Hudson River Sturgeon Population Recovering: DEC

The sturgeon, one of the Hudson River’s most famous, enormous and delicious fish, may be coming back.

A new Juvenile Atlantic Sturgeon Survey shows the highest number of Atlantic sturgeon in the Hudson River in the 10-year history of the survey and the trend of the results show an increasing juvenile sturgeon abundance, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Acting Commissioner Basil Seggos announced Wednesday.

“Juvenile Atlantic sturgeon are at the highest level recorded in the Hudson River in the last 10 years. These survey results are an encouraging sign for the recovery of Atlantic sturgeon,” Seggos said in a prepared statement. “We are cautiously optimistic that, with our continued vigilance and efforts to protect this species, Atlantic sturgeon will have a secure future.”

That was good news to Riverkeeper, the Ossining-based activist group whose mission is to protect the Hudson. However, the group, which has filed notice of intent to sue the state over deaths of adult sturgeon they say were caused by the construction of the new bridge over the Tappan Zee, said it was disappointed that the DEC was using its good news to defend the bridge project.

“The fact that there are more juvenile Atlantic sturgeon is great news,” said John Lipscomb, Riverkeeper Patrol Boat Captain. “We’ve worked closely with DEC Fisheries in the past, and supported some of their research on our patrol boat, and they are a great team. We all hope for a recovery of sturgeon, as well as shad, herring and other species. It’s our greatest hope.

“However, it’s a shame that the state is using this good news as a defense of Riverkeeper’s Notice of Intent to Sue over vastly increased adult sturgeon mortality – some of which is clearly being caused by the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement project. Everyone, from experts to the general public, gets that – except for state agencies invested in the bridge.”

In Fishes of New York, the DEC says sturgeon have been around for hundreds of millions of years. They belong to one of the most primitive groups of bony fishes. Atlantic sturgeon in the Hudson River occasionally reach over 200 pounds in weight and six to eight feet in length.

However, commercial fishing rates exceeded the ability of the fish to replenish themselves by the late 1980s and early 1990s.

New York called a moratorium on Atlantic sturgeon fishing in 1996.

In 1998, an amendment of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission Fishery Management Plan for Atlantic sturgeon resulted in a coast wide moratorium on Atlantic sturgeon harvest for 40 years and aimed to protect two generations of females in each spawning stock.

The juvenile Atlantic sturgeon abundance survey began in 2006 as part of the DEC’s Hudson River Estuary Action Agenda. The survey was designed by DEC in collaboration with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and was implemented to track the response of Atlantic sturgeon to the closure of commercial sturgeon fisheries.

Since sturgeon are a long-lived species, with Hudson River fish beginning to spawn at 10 to 20 years old and living as long as 60 years, signs of recovery were expected to be slow. This slow pace of recovery contributed to the National Marine Fisheries Service listing Hudson River Atlantic sturgeon as Endangered in 2012.

Encouragingly, the DEC said, biologists are now seeing a steady increase in the number of Atlantic sturgeon in the Hudson River as the first protected fish are coming into their prime breeding years.

As identified in the NMFS Atlantic sturgeon status review, threats remain, including from accidental mortality when other fish are harvested along the Atlantic coast, habitat degradation, impingement and entrainment from water withdrawals, and mortality from vessel strikes.

The DEC said it continues to monitor these threats and evaluate and implement measures to prevent or mitigate their impact on Atlantic sturgeon.

However, DEC officials said, after the federal government put Atlantic sturgeon on the “endangered” list, the DEC improved its data collection and the number of reported sturgeon deaths began to rise.

“However, the increase in reported sturgeon mortality reported to the DEC is likely related to the increase in outreach and centralization of sturgeon mortality reporting and the increased abundance of Atlantic sturgeon in the Estuary, rather than a specific source or project. In addition there is no evidence that the construction of the replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge is the cause of the increased number of reported sturgeon mortality, as the wide geographic spread of the reported mortalities (129 miles in 2015; 56 miles in 2014) suggest that the cause of the mortalities is not occurring at a discrete site,” officials said in the press release.

That’s the part of the statement that Riverkeeper disagrees with.

SEE ALSO:

• Engineers Begin Legwork Ahead Of New TZ Bridge
• Dead Sturgeon Washes Up Near Tappan Zee Bridge
• Dead Sturgeon/ TZ Bridge
• Feds to Review TZB project Over Fish Kills: CHART

“It’s obvious but important to remember that it takes adult sturgeon to make juvenile sturgeon,” Lipscomb said. “The increase in juveniles we see now is likely because the adult sturgeon harvest was stopped in the 1990s. Preventing additional adult mortality is exactly what Riverkeeper’s Notice of Intent to Sue seeks to do.”

The state maintains in this press release that there is no connection between the bridge project and observed mortality. That’s incorrect.

1) In the four years prior to construction, 2008-2011, only six sturgeon were found dead in the Hudson River estuary. From 2013, when the bridge project started, through 2015, 124 have been found dead. That is not just a coincidence.

2) Several of the fish have been found freshly killed, in all likelihood killed by being struck by a propeller, within a half-mile of the bridge construction. That’s not a coincidence.

3) While the state maintains the mortality is spread over 129 miles, which is correct, when we average all those locations, ground zero for mortality, year after year since 2012, has been very near the Tappan Zee replacement project. That’s not a coincidence.

The state attributes the increase in mortality to better reporting. That’s nonsense. In my experience (15 years operating the Riverkeeper patrol boat), the public has always vigorously reported fish mortality. We saw that in the spring of 2002, when there was a multi-species die-off, and again in the spring of 2015, when there was a menhaden die-off. While neither of these die-offs involved high profile, well known, endangered species, the public was distraught at the sight of dead fish, and many, many calls were received by Riverkeeper and the DEC. Robust reporting of what ails the River isn’t just happening now.

In closing, we call on New York State to stop trying to hide from the evidence, and immediately institute protections for sturgeon at the Tappan Zee construction site.