The Founding Fish (6 page)
Authors: John McPhee
After three years in the Marine Corps, Kynard majored in English at Millsaps College, Jackson, and double-majored in biology. A moment was fast arriving when, as a biologist, he would have to decide between fish and mammals. It was not a long moment. “Fish lend themselves to getting up close and personal,” he says. “I want to be able to understand as closely as I can what's going on with these guys. Fishâbecause of their limited sensory ability and limited ability to get away from youâwould lend themselves to an up-close-and-personal approach more than, say, a beaver would.”
His choice was reinforced by eighteen postgraduate months at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. During this period, he married Janice Ray, whom he had met at Millsaps. (Their daughter, Kari, is a journalist. Their son, Brian, is a field technician at the Conte lab.) After Ocean Springs, Kynard went into a master's program at Mississippi State, where he worked on the behavior of mosquito fish and their physiological resistance to DDT. Somewhere along the line, he came upon a book called “Behavioral Aspects of Ecology,” by Peter Klopfer, found himself reading the whole of it in one night, and decided that behavior was going to be his field. “I was ready to be imprinted.”
Imprinted and advised. His “major professor,” a herpetologist who happened to come from Oregon, said to him, “Boyd, you're interested in evolution, and individuals, and behavior. You're not going to be able to find that in the South. I think you've got to get out.”
Kynard studied journals to see who was doing what on the behavioral ecology of fish. The field seemed to be concentrated in Honolulu, Miami, and Seattle. The School of Fisheries at the University of Washington was the largest and oldest in the United States. Kynard spent five and a half years there, completing a doctoral dissertation on the behavioral ecology of the threespine stickleback. He did his field work in a kayak on a glacial lake in the foothills of the eastern Cascades. He had a microscope, preserving jars, and other lab equipment in the kayak. He had covered the deck with a small platform he could lie on. After observing a fish long enough to note any idiosyncrasies, he would “collect him and collect his nest.”
Within six years, he was a tenured professor at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, where he created the undergraduate fisheries program and developed a strong ambition to establish a desert-fish institute. Arizona was not interested. In 1978, ignoring his tenure, he joined the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and was assigned to a unit in Massachusetts attached to the state university. He had never seen a shad. He was there to work in marine fisheries, but after he saw a shad he transferred into migratory fish. His work on shad and sturgeon has ranged, for the most part, between northern Connecticut and southern Vermont, but has led him in related ways to China, Brazil, Romania, Puerto Rico, and most shad rivers on the two sides of North America. In interior Puerto Rico, where flash floodsâ“flashy beyond belief”âcan turn a stream into frothing “liquid mud,” various fish have developed an ability to go back and forth from fresh to salt as often and as rapidly as they need to. In Pennsylvania and Maryland, Kynard
helped the shad specialist Richard St. Pierre work out the restoration program that has to make its way through four huge dams in the Susquehanna River. As a representative of the United States government, he has worked with “high-level conservation officials” in China to illuminate the life histories of migrating Chinese fish. His research in Brazil has been similar. Willy Bemis has said, “When most people are confronted with new environments, their eyes glaze over. It's all too much for a while. My impression is that Boyd goes into a new environment and begins making original observations immediately.”
helped the shad specialist Richard St. Pierre work out the restoration program that has to make its way through four huge dams in the Susquehanna River. As a representative of the United States government, he has worked with “high-level conservation officials” in China to illuminate the life histories of migrating Chinese fish. His research in Brazil has been similar. Willy Bemis has said, “When most people are confronted with new environments, their eyes glaze over. It's all too much for a while. My impression is that Boyd goes into a new environment and begins making original observations immediately.”
Kynard is the only American in the Danube Delta Research Institute. When I went shad fishing with him in South Hadley in May, 1999, he was still feeling traces of jet lag after flying home from Romania. Carrying 55â75-kilohertz hydrophones, he had spent three weeks tracking sturgeon up the Danube, with Dr. Radu Suciu and a three-man Romanian support team. Kynard was the river pilot. It was his boat. He had bought it in Arkansas and shipped it to Romania in a forty-five-foot box. The Romanians named it Sam, because it came from America. It had a seventy-five-horsepower outboard motor. Telling me some of this as he stood in the Connecticut that morning casting darts for shad, he said, “All my trips come back with some kinds of stories; they just don't include a war.”
