It is found that American shad populations on the East Coast are at historic low and that concern the fishermen as well as the authority. An interstate commission is considering new restrictions on shad fishing from Florida to Maine. Due to depleted stock of shad there will be shad free annual shad festival on Hudson this year. Karin Limburg, a state College of Environmental Science and Forestry professor who has studied shad, told that they have been overfished for so long there’s not a lot of adults around to replenish the population.
It is fact that shad are a rare sort of fish that hatch in rivers but spend their adult lives in the ocean. They mature for several years at sea before heading up the river where they were born to spawn in the spring. It is said that shad populations declined in the 20th century amid overfishing and construction of river dams, which blocked spawning runs. As the losses mounted, Maryland in 1980 closed its shad fishery and Virginia followed in 1994, effectively closing the Chesapeake Bay.
According to the commission American shad stocks do not appear to be recovering. Bob Sadzinski, a fisheries biologist in Maryland, opined that most states have closed their directed shad fisheries and the stocks have not rebounded, so something else is going on. Kathy Hattala, a fisheries biologist for New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, told it’s possible that shad stocked in the rivers simply ended up in ocean gill nets. Three years later, there is no big reserve of fish in the ocean left to spawn in the rivers.
