Restoring River Herring Might Require Curtailing the Ocean Bycatch

The incredible amounts of silt that washed down the Hudson and Connecticut rivers after Irene probably didn't do much good for fish in those rivers. I blogged about it here, after asking Tom Lake, of the Hudson River Estuary Program, about it.

The long term affect probably won't be terrible, he told me: "that is why fish have so many thousands of progeny, to account for such unexpected losses."

Then he said, "They'll rebound, as soon as we close the coastal loopholes on their harvesting."

I let that remark pass until just now, when I saw, via Twitter, this piece, published in the Patriot-Ledger, which covers (I believe) the Quincy, Massachusetts, area. It was written by Steve Pearlman, coordinator of the Watershed Action Alliance of Southeastern Massachusetts. He wrote that efforts to restore historical spawning runs of blueback herring and alewives (such as the work Save the Sound and the state of Connecticut have been doing to build fish passages on Long Island Sound's tributaries) ...

... won’t truly succeed if river herring continue to be decimated at sea by corporate trawler fleets dragging football field size nets to catch entirely different species of fish: Atlantic herring. Their “incidental” catch of river herring is imperiling commercial and recreational fish such as cod and striped bass that depend on river herring as a key source of food.

A quarter of a million river herring were caught in a single tow by a mid-water trawler in New England in 2008, more fish than were counted in all but one Massachusetts herring run that year.

On Sept. 28, the New England Fishery Management Council meets in Danvers to vote on several approaches to minimize the accidental “bycatch” of river herring. But the few corporate fishing interests that benefit financially from ignoring the bycatch problem will try to stop the council from even considering options that could cost them a bit more to implement. Yet these very options could financially benefit small-scale commercial and recreational fishermen who are harmed by wholesale destruction of this critical part of the aquatic food chain.

The intercept fishery or bycatch fishery have been causing problems for river fish for decades.Let's hopet the fishery management council takes some action.

Spawning Help in North Branford and Success in Greenwich

Who knows why the number of spawning alewives and blueback herring in local rivers and streams has fallen so low? One theory is that striped bass restoration efforts have been so successful that the big fish (the stripers) are eating the little fish (the herring). Throughout Connecticut, the two most popular solutions are to remove dams or build fish ladders, to ease the upstream passage. And apparently it's working, at least in some locations:

This spring, in Greenwich, the Mianus River passageway saw a 12-fold increase in river herring — about 90,000 fish. News of the record migration spread rapidly along the shoreline.

Kim Martineau of the Hartford Courant dropped that nugget into the bottom of an interesting story (here) about a family in North Branford that, with state and Trust for Public Land help, is building a fish ladder on the part of the Farm River that passes through their property.

There are Plenty of Fish, Not Enough Fish, and Too Many Fish

Fish abundance is up, fish abundance is down. Conditions are improving in Long Island Sound, conditions are getting worse. Here’s evidence perhaps that when it comes to figuring out what’s going on in the natural world, we don’t really know what we’re talking about.

There are so many fish in the Sound that the number of seals that spend the winter here is really high (although when a reporter went out yesterday to cover a seal census, the seal counters didn't found no seals, and yet both the Greenwich and Stamford papers published his account, which tells you something about the economics of newspapers these days, namely that they are so short-staffed that when a reporter's story doesn't pan out, he has to write something anyway because the paper can't afford to send someone out on a story and then have him not write anything; but I digress). Here's what a fellow from the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk opined about fish and seals:

"The seals follow the fish, so if the fish population wasn't healthy, there wouldn't be seals," he said.

Yet there are so few blueback herring and alewives – both of which stage spring spawning runs up rivers from the Sound – that the Connecticut DEP has extended a ban on catching them. Once they were so abundant, as the colonists reported, that you could walk across a stream on their backs and not get your feet wet.

One of the reasons there are so few of these fish now, biologists suspect, is that there are so many fish – namely, striped bass, which eat the smaller herring. The reason there are so many striped bass is that once upon a time – say, 25 years ago – there were so few that officials made it illegal to catch them.

I think it was Barry Commoner who said that in the natural world, everything is connected to everything else.