The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  At the Manning Hatchery in the state of Maryland, where adult shad also spawn in tanks, biologists developed a way of injecting the fish with hormones in order to accelerate maturation of the eggs, enhancing greatly the yield of larval shad. Sam and Carolyn tried the method but found it “too hard on the fish—you can feel the shad fighting the handling, with their muscles quivering as if they were being jolted by electric shocks.” For the spawning Waldoboro shad, a night in the tank can be rough enough without a traumatic injection. “They’ll go around very fast and quite often they’ll ram the side of the tank, and it kills one or both of the fish. If they hit it a sideways blow, they’ll become stunned, and they’ll swim around for a while with their jaws locked open. There was quite a bit of activity last night—chasing each other, going like bullets—and I thought at times they were going to pop right up out of the side of the tank. They’re big-river fish, and at times they need to be in a big river, meaning that if they turn and really go for it here they might hit the side, like birds hitting a plate-glass window.” You see a number of noses bruised red. You see an eyeball bulging. Suddenly, a pair takes off, burst-speed swimming. They hit the side of the tank, rupture their kidneys, and fall to the bottom.

  The most obvious characteristic in shads’ behavior, he said, is their nervousness. “If they’re in a tank outside in sunlight, just step near the tank and they all bang into the other side.” Even indoors, the Chapmans are careful not to move rapidly. One day, Sam and Carolyn were talking and she inadvertently draped a white filter bag over the rim of a tank. The fish, in waves, banged into the far side, then came back and banged into the near side. A ringing telephone has caused them to bang one side and then the other. Once, when Sam injected some roe shad with tetracycline, nineteen out of twenty died from the stress of being held down. “I was too busy digging graves to count,” he told me. “Those females don’t take much. It doesn’t take much stress to put them down.”

  Almost in afterthought, he remarked that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—considering the costs of everything from boats and gasoline to waders, lures, and rods—had computed the dollar value in the Northeast of one shad caught in one day from a boat ($45) and from shore ($22.50). “If you’ve got seven hundred and fifty thousand shad in the Kennebec River and the catch rate is ten per cent, they’re worth three million to six million dollars. Multiply that by all the rivers in Maine, and the value of a restored shad fishery is huge. But not as huge as some things. Try duck meat, try woodcock, if you want to see a big number.”

  Drifting on the Delaware in the evening, I sometimes go down through the flat shallows and the rings of spawning shad. Their dorsal fins—out of water like shark fins, like conning towers—are sketching out the rings, males hanging close to females, nose to gill. This is in June, usually, but the spawning begins in May and goes on into July. Some individuals mate and move on upriver, mate again and move upriver. Others seem to choose a deep pool and stay in it, day after day for a week or two, going off into pebbly, sandy shallows to copulate at night. They will even mate in the daytime if the day is dark enough with clouds and rain. The spawning grounds are known to fishermen as shad wallows.

  People on the river still say that when the Dutchman’s breeches bloom, it’s time to go for shad. Or when forsythia blooms. And, of course, when the shadbush blooms. Almost everyone mentions the shadbush, but few as gracefully as the fish-and-fishing encyclopedist A. J. McClane: “The shad comes into New England’s rivers when the shadbush blossoms in clusters of white flowers and a mottled brown caddis or shadfly emerges in great clouds from the water to dance in a warming sun.” The biologist, like the shad, will prefer to note the temperature of the water. While schools come into the river when the water gets up beyond forty Fahrenheit, and spawning begins around seventy, the fish are so individual and idiosyncratic that even after the shadbush has turned from white to green—in the middle of May at the height of the spring migration—they are everywhere in a river from sea to source. Radio-tagging has shown that they can go thirty miles in a day if they want to. They may not want to. The migration, at its peak, is bewilderingly spread out. While shad are still being netted by commercial fishermen in Delaware Bay, the vanguard of the run is three hundred miles upriver.

  Since shad seem to require a large critical mass in order to detonate successful spawning, they go into the slow shallows in considerable numbers and make those endless Olympic rings. After fishing since April to invisible fish, a fisherman could ask pardon if he feels a little lust himself on seeing the circles in the river. I will confess that I have paddled to the edge of shad wallows and permitted a small dart, presented by a fly line, to drift into one of those sun-and-planetary systems. Whatever else might be made of it, to do that—to cast a -ounce dart into that scene—is to know what it is to be ignored. Try again. Again. The dart is in front of their noses, ignored. The various fish are like collected crop dusters working the same field. Very rarely, a buck will hit the dart, perhaps to protect the spawning ring. The buck is usually furious, as who, copulating, would not be if yanked out of bed on a barbed bit of wire? The buck leaps, flips end over end, dives, races, sounds. One ran so far with my line that the backing was about to expire. I stopped the line and the hook flew out of the fish.

