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Facility gives birth to fish restoration

May 26, 2008 12:15 am

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.

As dams, pollution and overfishing took their toll on shad in other rivers, shad runs remained strong in the Indians' rivers.

In the 1950s, "the lanterns on the shad nets looked like a little city in the water at night," said Mattaponi Chief Carl "Lone Eagle" Custalow, 63.

In the 1970s, fisheries biologists seeking to restore shad in other rivers visited the Indians "to see what could be done. They refined the process and introduced tagging and other improvements," Custalow said.

Both tribes now operate new hatcheries built on pilings in the rivers. Custalow said his tribe's hatchery replenishes the river with 3 million to 5 million fry a year.

"We like to give back. Saving the spawning shad and bring the eggs back to hatch is one way to give back and assure the population of shad for the future. You're going to run out of resources unless you replenish. It's going to cause major problems," Custalow said.

FOCUSING ON SHAD

The state's King and Queen hatchery, according to its historical marker, was a New Deal project built in 1937 "for the hatching and rearing of largemouth bass and other species of sunfish for stocking the public waters of Virginia."

A cluster of buildings now sits in the middle of a line of 18 fish ponds for bass, bluegill, striped bass, channel catfish, and fathead minnows to feed them all.

The biologists with their cargo of eggs arrived at the hatchery's shad building at 2:30 a.m.

Bill Thomsen, a seasonal fisheries technician on the graveyard shift, began his work of transferring the eggs from the plastic bags to an array of hatching jars. Water flowing through the jars would bathe the eggs until they hatched.

Filled with pipes, valves and tanks, the $143,000 shad building was finished in November 1994. But T.P. Gunter Jr. didn't wait for the final touches. He started using the unfinished building that spring to hatch shad.

Gunter, 52, worked 30 years as a state fisheries biologist before he retired two years ago for the better pay of an aquatic consultant. He initiated the Shad Restoration Project in 1988 in the midst of a frantic effort to restore stocks of striped bass.

"I thought we were working on the wrong fish," Gunter said. "Shad were in trouble and they are the forage base for stripers, shark and tuna, all of them billion-dollar industries."

"Tom is too modest to bring it up, but he has been the driving force behind the Virginia shad restoration," said Michael L. Hendricks, a shad expert with the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission.

"Despite having a full plate as an area biologist, Tom started the Virginia Shad Restoration Project pretty much on his own. He had to convince his bosses to get involved in shad and, at various times, had to lobby to restore his funding after it had been cut.

"It's pretty rare to find a lowly biologist mixing it up with the politicians when the bosses are lukewarm in their support," Hendricks said.

SAVING A 'GOOFY' HATCH

Gunter's shad program began in 1992 with the release of 52,000 fry into the James River.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is a major partner in the shad effort and helps fund the work. Its hatchery at Harrison Lake in Charles City County actually provides most of the fry released into the Rappahannock.

Through last year, more than 146.7 million hatchery fry had been added to the James, Rappahannock, Pamunkey and Potomac rivers.

The program, said Gunter, "has created a fishery in the James River." It will take 10 or 15 years of restocking to do the same in the Rappahannock, he said.

It took five days, a bright light and a turkey feather to hatch the eggs from the Potomac.

Chris Dahlem, manager of the King and Queen hatchery, called it "a goofy hatch."

"I came down to the shad building at 9:30 and found 10 or 15 fry hatching in every jar. "They wouldn't have made it until morning," he said.

To induce hatching of all of them, Dahlem stirred the eggs in the jars with a turkey feather and exposed them to a halogen floodlight. He did that three times for each jar until tiny, wiggly tails emerged from hundreds of thousands of egg sacs.

In a crease of a palm, the fry looked like pairs of tiny black specks. Under a microscope, the specks became pairs of gigantic, alien eyes on wispy, transparent bodies whipping through the teaspoon of water in the dish.

Dahlem poured the fry from the jars into two 240-gallon tanks of swirling water that would be their home for the next six days. On day three, they would receive their first meal of microscopic brine shrimp from a salt lake in Nevada.

On days three and six, the hatchery crew would add doses of oxytetracycline to the tanks. The antibiotic stains the rings of the otolith bones in the shad's inner ear to identify the fish as hatchery offspring.

On day seven, the fry would hauled out of the hatchery on a truck. At sunset 100 miles away, they would be released in the Rappahannock River to face an uncertain future.

Frank Delano: 804/333-3834
Email: fpdelano@gmail.com