Shad in the Delaware face a problematic future

The Atlantic shad looks unremarkable, much like a kid’s drawing of a fish: shiny silver coat, fins, forked tail.

But it is the source of many anglers’ fascination. To know that feeling, read John McPhee, in his “The Founding Fish” (2002), which is all about shad. Here, he writes about their soul-stirring migration from the Atlantic up the Delaware:

“When it warms past forty Fahrenheit, they (the shad) begin their migration, in pulses, pods —males (for the most part) first. Soon a single sentence moves northwards with them — in e-mails, on telephones, down hallways, up streets — sending amps and volts through the likes of me. The phone rings, and someone says ‘They’re in the river.’”

McPhee praises the Delaware River as being the longest undammed river east of the Mississippi River and, as such, a paradise for shad seeking spawning grounds deep upriver and for the anglers who find them such a challenge.

Outlook is not looking good

Daniel Stich is a fan of shad, both as an angler and as professor in the biology department of SUNY Oneonta. He gave a presentation at the Friends of the Upper Delaware River conference recently that vibrated with his enthusiasm for the fish. But he was also sober about its future.

Simply put, it’s not looking good.

“The news is both good and bad in the Delaware,” Stich said. “There’s been no clear up or down (in population) since the last assessment.”

He added that the population is “depleted and not showing significant upward or downward trends as of the last assessment, which is better than really bad.”

Can you detect an optimist at work? But really, there’s no way to sugarcoat this: It’s bad news.

The assessment he’s referring to was in 2020 by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which concluded that the population was not sustainable. Essentially, new shad being spawned won’t make up for their rate of mortality.

So, will there be shad for Stich to fish as he gets older? Does he have children? What about them?

“Yes, I have children and they’ve grown up traipsing through the Delaware. Neither of them have ever caught a shad,” he said with a laugh.

Growing more serious and returning to his science side: “We don’t anticipate the biome recovering on its own.”

But there is another voice to listen to: Sheila Eyler, who works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Mid-Atlantic Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office.

She tempers the outlook for shad with a view that recognizes that shad are holding their own, despite some threats.

Asked if the prognosis is that shad will disappear from the Delaware River, she responded: “I hope not. The population is the lowest it’s ever been but it’s not going away.”

Going back to that 2020 assessment (which addressed the shad population in all rivers in its range, from Canada to Florida): “Multiple factors are likely responsible for shad decline, such as overfishing, inadequate fish passage at dams, predation, pollution, water withdrawals, channelization of rivers, changing ocean conditions, and climate change.”

That assessment was about the general state of East Coast shad. It mentions the problem of dams for shad. While there are no dams directly on the Delaware River, there are dams in streams that flow into the river, though those are coming down as stewards of riverways realize the good that undammed rivers provide.

Returning to Stich: “Even with all the assessment’s recommendations in place, we’re unlikely to see the bounty of the 1700s in my lifetime.”

Eyler agreed. But Eyler (and others) are working on the threats to the shad population in the Delaware River Basin Fish and Wildlife Management Cooperative, which, as the name suggests, is a cooperative among the four basin states, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Unfortunately, that cooperative doesn’t have its own website, but the Delaware River Basin Commission has an informative page about shad and managing shad in the Delaware River.

Facing numerous threats

Quick explainer about the 1700s: The reason why McPhee titled his book about shad “The Founding Fish” is because shad were a dietary mainstay for the residents of Philadelphia.

The spring run of shad was monumental for the whole watershed until the Industrial Revolution created an oxygen “block” that shad couldn’t get through but not before “the Basin once supported the largest harvest of American Shad on the Atlantic Coast from 1896 to 1901, where more than 3 million fish were harvested annually.” That’s from another great source of up-to-date information on shad: a report from the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary.

That report concludes, for our Delaware River shad: “Abundance declined rapidly in the following decades, and by the 1970s, the entire spawning population was estimated to range from 100,000 to 500,000 fish. Since the 1980s, populations have remained low, and recent assessments have determined that the level of mortality currently occurring in the population is too high to sustain current population levels.”

The causes for the decline of Delaware shad include a combination of past threats, like the oxygen block caused by wastewater treatment plants allowing too much nitrogen in the river. That block was the focus of work by the Delaware River Basin Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency and resulted in the recent promulgation of new rules about increasing oxygen in a section of the river.

It’s all swings and roundabouts when it comes to figuring out this famous fish’s future. Even as the basin works on lessening the dissolved oxygen block, Eyler points out that more development in the watershed generally can make conditions worse.