Above river kilometre 130 is a zone of intense commercial fishing on the Danube, a drift gill-net fishery, where Kynard and company picked upâmainly from Gypsy fishermenâforty-four sturgeons on the spawning run. They were stellate sturgeons, averaging four and a half feet in length and fifteen to thirty pounds. In addition to fitting them with ultrasonic telemetry tags, it was highly advisable to get them out of the heaviest commercial gill-netting zone before releasing them back into the river. On Sam, which was six feet wide and twenty feet long, they could carry only six of the big fish at a time. They made a canvas sling, pinched it off at the
two ends like a brioche, rigged it to a twelve-volt pump that kept water in it, slung it from gunwale to gunwale, and carried six sturgeons upstream to river kilometre 178. They turned around and went back for more. When it was time for lunch, they ate green onions, feta, salami, bread, and jam. The Danube there is the border between Romania and Ukraine. They made the seven round trips in two days. When it was time for dinner, they ate green onions, feta, salami, bread, and jam. A hundred miles up the Danube from the Black Sea, all forty-four wired sturgeons went back into the river and most took off upstream. Kynard and the Romanians had no idea where stellates spawn in the Danube. Their purpose was to find out.
two ends like a brioche, rigged it to a twelve-volt pump that kept water in it, slung it from gunwale to gunwale, and carried six sturgeons upstream to river kilometre 178. They turned around and went back for more. When it was time for lunch, they ate green onions, feta, salami, bread, and jam. The Danube there is the border between Romania and Ukraine. They made the seven round trips in two days. When it was time for dinner, they ate green onions, feta, salami, bread, and jam. A hundred miles up the Danube from the Black Sea, all forty-four wired sturgeons went back into the river and most took off upstream. Kynard and the Romanians had no idea where stellates spawn in the Danube. Their purpose was to find out.
Going up the river, they stopped at one-kilometre intervals and put the hydrophones over the side. The hydrophones, with their long arms, were like boom mikes on a movie stage. There was no sound from the sturgeons. Kynard heard only the soft rustle of sediment moving in the river. A 0-1,000-hertz hydrophone is so sensitive that it can hear sand grains in motion, even in very quietly moving water, as Kynard would demonstrate to Willy Bemis, me, and others one day in Willy's boat in the Holyoke Pool. A relaxing and soothing sound, not unlike the recorded surf played above the cribs of infants, it was audible geomorphologyâyou were listening to mountains on their way to the sea. The sound is the signature of rivers, Kynard said. The Danube's differs from the Yangtze's, the Yangtze's from the Connecticut's. He had never heard the Yukon River. With its great load of glacial Hourâjagged particles of fresh-ground rockâthe Yukon would sound like a chain saw.
At the Danube River's kilometre 250, he had not caught up with the sturgeons. Before long, the Danube, having crossed eastern Romania, became the boundary between Romania and Bulgaria. At river kilometre 500, he had still not heard the sturgeons, nor at 600. The Danube is a braided river, full of islands, and Sam
the fishing boat tracked all channels and both sides of islands as well as the left and right banks. In all, Kynard figures, he tracked about fifteen hundred kilometres, stopping once a kilometre to listen for the fish. Kynard and company camped out all the way. Each morning for breakfast, they had green onions, feta, salami, bread, and jam.
the fishing boat tracked all channels and both sides of islands as well as the left and right banks. In all, Kynard figures, he tracked about fifteen hundred kilometres, stopping once a kilometre to listen for the fish. Kynard and company camped out all the way. Each morning for breakfast, they had green onions, feta, salami, bread, and jam.
