The Founding Fish by John McPhee

Larval salmon stay in the
redd. Moreover, young salmon stay around their birthplace for two years before taking off for the sea—plenty of time for detailed imprinting. Shad come down from the Gulf of Maine, and find the right river, but they do not form close identification with one place in the river. If a salmon was born in a hatchery, as a returning adult it will climb a fish ladder trying to get back into the hatchery.
    Shad larvae, in their millions, darken the river and look like one-inch eels. Minnows eat them. Shiners eat them. Ninety per cent of fish in the river eat shad, and ninety per cent of what’s in other fishes’ stomachs will be larval shad. “After thirty to forty days, they go through metamorphosis and look like fish-shaped animals,” St. Pierre said. Fish-shaped animals look even more delicious than one-inch eels.
    I asked St. Pierre what sort of diseases he had encountered in studying the species.
    He said, “We have never found a disease in a wild shad. But remember, we’re trained to look for trout diseases. We’ve never found a trout disease in a shad.”
    His degree in fisheries science was from the University of Virginia, and he went into the science as a direct result of the fishing and scuba diving he did as a kid in Florida. Trim, six feet, he had closely cut hair, an intent narrow face, a soft low voice and contemplative manner. He had arrived early at Smithfield Beach and had fished with a hook and line until seven. When he works in other rivers, he takes his six-pound test and ultra-light. Below Troy and Albany, the mile-wide Hudson can look hopeless for fishing from the bank, but it failed to intimidate St. Pierre. “They don’t know what they’ve got,” he said. Across the river from Catskill, he fished one evening from a ferry dock, where, despite the great breadth of water, sufficient current ran close to the eastern shore. Using a big dart for a long cast, he caught a nine-pound, nineounce roe shad. It was twenty-eight inches long and twenty-eight inches in maximum circumference. It was somewhat heavier than
the New York record shad. But St. Pierre is “not into that sort of thing” and did not report it.
    Soon after midnight at Smithfield Beach, the last of more than a million eggs went into a plastic bag and were ready for shipment. There were five bags, each with five litres of eggs, and a college kid in a station wagon took off with them for Thompsontown, on the Juniata River. There are nine shad hatcheries in the United States, and Pennsylvania’s is in Thompsontown, where people would be waiting when the eggs arrived at four in the morning. Incubated at sixty degrees, they would hatch in six days. Two-thirds of the young shad would be stocked in the Juniata, a major tributary of the Susquehanna, and the remaining third would go to Conowingo, the first dam above the Chesapeake Bay. If you are trying to restore American shad in a depleted river system, there is no better way to do it. In the nineteen-eighties, an attempt was made to plant adult shad from the Hudson River in the uppermost Susquehanna, near Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, and Owego, New York. In two days, the fish were out of the Susquehanna, swimming two hundred miles and tumbling down the spillways of four dams. “We’ve seen fish move a hundred miles a day in the Susquehanna in the wrong direction,” St. Pierre acknowledges. “If you put an adult shad in a strange river, the fish knows it’s in the wrong place and takes off. It just boogies.”
    S t. Pierre has sent eggs to Thompsontown from places a great deal more distant than Smithfield Beach. For example, the Columbia River. To help meet the voracious requirements of the Susquehanna shad rehabilitation program, he has FedExed eggs from the West Coast to Pennsylvania. Something like five million shad come up the Columbia in spring, the largest shad run anywhere. They go a hundred and