Disappearance From State Waters Of Two Species Of Small Fish Swims Under The
Radar
Story
By STEVE GRANT and Photos By BOB MACDONNELL | The Hartford
Courant
December 4 2004
Another November morning, this one
tolerably warm, about 30 degrees at first light. Heather Fried and David Steven
Brown are waist deep in the Mystic River, as they are almost every day this time
of year.
For the first time in days, there is no strong wind blowing up
or down the river to make things difficult. It is bright, and the remaining
leaves on the trees dotting the surrounding hillsides are mostly gold, copper
and brown.
In chilly water, they are dragging a 40-foot net, hoping to
trap even a few tomcod or rainbow smelt, two fish species that in recent decades
have all but disappeared from Connecticut waters.
Not only have the two
species become scarce - particularly the smelt - but they also seem to have
slipped from the public consciousness. There are no chants of "Save the Smelt"
heard along the Connecticut shore.
On this day, in fact, were it not for
Fried, a University of Connecticut graduate student, and Brown, a UConn
undergraduate, it could almost seem the tomcod and smelt are forgotten fish.
When the net is pulled ashore, several times, it holds hundreds of tiny fish,
wriggling madly, but not a single tomcod or smelt.
In Connecticut waters,
at least, the situation for smelt, a small but tasty fish, is dire.
"We
are really convinced they are close to extinction," Fried said.
Were
these fish striped bass or shad, there would be an uproar. But smelt and tomcod
are small fish, typically under a foot, and any commercial or recreational
fishery for the species has collapsed.
But researchers are intrigued by
these species because they once were plentiful, and, significantly, their
decline may say something about the health of Long Island Sound and the state's
coastal rivers.
For two years Fried has been sampling rivers along the
Connecticut coast searching for the two species as part of a project sponsored
by the state Department of Environmental Protection. Tomcod can still be found,
but their numbers are tiny and the fish invariably young. Smelt are in worse
shape than anyone knew, and already they are classified by the state as a
threatened species.
"With smelt, it's really changed into a project
where we are verifying that they are close to gone in Connecticut waters," said
William Hyatt, director of the state DEP's inland fisheries division.
In
the Hudson River in New York, the situation may be worse.
John Waldman, a
biology professor at Queens College in New York who has long been involved in
Hudson River issues, said research conducted in recent decades suggested that
sometime about 1980 the smelt populations in the lower Hudson dropped sharply,
and crashed completely in the late 1990s. Between 1996 and 2000, yearly sampling
for smelt in the Hudson produced a total of 4 fish, he said.
"As far as I
know those are the last seen in the river," Waldman said. "I haven't heard of
any since then. It seems like these fish are now extinct in the Hudson
River."
As for the tomcod, "the overall trend is for long-term decline
over the last decade or two," he said.
There are thought to be a number
of possible reasons for the decline of the two species, and there is the
possibility that many factors are the cause. Degradation of their spawning areas
over the past century is one possible cause, including the construction of dams
that deny the fish access to upstream spawning beds.
Increased predation
from striped bass is another possibility, especially for the tomcod, which
remain close to shore and near the bottom, vulnerable to small schools of bass,
said Eric Schultz, an associate professor in the University of Connecticut
department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology who oversees the Connecticut
research.
Global warming is another suspect, especially because both
species are near the southern edge of their natural range and must have cold
waters. They are still sought after in Maine and Canadian waters, and smelt are
still sold in some fish markets.
Fried noted that it appears the fish
have been especially uncommon since some mild winters in the
1990s.
"Sometimes you have to pay attention to these fringe species. How
they do can sometimes tell you more about environmental trends than a species"
in the heart of its range, Hyatt said.
"If they have fallen off the
precipice, what is that telling us about the system?" Schultz asked.
Both
species have had their ups and downs, though the decline in recent years is far
more dramatic.
A 1922 report on the smelt by the State Board of Fisheries
and Game lamented "the disappearance of this delicate table fish from many of
the estuaries connected with the Sound." The report said the problem was
"undoubtedly due to pollutional conditions." On the Saugatuck River in Westport
there was said to have been a long-time commercial fishery for smelt, but the
run was so small in 1922 "that the fishery was a total failure."
Still,
at that time there was enough public interest in the two species that the state
created hatcheries to augment the populations, long since
discontinued.
Fried, meanwhile, said anecdotal information indicates that
there was a recreational fishery for the two species in some of the coastal
rivers up until recent years, though it became very small, perhaps because the
fish became scarce. Information on where the two species could be caught, and in
what numbers and sizes, could be critical in determining exactly how rare the
fish have become.
It is possible, she said, that there are places she has
not sampled with her net where the fish could still be found.
But, so
far, after dragging the net hundreds of times in coastal waters, it does not
look good for the tomcod and smelt.
