May 2, 2012 – EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP — Matt Walker stood staring at his surf rod as if willing it to bend in the direction of the Great Egg Harbor Inlet.
Walker, 39, of Egg Harbor Township, reeled in a 32-inch striped bass last week at the foot of the Ocean City-Longport Bridge and was hoping to catch its big sister Saturday. He keeps some fish for his own dinner table during the year but gives a lot of it away to friends and family, he said.
“I catch a lot more striper than I eat. I’ll have it maybe once a month,” he said.
One 8-ounce serving of striped bass per month is all you should eat, if you follow the fish-consumption advisories issued by the Department of Environmental Protection. If you fall into a high-risk category, including women of child-bearing age, children and infants, the state advises you to not eat striped bass and other fish at all.
While the striped bass and other consumption advisories in New Jersey are not new, the DEP recently expanded the list to include 14 additional lakes and streams in the state because sampling showed that fish in those waterways may contain amounts of mercury, PCBs, dioxin or other contaminants at levels that are unsafe for consumption.
Mercury is considered a neurotoxin and can impair development in the central nervous system in children and can dull certain senses and cognitive functions in adults, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, were banned in 1979, but the chemicals continue to persist in the environment, accumulating in fatty tissues and sediments. PCBs are known to increase the risk of cancer and, in higher amounts, can affect the immune, reproductive, nervous and endocrine systems, according to the EPA.
Read the full story at the Press of Atlantic City.