David Keller, a fish ecologist working for the The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University Patrick Center for Environmental Research, was surprised when he recently studied which fish still migrate to the Cooper River in Camden from the Atlantic Ocean.
Not only did Keller, a fish ecologist, find that blueback herring had returned to the Camden County river system, but it was abundant.
In fact, it represented the biggest population of species of ocean-migrating fish, known as anadromous fish, in the river.
Keller and his team recently published a paper on the findings in the journal Marine and Coastal Fisheries, demonstrating that highly urbanized rivers can support substantial amounts of anadromous fish — ones that spend most of their adult lives in salt water, but return to spawn in fresh water.
“When we started the work, we did not know what to expect,” Keller said. “We definitely had interest in assessing migratory fish like your American shad and your river herrings, but we didn’t know if the runs would be there at all. Or, we assumed we would see very low numbers. So we were surprised to see what appeared to be a very strong run, a robust run, of blueback herring.”
Overall, his research team found seven species of anadromous fish in the Cooper River system.
Thirteen sewage treatment plants were removed along the river starting in the 1980s. Treatment was centralized and improved by the Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority, which discharges treated waste into the Delaware River.
“The ones you expect to be there are in the system, such as American shad, alewife, and blueback river herring,” Keller said. “We also came across hickory shad and other migratory species that migrate between fresh and salt water, such as American eel, sea lamprey, and striped bass.
Kudos to Scott Schreiber Timothy Feeney and the whole team at CCMUA
Link to Frank Kummer‘s article in the The Philadelphia Inquirer here.