This was at the height of the 1998-99 Kosovo war, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was bombing Serbia intensely. Danube kilometre 830 is the Serbian border. On the east side of the river, Romania continues, but on the west side Bulgaria ends and Serbia begins. When Sam had progressed as far as Calafat (Romania) and Vidin (Bulgaria), which flank the Danube at kilometre 815, the hydrophones had still heard nothing from the sturgeons' acoustic tags. Spawning sturgeons swim side by side in pairs. In Kynard's words, “They have a form of communication that is probably tactile.” The male has a large anal fin, which cups the milt. The milt and the caviar are blended by the current. Ichthyologists would not call the eggs caviar. A single female sturgeon may carry a million five hundred thousand eggs. Sturgeons engaged in sex and simultaneously broadcasting to hydrophones will outbolero “Bolero.”
As the boat had come ever nearer to Serbia, other traffic had diminished on the river. Along the Bulgarian side were towers, in which were guards equipped with machine guns and telescopes. “The Bulgarians were not happy about the hydrophones on their side of the river.” When the guards reached for the telescopes, it was not clearâfrom the waterâif they were reaching for the telescopes or the guns. Sam had a cabin enclosure and looked pretty much like a fishing boat, but Kynard, in earphones sitting by a receiver with a hydrophone shaft sticking out a window into the water, created a somewhat martial impression. In a specialized way, he had become known up and down the Danube, but not to these Bulgarian tower guards. Even the Hungarians, isolated by dams
and far to the north, were aware of his Romanian project. They had asked him to come to Hungary and track the sterlet sturgeon, a freshwater species, because sterlet is good caviar. Kaluga sturgeon, pallid sturgeonâthere are numerous species of sturgeon and four genuses, three of which are subjects of studies by Kynard. See Bemis, W E., and B. Kynard (1997), “Sturgeon Rivers: An Introduction to Acipenseriform Biogeography and Life History,”
Environmental Biology of Fishes
48:167-183. The acipenseriform sturgeons are the most typical and common: in North America, the shortnose, Atlantic, lake, white, and green; the sevruga and beluga in, for example, the Black and Caspian Seas. At Galati, on the Romanian Danube, Kynard spoke at a 1998 symposium involving all the Danube countries. He advocated a Danube River compact for sturgeon conservation.
and far to the north, were aware of his Romanian project. They had asked him to come to Hungary and track the sterlet sturgeon, a freshwater species, because sterlet is good caviar. Kaluga sturgeon, pallid sturgeonâthere are numerous species of sturgeon and four genuses, three of which are subjects of studies by Kynard. See Bemis, W E., and B. Kynard (1997), “Sturgeon Rivers: An Introduction to Acipenseriform Biogeography and Life History,”
Environmental Biology of Fishes
48:167-183. The acipenseriform sturgeons are the most typical and common: in North America, the shortnose, Atlantic, lake, white, and green; the sevruga and beluga in, for example, the Black and Caspian Seas. At Galati, on the Romanian Danube, Kynard spoke at a 1998 symposium involving all the Danube countries. He advocated a Danube River compact for sturgeon conservation.
In Calafat and Vidin in May, 1999, there was not much going for the compact. The Romanian border military at Calafat told Kynard and company not to proceed, and made them sign a paper stating, in effect, their awareness that NATO was attacking more than fish. They pushed on. Kynard listened to the water, hearing nothing. As the boat drew closer to the Serbian border, absolutely all other activity disappeared. More kilometres, more silence. They kept going, and stopping to listen. “The river was deserted. There were no boatsâzero. It was a war zone.” They kept going, and stopping to listen, until they heard bombs.
Emplaced in bedrock between Romania and Serbia, at river kilometre 985, is a dam called Iron Gate II. Nothing swims past it. Having failed to catch up with his forty-four sturgeons, Kynard decided that they might have gone on to spawn at the dam. He speculates, “Maybe all sturgeon-spawning in the Danube is in Serbia, because they spawn over rocky bottoms, from gravel upward. Basically, the war stopped me from finding out.”
