April 24, 2013 — Despite a new ban on fishing for American shad in New Jersey rivers beyond the Delaware — part of a larger push along the Eastern Seaboard to study why the population has been in decline — it’s been a banner season so far for Steve Meserve, who operates the last shad fishery on the upper Delaware from a tiny island just north of the New Hope-Lambertville bridge, which bodes well for this weekend’s Shad Fest there.
American shad spend most of their life at sea, but return to their natal rivers in the spring to spawn. Meserve and his mostly volunteer crew — there’s little money to be had in shad, so it’s more compulsion than vocation — caught 164 fish on April 15, the largest haul by far in the last decade. In fact, he caught more shad that one day than he did for six of the last 10 seasons.
For comparison, the largest season-long haul on record is 9,288 in 1896. Hefty hauls continued through the 1930s, when pollution started to take its toll on Delaware River shad. A 2007 study showed an all-time low for American shad, mostly due to overfishing, habitat loss and degradation (sometimes due to damming), and bycatch (in which shad are swept up by fishermen targeting other species), which led the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to institute new policies to help the population recover, according to Kate Taylor, the senior fisheries management plan coordinator.
The Delaware River population is low but stable, so the New Jersey officials merely kept in place a limit of three fish a day for recreational fishermen. There isn’t enough data available for other rivers, so a ban on American shad fishing (outside of catch-and-release) is now in effect on the rest of the state’s rivers.
Read the full story at the Newark Star-Ledger