when fish return from the ocean to spawn in the river’s shallow upstream water, the total number of fish recorded at a fishery in Lambertville, Hunterdon County, was 1,262, the ninth-highest in 92 years, the DEP said.
At another location in Hunterdon County, the number of shad caught by netting this summer exceeded that for the last five years combined.
The numbers represent a strong recovery after sharp declines for the species in the 1950s and 1960s, when heavy pollution slashed oxygen in the lower river near Philadelphia to a level that stopped many fish swimming upstream to spawn.
Better wastewater management
Since then, tighter controls on wastewater treatment plants and sources of industrial pollution have allowed oxygen levels to recover to the point at which the fish are returning in numbers not seen in years.
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