AMENDING NATURE
O
n the Pamunkey River, in earliest Virginia, a cockarouse was any Pamunkey who could wade into the river and cinch a noose over a sturgeon's tail, and then hang on, even if the sturgeon hauled him under water, and ultimately bring the fish to the riverbank. Atlantic sturgeon in the Pamunkey River were eight feet long. They came up in spring with the run of shad.
n the Pamunkey River, in earliest Virginia, a cockarouse was any Pamunkey who could wade into the river and cinch a noose over a sturgeon's tail, and then hang on, even if the sturgeon hauled him under water, and ultimately bring the fish to the riverbank. Atlantic sturgeon in the Pamunkey River were eight feet long. They came up in spring with the run of shad.
The tribe numbered a thousand then. Sixty live on the Pamunkey reservation nowâtwelve hundred acres in an oxbow bend of the river, in the tidewater plain not far from Richmond. They slow-cook shad in two sheets of foil, six hours at two hundred and fifty degrees, dissolving the smaller bones. They scramble shad roe in their scrambling eggsâa whole set of roe with two eggs. Season it with salt and pepper only. Mix it well, and fry it. You leave Rose Garden on Route 113 and go southwest five or six miles through a network of small roads with names like Powhatan Trail and Pocahontas Trail. You pass near Powhatan's grave. It is not known if Powhatan ever was a cockarouse or how he liked his shad. His brother Opechancanoe was the leader of the Pamunkey tribe, while Powhatan ruled over many peoples as a kind of tyrant king. Powhatan was described as a tall, well-proportioned man with a sour look, and he presided over the Powhatan Confederacyâamong whose thirty-odd tribes the Pamunkeys were the largest
and most powerful. At night, he posted four tall guards at the corners of his house, with orders to call out to each otherâone to the next one, round and roundâwhile he slept. And while his daughter Pocahontas slept. English colonials named the river York, but the Pamunkeys rejected the idea and have gone on rejecting it for several centuriesâthe Pamunkey becomes the York only in its last thirty miles. (The Powhatan River, a little south, became the James.) In 1614, Pocahontas was baptized Rebecca in order to marry the colonist John Rolfe. He took Rebecca home to England. She met King James and Queen Anne. Rebecca died in Gravesend at the age of twenty-two.
and most powerful. At night, he posted four tall guards at the corners of his house, with orders to call out to each otherâone to the next one, round and roundâwhile he slept. And while his daughter Pocahontas slept. English colonials named the river York, but the Pamunkeys rejected the idea and have gone on rejecting it for several centuriesâthe Pamunkey becomes the York only in its last thirty miles. (The Powhatan River, a little south, became the James.) In 1614, Pocahontas was baptized Rebecca in order to marry the colonist John Rolfe. He took Rebecca home to England. She met King James and Queen Anne. Rebecca died in Gravesend at the age of twenty-two.
Her name Pocahontas lives on among women of her tribe, whose houses range from suburban brick colonials with two-car garages to wooden places that seem run-down, rural, and old. They are spread among fields of cotton, running to the river's edge. The Pamunkeys' seventeenth-century treaty with the colonial government of Virginia stated that the tribe was to “enjoy their wonted conveniences of oystering, fishing and gathering tuccahoe, curtenemons, wildoats, rushes, puckone, or anything else for their natural support, not useful to the English ⦔ Evidently not useful to the English was the American shad. By the nineteenth century, the spring migration had become a commercial asset for the natives as well as a subsistence resource. Shad became so significant in the tribal economy thatâin 1918âthe Pamunkeys set up a shad hatchery “to put fish back into the river.” This was foresight on a Nostradamian scale. For something like seven decades while runs declined in East Coast rivers for various reasons, including stream pollution and ocean intercept fisheries (commercial boats offshore), shad continued to flourish in the Pamunkey River. Toward the end of the twentieth century, Maryland closed its waters of the Chesapeake Bay to shad fishing, and soon the Potomac and all rivers farther down in Virginia were closed as well, with the exception
of tribal subsistence fishing in the Pamunkey. Alarmed by the declines in neighboring rivers, the Pamunkeys tore down the original hatchery and built a much larger one.
of tribal subsistence fishing in the Pamunkey. Alarmed by the declines in neighboring rivers, the Pamunkeys tore down the original hatchery and built a much larger one.
