A few days old, shad fry--their eyes visible, their bodies transparent--swim in a hatching jar before being moved to large vats in which will will be carried to Kelly's Ford for release into the Rappahannock River. PHOTOS BY ROBERT A. MARTIN/THE FREE LANCE-STAR View More Images from this story Visit the Photo Place

Facility gives birth to fish restoration

State hatchery in King and Queen County prepares shad for release into Rappahannock River

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Date published: 5/26/2008

BY FRANK DELANO

STEVENSVILLE

Earlier that night on a boat in the Potomac River off Fort Belvoir, the biologists had stripped and mixed eggs and sperm from shad caught in nets.

In all, Dean Fowler and Mike Isel of the Shad Restoration Project of the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries had doubled-bagged 23 liters of fertilized eggs, topped off the bags with oxygen, packed them in foam boxes and loaded them onto the truck.

Baby shad from the eggs were destined for the Rappahannock, but Fowler and Isel didn't slow down as they crossed the I-95 Rappahannock River bridge at Fredericksburg at 1:15 a.m. on April 20. They had another 70 miles to go to a state hatchery deep in the woods of King and Queen County.

The biologists traveled that night through shad-hatching history.

Embrey Dam once stood less than a mile below the bridge. In 2002, U.S. Sens. John Warner and Chuck Robb joined 50 other people in a bucket brigade to carry spawning shad over the dam, which had blocked the fish from their hatching and nursery waters for many years.

The dam was breached in 2004 and completely demolished the next year.

Hatching shad is old aquaculture. In 1873, the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries released 1.4 million fry, as shad larvae are called, from pine hatching boxes anchored in the Potomac River at the Virginia end of Long Bridge, the ancestor of today's 14th Street Bridge.

Also in 1873, a determined biologist managed to successfully deliver eight milk cans containing 40,000 healthy Hudson River fry to California, and thus began the creation of a West Coast shad fishery that, unlike its East Coast counterpart, remains bountiful today.

Not far from the King and Queen hatchery, the Mattaponi and Pamunkey Indians live beside their namesake rivers. With what writer John McPhee called "foresight on a Nostradamian scale," the Mattaponi and Pamunkey started hatching shad in spawning boxes in 1917 and 1918.

ABOUT THE SERIES Second of three parts looking at efforts to restock shad in the Rappahannock River. YESTERDAY: Biologists harvest and fertilize shad roe from the Potomac to begin the process. TODAY: State's King and Queen hatchery turns eggs into fry for restocking rivers. TOMORROW: Newly hatched shad fry are released into the Rappahannock to begin their swim to the sea--and eventual return. American shad, also known as white shad or Atlantic shad, once spawned on virtually every river along the Atlantic Coast from Florida to the Bay of Fundy in Canada. Adult females can weigh up to 8 pounds; males, 4 to 5 pounds. The fish can live up to 11 years. After spawning, the fish return to the sea and migrate northward to summer feeding grounds in the Gulf of Maine.

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Date published: 5/26/2008

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