August 30, 2016 — An increasing number of fish kills like the four that occurred in New Jersey this past week are in the state’s future if officials don’t take steps to improve the water quality, environmentalists warned.
The die-off of more than a million peanut bunker since Aug. 22 along the waterways of Raritan Bay and Sandy Hook Bay in Monmouth County and Great Bay in Ocean County were caused by a lack of sufficient levels of oxygen for the fish to survive. But human activities on land have helped contribute to that oxygen deficiency, said L. Stanton Hales, director of the Barnegat Bay Partnership.
Hales, who has studied New Jersey’s waterways for more than two decades, said that while fish kills caused by low dissolved oxygen levels are naturally occurring events, they are now exacerbated by the deteriorating conditions of the state’s waterways.
“These things can happen naturally, but they’re made worse by everything we’re doing (on land),” he said.
The state Department of Environmental Protection has said the fish kills in Monmouth and Ocean counties were caused by too many peanut bunker – a juvenile form of Atlantic menhaden – in water that had too little oxygen because of warm temperatures.
Bob Considine, a spokesman for the DEP, has said the number of Atlantic menhaden has been “extremely high” this year, the highest it has been in a decade off the Atlantic coast.
Data from the past few years shows that spawning of Atlantic menhaden has been high because of favorable conditions, including water temperatures, salinity and food availability for them, said Tina Berger, spokeswoman for the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.
She said there are about 3 billion pounds of Atlantic menhaden off the Atlantic coast and national fisheries requirements limit the total catch allowed to about 416.5 million pounds a year.