It is a plain gray building on pilingsâa long dock behind it, reaching into the quiet current of a meander bend. This was an October day, off-seasonâI was stopping by on my way to Norfolkâand no one was there. Ivy Bradley soon arrived in his pickupâa tall, whitish-haired, strong-looking man who had lived on the reservation all his life and was among the managers of the hatchery. Retired, he had long commuted to Richmond, where he installed sprinkler systems in large new buildings. He said that when the shad come up the river he and the others go out in johnboats with drift nets six hundred feet long.
The river is about a quarter of a mile wide, thirty to forty feet deep. They have six boats, fifteen nets, all working at once. They fish a mile of the river, going both ways with the ebb and the flow. The salt line is far downriver but the fresh waters around the reservation are pushed up and pulled down by the ocean tides. Shad are milling when they spawn, in early to late evening, so that is when the boats are out and the nets are in the riverâover the spawning beds of Lester Manor Reach, of Docks Island Reach, of Rockahock Reach, of Lay Landing Reach. In a very good session, Ivy Bradley said, the nets will trap eighty female spawners. “When the tide stops, and the net is vertical, that's when the most fish are caught.”
They strip the fish right there in the boats, pinching the body behind the head and sliding their fingers toward the anus as if they are squeezing pastry from tubes. In this way, they draw roe and milt, and they admix the two in a plastic bucket. The milt is so white it looks like crème anglaise. The roe is often likened to applesauce. They bring the buckets to the hatchery and let them stand for an hour. The mixture swells, as the barely visible eggs become diaphanous amber pearls. Three litresâa hundred thousand
eggsâgo into hatching jars on the sides of tanks. Four days later, sac fry appear and fall into the tanks, where they absorb their sacs and are then fed microscopic shrimp. On any given day in spring, the hatchery is nurturing two and a half million shad, he saidâin all, about seven million in the eight-week season. Their survival rate indoors is at least twenty times what it would be in the river. They live in the tanks seventeen days, and are now and again “dyed” or “marked” with tetracycline, which is absorbed in calcium structures, notably the hard calcareous bodies known as otoliths, in the shads' inner ears. Otoliths have daily growth rings, so you can write on them a kind of bar code with tetracycline, and if you know how to read the otolith you can tell, among other things, where a shad comes from and the day on which it was born. At the age of three weeks, Bradley told me, the fry are released through the bottoms of the tanks and descend through pipes to the Pamunkey River.
eggsâgo into hatching jars on the sides of tanks. Four days later, sac fry appear and fall into the tanks, where they absorb their sacs and are then fed microscopic shrimp. On any given day in spring, the hatchery is nurturing two and a half million shad, he saidâin all, about seven million in the eight-week season. Their survival rate indoors is at least twenty times what it would be in the river. They live in the tanks seventeen days, and are now and again “dyed” or “marked” with tetracycline, which is absorbed in calcium structures, notably the hard calcareous bodies known as otoliths, in the shads' inner ears. Otoliths have daily growth rings, so you can write on them a kind of bar code with tetracycline, and if you know how to read the otolith you can tell, among other things, where a shad comes from and the day on which it was born. At the age of three weeks, Bradley told me, the fry are released through the bottoms of the tanks and descend through pipes to the Pamunkey River.
I asked him if he ate shad roe. “Salted real good,” he said. “And wrapped in bacon. And wrapped in wax paper. Deep fried.”
T
he first time I had seen sexual secretions expressed from the bodies of captured shad was years before at Smithfield Beach, on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, just above Tocks Island. This was below the Kittatinny ridge and near the improbable gap where the river has severed the spine of the deformed Appalachiansâa scene that inspired some of the finest work of the so-called Hudson River School. But shad spawn at night, the johnboats were lighted by twelve-volt batteries, and all was dark above the trees. Under the eye of Richard St. Pierre, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a team of biologists hung gill nets in the river, all parallel to the currentâeleven six-foot-high nets, each two hundred feet long. Placed at several distances from shore and held up by floats, they resembled lanes for racing shells. Because spawning
shad go back and forth crosscurrent while other fish are travelling upstream and down, these axial underwater fences select the shad. From time to time, we went out in the johnboats to pick the nets, where the lanes zigged and zagged from the pressure of fish. They were dumped into tubs of clear water, which was quickly reddened by their damaged gills. The Delaware teems with fish of countless species. In four hours, we collected one catfish, one sucker, and sixty American shad.