  If you drive to the upper Delaware from central New Jersey, as I do frequently in spring, you go around the end of Jenny Jump Mountain, and, on Route 46 in Manunka Chunk, first glimpse the river. It tells you sometimes more than you hoped to know. Early on, it may be high, fast, and wide, its riffles drowned where no one could stand, and later it is low and channeled, its anatomy exposed. When you see scaffolding there—as you do every year—you know that your season is over. The scaffolding stands in the river, far out from either bank. Weighted and firm to the bottom, it rises maybe three feet above the river’s surface and is capped with wooden planks. Bow hunters stand on these platforms and shoot arrows at shad.

  A week or so before, a bow hunter could have stood on one of those platforms and shot all day, hitting nothing. A bow hunter could sooner stop a ray of light than a high-season swimming shad. But now, at the end of time, the archers are able to hit them because the shad have slowed way down. They are languid as they swim, their bodies in sinuous motion, the big forked tails slowly sweeping. I stopped there to eat a sandwich one day, and saw three men standing like Saracens on three mid-river parapets. They were peering into the water, bows drawn. Their arrows were connected to lines that were connected to reels. Suddenly an arrow entered the water. The bowman reeled in and lifted up a big shad pierced straight through. After withdrawing the arrow, he dropped the shad in the river. The evident purpose of the line was to enable the archer to retrieve the arrow. Shoot and release.

  People speak of a “mud taste” in shad taken in late season. They say the shad “taste of the river.” They do taste different, sometimes, but they have not been eating and the taste is not from the river. Fasting since they left the ocean, they have sustained their energy by depleting their own bodies. “Someone is calling it mud taste for lack of a better term,” Boyd Kynard has remarked. “It’s off taste—from oil depletion, muscle breakdown.”

  Like Atlantic salmon, shad spawn and die; and like Atlantic salmon, some shad spawn and do not die. The correlation with latitude is distinct. In the St. Johns River in Florida—the southern extreme of the range of the species—they all die. Below Cape Fear, North Carolina, spawned-out shad, with few exceptions, die. In the rivers of the middle states—in the Delaware, the Hudson, the Connecticut—roughly fifty per cent die. In the rivers of Maine and Canada, most shad spawn, go back to the ocean, and return in later years to spawn again. Typically, a doomed roe shad in Florida carries twice as many eggs as a northerly roe shad that spawns and survives.

  In the Delaware, as in other Middle Atlantic rivers, shad that survive turn and go downstream very soon after spawning. Fishermen call them downrunners. Of their number, fewer than ten per cent will return another yea
r to spawn again. In Maine rivers, about a third of the migration will come back and spawn again, some of them four or five times. The shad in West Coast rivers survive and repeat in percentages comparable to Maine’s. (All Pacific salmon, after spawning, die.) Generally, shad that are repeat spawners are larger than virgin shad. A six-pound roe is experienced; a three-and-a-half-pound roe is almost certainly a virgin. Almost. The Delaware River’s eleven-pound one-ounce, all-timerecord shad was a seven-year-old virgin.

  When the fish slow down and in themselves declare the end of the season, you can stand on a rock in the river and watch them go by. These are the ghost days. The fish, always in single file as they climb into faster water and advance the migration, are gray and spectral. But they keep going. You can dangle a dart in their path and watch them in hundreds swim past and ignore it, but if you throw out a proper cast and let it swing downcurrent an occasional shad will hit. They may be tired but they’re not defeated. One evening in late June, standing in white water, I lost three out of five as—with ten thumbs and dimwitted—I impatiently thought I could horse them into an undersized net. They had let themselves be reeled in as if they were docile. They rebelled when the line was short. One was a big roe shad. Her resistance was about fifty per cent of what it would have been a couple of weeks earlier. She somersaulted three or four times but did not clear the surface, flipping instead like a racing swimmer. That day’s diary says, “She was, in two senses, a depleted roe. But keep perspective on the struggle she put up. Half a shad is twice a trout.”

  Below Holyoke Dam, Armand Charest once told me about a fisherman at the end of the season who caught a shad that had been lying dead on the bottom of the Connecticut River. The dart was hooked perfectly in its lip. I could not quite match that feat, but thirty miles upstream, at the Rock Dam in Turners Falls at the end of one season, I did hook into a roe shad that died on the line. It thrashed around for a couple of minutes but did not move in the net, or thereafter. I thought of the matter of “mud taste” and was wary of its future on the table. I wondered if the flesh would be deteriorated, and was a little wary about baking the fish. That night, nonetheless, I stuffed it and baked it. Even that specimen was, indisputably, Alosa sapidissima. Its specific name means “most savory.”

  Shad fry and fingerlings are eaten, evidently, by just about every kind of predator that can get its mouth around them, while shad in turn prey all their lives only on the animal titbits collectively known as zooplankton. After four or five days growing in eggs, shad fry hatch out into the river by the hundreds of millions, and are decimated immediately by minnows, shiners, and almost any small fish that happens to be around—eaten alive even as they are still absorbing their own yolk sacs. About five weeks later—as larvae in cloudy black masses—they are consumed in even greater numbers. Small wonder that some parents are instinctively driven to place their young as far upstream as they possibly can, to be nearer sources of zooplankton, where they might gain a slight advantage in speed and size over others they will join. As juveniles —two, three, four inches long across the summer—they look remarkably like miniature adult shad in every detail but their huge, disproportional eyes.

