Shad stocking

[sandfly]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_shad

 

[bigjohn58]

sandfly wrote:
without mussels, eels and shad the susky will die and be gone forever. they are filter feeders and help clean up the water. part of reason the susky is dying is none of those species are left except a few. also a major food source for a lot of species including smallies.

You are the only one who has ever said that. Mussels do filter but I never heard of the shad and eels really contributing in that fashion. Eels are kind of neat...the shad on the other hand are nothing but bait fish. I hold shad in the same respect as carp, chubs, etc.

 

[JeffK]

Shad, like most anadromous fish, are a nutrient pump for inland areas. They grow out at sea gathering nutrients at sea and most die from the stress of spawning and provide plenty of food for whatever is in the river. Never seen it measured for Eastern shad rivers, but in the West even the forests along salmon rivers are healthier from the nutrient input.

Of course shadlings provide a good source of protein for predators to get in shape for winter as they migrate out to sea in the fall.

 

[sandfly]

without eels the muscles are dying, muscle larva live in the eels gills for a year before dropping and becoming a hard shell muscle. they are putting adult and elvers in pine hoping to bring back the eels and muscles.

 

[bigjohn58]

sandfly wrote:
without eels the muscles are dying, muscle larva live in the eels gills for a year before dropping and becoming a hard shell muscle. they are putting adult and elvers in pine hoping to bring back the eels and muscles.

What kind of muscles are these? I am assuming completely different then the ones in the great lakes that effected them so. I don't think there are any eels at least not from Erie west (I could be 100% wrong here).

Sorry I'm not going to lie here...I'm much more interested in eels and the muscles then the shad. No matter what anyone says about them I just can't get excited or see a real necessity. It just seems like a failed program with no chance of real survival.

 

[salmonoid]

So long as there are dams on the lower Susky, any reintroduction project is doomed. The passage numbers over the so-called fish ladders is abysmal. Shad were an important historical foodstuff of the colonists and were big business into the 19th century. They were the catalyst for the formation of the precursor of the PFBC. Sadly, the current PFBC still hasn't quite figured out that whole stocking thing 🙂

 

[sarce]

If you want to see an example of what a river looks like when it does have a healthy shad run, come visit the lower Potomac River in the next 3-5 weeks. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of shad, with every predatory bird and fish for many miles around all feasting on the shad. It's something else to witness. I'm not saying the upper Susky could ever be like that as things stand today, but if that program were to someday succeed you would see massive improvements in the fishery up there.