he first time I had seen sexual secretions expressed from the bodies of captured shad was years before at Smithfield Beach, on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, just above Tocks Island. This was below the Kittatinny ridge and near the improbable gap where the river has severed the spine of the deformed Appalachiansâa scene that inspired some of the finest work of the so-called Hudson River School. But shad spawn at night, the johnboats were lighted by twelve-volt batteries, and all was dark above the trees. Under the eye of Richard St. Pierre, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a team of biologists hung gill nets in the river, all parallel to the currentâeleven six-foot-high nets, each two hundred feet long. Placed at several distances from shore and held up by floats, they resembled lanes for racing shells. Because spawning
shad go back and forth crosscurrent while other fish are travelling upstream and down, these axial underwater fences select the shad. From time to time, we went out in the johnboats to pick the nets, where the lanes zigged and zagged from the pressure of fish. They were dumped into tubs of clear water, which was quickly reddened by their damaged gills. The Delaware teems with fish of countless species. In four hours, we collected one catfish, one sucker, and sixty American shad.
Ashore, under floodlights, the roe shad were squeezed over bowls, which rapidly accumulated the pulsing jets of eggs. After the eggs stopped coming, the fish were tossed into a large waste receptacle. In the paired ovaries of a big female shadâher roe sacsâthere might be three hundred thousand eggs. Rare specimens have carried twice that, and the average is a quarter of a million. There at Smithfield Beach, if a fish was “green” and nothing came forth when she was stripped, she went into the receptacle. A fish whose eggs have not ripened is known as a green roe, a green fish, a hard shad. Eggs ripen outward from the innermost part of the roe sac. The ripe eggs pass through a tube along the sac that leads to the anus. The roe shad spawns when she is ready. Spawning takes place in different places across a sequence of nights, while the sacs progressively ripen and deplete. So even a “good ripe fish”âbeing stripped by human handsâwould yield little more than forty thousand eggs, and the rest, with the mother, went into the can. The plan, St. Pierre said, was “to shoot for a million eggs”âin the season, ten million eggs in ten nights of stripping. The aim of this annual endeavor wasâcourtesy of the Delawareâto revive the run in the Susquehanna River.
The buck shad are always ripe, like buck rabbits and buck fruit flies, not to mention other species close to home. One buck shad could fertilize the river, or so it seems, as his white stream goes over the eggs in the bowl. Stir with index finger. Each egg has a microscopic aperture. One sperm enters, and the aperture seals.
As the eggs swelled up golden, and clear as glass beads, St. Pierre said, “Applesauce turns to pearls. If they're white, they're dead, and if they're red they're no good.” For an hour, the bowls were immersed in floating tubs designed to bathe the eggs gently in flow from the river.
As the eggs swelled up golden, and clear as glass beads, St. Pierre said, “Applesauce turns to pearls. If they're white, they're dead, and if they're red they're no good.” For an hour, the bowls were immersed in floating tubs designed to bathe the eggs gently in flow from the river.
I asked him to what extent the spring migration is affected by people who take shad from the river. At the time, in the Delaware, commercial fishing was taking fifty thousand shad, sport fishermen were keeping about sixteen thousand shad (and damaging a very large unknown number), and biologists were removing fifteen hundred.
“If fifty per cent of the run make it to spawning, you're o.k.,” he said.
“Do they spawn in tributaries?”
“Large ones, yes. If it looks like a mountain trout stream, no. If it's broad and sluggish, yes. Generally, shad are main-stem spawners. Everything about them is temperature-controlled-when they move, when they stop, when they spawn, where they go, when they strike and don't strike.”
