Fishing for a way to save a species

[Sam]

It is like fishing for dinosaurs. With its snout nose and plated spine, the sturgeon looks the part, an apparition with a 70 million-year-old pedigree, drawing closer to a boat in the blue-green water of Delaware Bay near the Maurice River. "We've got one!" says Brick Wenzel, a commercial fishing captain from Lavallette, as he reaches for a burnished bronze handle that controls a hydraulic net reel. The web of 12-inch monofilament mesh slows its advance over the stern, as Wenzel and mate Rick DelSordo cradle the heavy fish and lower it to the deck.A decade ago, this Atlantic sturgeon would have been bound for New York City smokehouses and fish markets, a culinary echo of the 1890s when sturgeon were harvested by the millions of pounds out of the Delaware River estuary to feed the Gilded Age appetite for caviar.


But today Wenzel and DelSordo, his fishing partner from Wall, are more concerned with the health of this fish. "He looks sluggish," DelSordo says. The men go quickly for their tools — not to cut up their catch, but to rig up the sturgeon and release it alive, so scientists can track it for months to come. "I was lucky to be involved in the fishery when it was active, and it was a good living," says Wenzel, who still encounters his old quarry at sea when he's fishing out of Point Pleasant Beach. "Now I'm lucky to be able to give something back." Once legendary for their girth and size, sturgeon up to 14 feet in length were described by early European settlers in the 1600s. In the early 20th century, fishermen who worked nets off Ocean County beaches posed for photographs with massive specimens almost as large.


No more. There's a 40-year moratorium on catching Atlantic sturgeon. That's how long scientists predict it will take for the species to recover a sustainable population. Even a late 1980s to 1990s ocean interception fishery, which picked off sturgeon on their travels to river breeding grounds, was just a faint memory of what used to be seen in New Jersey waters. The nonprofit American Littoral Society, based at Sandy Hook, is sponsoring the sturgeon tagging project, financed with a federal grant derived from fines paid by Delaware Bay polluters. Longtime society activist Dery Bennett said the effort involves state wildlife agencies in both New Jersey and Delaware, scientists with Delaware State University and the National Marine Fisheries Service Howard Laboratory at Sandy Hook. "The Delaware Bay population has about bottomed out. It used to be huge," Bennett said. "Actually it was the largest fishery in the country," said Bruce Freeman, a retired state Division of Fish and Wildlife research scientist who's studied old Delaware Bay fishing reports. "It only lasted, at its peak, about four years in the late 1890s," said Freeman, who chairs the Jersey Coast Anglers Association's science and research committee. "They had barges on the river where fish were butchered. It wasn't so much for the meat as for the roe, the eggs for caviar."
The society had been searching for ways to help restore sturgeon.



So, when Wenzel came looking for research partners, Bennett knew he was in luck. "He used to fish for sturgeon down there in the bay, so he knows his way around," Bennett said of Wenzel. "He's an interesting guy. He knows his fish."On the deck of his 42-foot workboat, Wenzel readies tags to insert in the sturgeon's back. One is a tiny acoustic transmitter, which sends signals that will be picked up by Delaware State University receivers on bay buoys to trace the fish's movements. He snips a small piece off the sturgeon's right pectoral fin — a tissue sample with DNA that may reveal much about the 54-inch-long animal's ancestry. Genetic studies show there are five distinct breeds of Atlantic sturgeon along the East Coast, Bennett said. Like salmon, they are anadromous, meaning they ascend freshwater rivers to spawn. This study may help show if Hudson River sturgeon mingle with Delaware natives as the fish wander the coast, he said.


Wenzel and DelSordo slide the sturgeon back into the bay. Wenzel lies flat on the slippery, jellyfish-splattered deck, gently holding the fish in the water until it revives. As its gills pull dissolved oxygen from the bay into its bloodstream, the sturgeon begins to work its fins and roll. Wenzel releases, and the torpedo-shaped fish submerges. The littoral society has started a campaign to interest schoolchildren and their teachers in the sturgeon's plight, with a poster contest for schools in the bayshore counties of Cape May, Cumberland and Salem. Wenzel and DelSordo say they'd like to go into classes for their own show and tell. The tagging part of the project costs $35,000 — much of it for fuel, because the fishermen burn 100 gallons of diesel a day, steaming from net to net to check for sturgeon. Another $15,000 pays for work at the Howard lab, where federal scientists looking for chemical contamination will analyze tissue from the half-dozen or so dead sturgeon that wash up after they're killed by ship strikes or accidental capture in fishing gear, Bennett said.


Across the bay at Delaware State University, Professor Dewayne Fox leads a tagging and tracking program to outline sturgeon spawning areas. That effort has tagged 27 fish over the years, while striped bass monitors with the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife look for sturgeons in their nets that can be tagged, too.


Sponsors hope this latest effort can continue for three to five years, Bennett said.
"This is just a blip of data," he said. "We need a lot more."

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