Another contributor to the high mortality rate: fish caught in the fish grates of power plant intake systems to draw water from the river for cooling. Likely at the heart of its decline is climate change and warmer waters, which affect not just the waters of the Delaware but the various sites where shad spend their winters in the Atlantic Ocean.

Eyler emphasized that great unknown: How hospitable will those warmer waters be for shad? Will they move to find colder waters and will the distance back to their spawning site be too great? And what’s the likely response of the phytoplankton that they feed on to those warming seas?

Another threat, at least in the past, has been commercial fishing, Eyler said, but that’s changing. She said that in the past three years, commercial landings per year have been under 200 pounds, and under 1,000 pounds per year since 2020.

Now, the cooperative is turning its sights on recreational shad fishing.

In big news for the shad and anglers, the cooperative is doing a creel survey next year, which hasn’t been done since 2002. (A creel survey is a way to gather data by interviewing anglers about their catch.)

Eyler praised the Delaware River Shad Fishermen’s Association as a partner in its aims to preserve the fish. “They are great advocates and understand the need to see what’s happening in the river.”

If there are fewer fish in the river, the cooperative can implement management restrictions: The creel limit now is two. It could limit it further, limit when anglers can fish and limit fishing to catch and release.

Though, she noted: “Shad are fragile. They can’t take too much handling. Even with catch-and- release, there’s a lot of stress in fighting for your life.”

Finding spawning hot spots

In addition to developing an accurate view of the shad in the Delaware River, another thread of optimism from Stich is the “latitudinal variability” of the Atlantic shad, which spawns in rivers from Canada to Florida. That might mean shad can withstand climate change better than other species.

And then a swing back to concern. In northern climates (like ours) there are plenty of instances of fish returning over several years to spawn. In Florida, they come upriver to spawn once and then die. Stich theorizes that might be a response to warmer waters than the fish might be best suited to.

In the Delaware, Stich has seen them in the East Branch of the Delaware River, far north above Hancock, N.Y. But its sensitivity to temperature is demonstrated by their relative absence from the West Branch, which is prized for its trout, a species that typically loves cold, clear water.

The 2020 assessment indicated that spawning most often occurred between Easton, Pa., and Hancock, N.Y. Stich remembered that in the 1960s a study showed a hotspot for shad spawning was at the Lordville/Equinox bridge.

As Stich tells the story, the fish receive cues from the river both in the run to return to their own natal waters, (as McPhee writes about) and when the young need to return to the ocean, usually several months after they’ve been spawned but just as the waters turn colder.

Most shad return to their natal waters (where the fish itself was spawned) to spawn, but there are often outliers from the Hudson or the Susquehanna populations. Stich celebrates these outliers as they “allow for natural variations on with evolutions can operate.”

Unlike, say, the salmon in the Northwest which are very specific about spawning only where they were spawned.

Stich explained further: “The more fish (of a specific species) return to specific sites, the more they are a collective genotype. When you have outliers, it mixes up a different cocktail of genes, making the species overall hardier.”

A source of fascination and enthusiasm

Part of the shad fascination, for both anglers and biologist, is the annual spawning run (the McPhee quote above) that, in the past, brought hundreds and thousands of shad upriver. In 2020, Matthew Best, a graduate student of Stich’s, wrote a blog post for the New York Chapter of the American Fisheries Society. (The “dart” referred to is a special hook ideal for shad fishing.)

“The shad would sometimes come to rest in the wake of the anglers’ legs before trudging on again upstream. One in any 20 might have paused to consider the allure of a pink shad dart before feigning left and dodging right on their way to spawn. It was at once some of the most frustrating and exciting work of the season. Rods in hand, they watched the pods move right past them as they presented beautiful dart after dart. But most shad proceeded single-mindedly, ever onward until the blue sheen on their silvery backs faded into the next upstream riffle beyond reach.”

Enthusiasm for shad fishing is infectious.

But another aspect of this famous fish deserves mention: How do they know when to begin their return journey back to the ocean? It’s one of those natural rhythms that we see, for example, in birds.

Back to Stich: “Juvenile shad undergo physiological changes in late summer/early fall that prepare them for saltwater entry. These changes make them unable to regulate salts in freshwater as temperature decreases, so they must move to saltwater to survive. It works evolutionarily because physiological changes are accompanied by behavioral changes (‘negative rheotaxis’) that are also ‘hard-wired’ evolutionarily and cause them to move downstream.”

But the fish that spawns such enthusiasm has got allies, like Stich and Eyler.

She admits that “we’re not in a great place right now, populations are pretty low, but the management cooperative is working hard to ensure there are shad here for future generations.”