On a warm afternoon in early May, a group of biologists from the District of Columbia’s Department of the Environment could be seen leaning over the side of a boat, tipping the contents of a clear bag into the Anacostia River. The bag was filled with tiny shad larvae, freshly spawned and hatched under their supervision. DDOE runs a small shad hatchery that releases about 1 million larval American shad into the Anacostia River each year, part of a broader effort to restore populations of the migratory fish to the region.
DC’s shad hatchery has been ongoing in some capacity since 2006, said Joe Swann, a fisheries biologist with the District’s Fisheries Research Branch that runs the hatchery. But that doesn’t mean it has much of a physical presence.
“The hatchery is nothing more than some hatching jars and some tanks,” Swann said during a tour of DDOE’s Aquatic Resources Education Center near the Anacostia River, where the hatchery pops up over a quick two-week window in the spring.
Compared with other shad hatchery operations in Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania, the District’s effort is small. But its fish monitoring and stocking programs are unique in that they take place exclusively in an urban area.
Because it takes about five years for these anadromous fish that travel out to the sea to return to the rivers to spawn, measuring progress from their effort is slow.
“This is purely a restoration effort on our part,” said Bryan King, associate director of DDOE’s Fisheries and Wildlife Division, when asked why the District is interested in growing shad. “The overarching reason is the coast-wide decline of shad and river herring stocks. American shad in the Potomac River — particularly in the District’s portions — have also seen tremendous declines since the turn of the 1900s.”
King said the hatchery has made some progress, noting a 10-percent increase in the number of adult shad returning to the District to spawn.
“Previously, most of it was caught in Maryland,” he said, referring to recreational catch-and-release numbers and those counted through monitoring programs. ”Now, we were able to catch shad in the District.”
Those fish were all caught in the Potomac River, however, not in the Anacostia, where there’s no recently recorded catches of adult shad.
“The Potomac has a relatively good run of American shad (compared to other rivers) on the East Coast,” said Swann. “We have no record of catching American shad in the Anacostia. I’ve been working here 10 years, and I’ve never seen one.”
All of the larval fish grown by the DC hatchery are released into the Anacostia River in hopes of seeing some of them return to spawn in the Potomac tributary in the future.
The tiny fish are released mid-May. Crews conduct a push net survey to estimate the numbers of juveniles in the rivers starting in mid-July, before they begin their seaward migration.
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