  Juveniles spend the summer in and around their birthplace. When the planet orbits far enough to lower the water temperature to sixty degrees, nearly all of them move downstream, joining others and then others and millions of others in the great mass transfer of energy known to science as the outmigration. A small number of juveniles hold in the river all winter, as do a few adult shad. But nearly all juveniles join the outmigration. Temperature is not the only factor drawing them toward the ocean. Cellular structures within them have changed, and they are losing their ability to live in fresh water.

  Now comes a scene that in aesthetic appeal all but equals the circles of June. Everyone who is still on the water in very late summer and early fall (long since fishing for something else) remarks on the dimpling of the baby shad. They are coming down the river in galactic schools, and at dusk especially they will turn the water white. They dimple, dapple, leap into the air. They seem like a squall of silver rain. It has long been said that they are jumping for insects. What the human eye sees, as it observes the dimpling of the shad on the blue river bordered with turning leaves, is early Impressionism rooted in the Hudson River School—the peace and the quiet of Nature with touches of silvery motion in it, an Arcadian pastoral vision. To a side-scan sonar, it looks like this: bronzebacks that can take in two and more shadlings in one swallow are coming up under the juvenile shad and eating them from below. That would make you dimple. A bronzeback is a smallmouth bass. In complete terror, the young shad are struggling for the top of the water column, and many leap into the air. Boyd Kynard, who has done some of the sonar studies, says the fish that lead the dimpling are coming from the bottom of the school. Others follow, while the school as a whole tries to turn itself inside out and upward. “The predators attack only those individuals in the low part of the school. So the school struggles within itself for the higher positions, and dimpling results. It’s a survival mechanism.”

  Historically, American shad encountered few predators in Northeastern rivers. For most of the nineteenth century and back through all of colonial time, the rivers in autumn were sluggish with fingerling shad. Kynard calls this the “precentrarchid community.” Centrarchids include sunfish, crappies, and black bass (a term that incorporates smallmouths and largemouths). Centrarchids are native to the American South, and were introduced into the Hudson and the Connecticut. There were some in the Delaware but more were stocked. Channel catfish also gobble up juvenile shad, as do pike, perch, and muskellunge. Sturgeons gorge on them, and so do striped bass. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the striper populations were strongly on the rise in the Connecticut, the Hudson, and the Delaware. In fall, they were resident in the main-stem Delaware from mile 1 to the sea buoy. Of the overall effect of every kind of bass on shad, Kynard says, “They really hammer ’em.”

  Human beings do not much alter the outmigration. The shadlings get past dams. I will confess that when I left Waldoboro I went down to L.L. Bean—at Sam Chapman’s suggestion—and bought some artificial mosquitoes on No. 22 hooks. They were so well tied they seemed to be ready to drink from your arm. On a 6X tippet, you lay the mosquito on the river and pull it along the surface where it cuts a miniature wake. Pow! Zap! The tenderest of shad are fighting for your mosquito. You hook, land, and pocket six or seven, and, as soon as you can, saute them in butter. You cook the whole four-inch fish—head on, scales on, fins intact. And that’s what you eat—innards and outards, head and tail, the whole baby shad. Sapidissima!

  The bright-red copious blood of a shad looks like human blood and has in it about the same level of salt as there is in human blood—roughly a third as much as in sea water. The fresh water in a river will have salt in it, too, but precious little—about a thousandth of what is in the sea. Since the salt in a fish’s blood is drawn and replenished from the fish’s environment, a fish in fresh water has to hoard the salt it takes up, while a fish in the ocean must get rid of more salt than it keeps. If this is the same fish, it obviously needs a reversible talent, an osmotic adjustability that can meet such radical change.

  The process by which the young shad move from fresh water to salt water is incompletely understood, but if you wanted to edge up to this scientific frontier you might call on Steve McCormick at the S. O. Conte lab in Turners Falls. A fish physiologist whose Ph.D. is from a program run jointly by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, McCormick grew up in suburban Schenectady, and was not at first your obvious future biologist. When he went fishing with his father, he asked his father to bait the hook and remove any fish that happened to get on it. In the company of a grandfather, he did develop an affection for crabbing off piers in Virginia, and fishing for croakers and spot. He has written numerous scientific papers on osmoregulation, as fresh-salt transitioning is called—often in c
oauthorship with his Conte-lab colleagues Joe Zydlewski, Joe Kunkel, and Boyd Kynard. McCormick once wrote out for me an explanation of the physiology of osmoregulation:

  When in fresh water, fish are always losing ions and gaining water from the environment. To counteract this, they actively take up salts across the gills, while the kidney produces large amounts of a dilute urine. In sea water, fish are gaining ions and losing water to the environment. In spite of being surrounded by water, they are constantly trying to prevent dehydration. To do this, they drink sea water and transport both salt and water across the gut into the blood. Excess salts are secreted across the gill, and urine production by the kidney decreases. When fish make the transition from fresh water to seawater they must reverse the “pumping” mechanisms of the gill from salt uptake to salt secretion.