The scarcity of shad which has so alarmed the fishermen of North Carolina within the past few years, is making itself evident in Virginia and Maryland waters where fishermen have heretofore been making good catches. The Virginians and Marylanders are becoming alarmed and lay the trouble on too many nets, which they say bar the shad from their natural spawning grounds, and some of the more thoughtful citizens are urging conservation that the species may again increase to something like the former number.
The scarcity of shad which has so alarmed the fishermen of North Carolina within the past few years, is making itself evident in Virginia and Maryland waters where fishermen have heretofore been making good catches. The Virginians and Marylanders are becoming alarmed and lay the trouble on too many nets, which they say bar the shad from their natural spawning grounds, and some of the more thoughtful citizens are urging conservation that the species may again increase to something like the former number.
Here in North Carolina the decrease in shad has been attributed to the closing of New Inlet, which, until five years ago was the greatest feeder of shad and herring in the North Carolina Sounds. So sure are the North Carolinians that this is the reason the General Assembly this year appropriated $500,000 for the relief of the fishing industry, $100,000 of which was set aside for opening the inlets.
Shad continued to come into New Inlet until the stream was so shallow that a man could wade across with boots on. And the alarming decrease in the shad industry in North Carolina is marked from the time when New Inlet began closing as a result of the action of tides brought about by the changing coast formation farther north.
It may be that the closing of New Inlet in North Carolina has had considerable to do with the scarcity of shad in Virginia and Maryland. The North Carolina sounds and the rivers were once the breeding places of the finest shad to be found. The young shad grew up in the sounds and rivers of North Carolina, passed out at the Inlets, and came back the following season to lay their eggs. And many of them went on up the coast to the rivers and bays of Virginia and Maryland.
The closing of the inlets has shut the shad away from one of their most favorable breeding localities. Their spawning is now largely confined to waters often laden with refuse form ships, and sewers, for in the bays and rivers of Virginia and Maryland, commerce is heavier than in the North Carolina waters, and tons and tons of filthy bilge water and fuel oil contaminate the very places where the ripe fish leave their fertile eggs. That Virginia has never been the producer of so fine a variety of shad as North Carolina, is attested by the retail tradesmen on the markets where the catches are sold.
But the Virginia folks are taking into consideration only one reason for the scarcity of shad. Too many nets, they say, is the trouble. Their verdict is expressed in the editorial last Saturday in the Ledger-Dispatch, a Norfolk newspaper, and their antidote is conservation. Read:
“Men who have been watching the situation have been telling us for years that the fish which spawn each year in the fresh water rivers and streams tributary to our bays and to the sea are becoming scarcer; and the reason they have told is, is to be found in the constantly increasing number of nets set to catch these fish on their way to and from their spawning grounds. We have heard from time to time that high up in the rivers fish that were once plentiful always are now very scarce and rapidly becoming scarcer. We have been warned that the fate of the lower bays, if this blocking of the entrances to the spawning grounds is not stopped.
“But most of us have either ignored these warnings or laughed at them. The very idea of consuming to extinction the fish of the sea has seemed to us to be absurd on the face of it. But the fact remains that certain fish of the sea are becoming scarce and that our own wasteful methods of the past are largely to blame.
“It is high time we began conservation—even of the multitudinous fishes of the sea.”
From page 3 of The Independent, Elizabeth City, N.C., March 30, 1923
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