They like to spawn over gravels and sands, in four to eight feet of water moving less than a foot a second. As they spawn, the males, at the surface, are splashing. They spread their cloud of milt around the emerging eggs. When fertilized and swollen, the eggs are slightly denser than water. Slowly, they sink. On the bottom, they roll along, bounce along, for several daysâthe time depending, as ever, on temperatureâbefore sac fry emerge, and soon become larval shad.
Salmon, after homing to their natal rivers, do not copulate just anywhere, as shad seem to by comparison. Salmon go back to the exact spot where they were born, and move rocks around in order to protect their eggs in fortresses called redds. While shad hatch in a few days, salmon eggs, buried under gravel, stay in the redd all winter and hatch the following spring. Larval salmon stay in the
redd. Moreover, young salmon stay around their birthplace for two years before taking off for the seaâplenty of time for detailed imprinting. Shad come down from the Gulf of Maine, and find the right river, but they do not form close identification with one place in the river. If a salmon was born in a hatchery, as a returning adult it will climb a fish ladder trying to get back into the hatchery.
redd. Moreover, young salmon stay around their birthplace for two years before taking off for the seaâplenty of time for detailed imprinting. Shad come down from the Gulf of Maine, and find the right river, but they do not form close identification with one place in the river. If a salmon was born in a hatchery, as a returning adult it will climb a fish ladder trying to get back into the hatchery.
Shad larvae, in their millions, darken the river and look like one-inch eels. Minnows eat them. Shiners eat them. Ninety per cent of fish in the river eat shad, and ninety per cent of what's in other fishes' stomachs will be larval shad. “After thirty to forty days, they go through metamorphosis and look like fish-shaped animals,” St. Pierre said. Fish-shaped animals look even more delicious than one-inch eels.
I asked St. Pierre what sort of diseases he had encountered in studying the species.
He said, “We have never found a disease in a wild shad. But remember, we're trained to look for trout diseases. We've never found a trout disease in a shad.”
His degree in fisheries science was from the University of Virginia, and he went into the science as a direct result of the fishing and scuba diving he did as a kid in Florida. Trim, six feet, he had closely cut hair, an intent narrow face, a soft low voice and contemplative manner. He had arrived early at Smithfield Beach and had fished with a hook and line until seven. When he works in other rivers, he takes his six-pound test and ultra-light. Below Troy and Albany, the mile-wide Hudson can look hopeless for fishing from the bank, but it failed to intimidate St. Pierre. “They don't know what they've got,” he said. Across the river from Catskill, he fished one evening from a ferry dock, where, despite the great breadth of water, sufficient current ran close to the eastern shore. Using a big dart for a long cast, he caught a nine-pound, nineounce roe shad. It was twenty-eight inches long and twenty-eight inches in maximum circumference. It was somewhat heavier than
the New York record shad. But St. Pierre is “not into that sort of thing” and did not report it.
the New York record shad. But St. Pierre is “not into that sort of thing” and did not report it.
Soon after midnight at Smithfield Beach, the last of more than a million eggs went into a plastic bag and were ready for shipment. There were five bags, each with five litres of eggs, and a college kid in a station wagon took off with them for Thompsontown, on the Juniata River. There are nine shad hatcheries in the United States, and Pennsylvania's is in Thompsontown, where people would be waiting when the eggs arrived at four in the morning. Incubated at sixty degrees, they would hatch in six days. Two-thirds of the young shad would be stocked in the Juniata, a major tributary of the Susquehanna, and the remaining third would go to Conowingo, the first dam above the Chesapeake Bay. If you are trying to restore American shad in a depleted river system, there is no better way to do it. In the nineteen-eighties, an attempt was made to plant adult shad from the Hudson River in the uppermost Susquehanna, near Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, and Owego, New York. In two days, the fish were out of the Susquehanna, swimming two hundred miles and tumbling down the spillways of four dams. “We've seen fish move a hundred miles a day in the Susquehanna in the wrong direction,” St. Pierre acknowledges. “If you put an adult shad in a strange river, the fish knows it's in the wrong place and takes off. It just boogies.”
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