Tag Archives: Peconic River
Subsidizing the effort, Riverhead gets help to avoid repeat of Peconic fish kill
It’s 5:30 a.m. and Will Caldwell and his crewman Dave Inoue step into the shallow water to set a seine net at the mouth of the Peconic River, working to prevent another biological and public relations nightmare. “It’s nothing but fish,” said Caldwell, a Hampton Bays commercial fisherman, of the bait fish swarming the river at sunrise on Wednesday. “They’re everywhere.” “We are going to clear this river out to make sure we don’t have another bunker kill,” said Riverhead Supervisor Sean Walter, who toured the Peconic with Caldwell on Tuesday. “What’s great is they’re capturing the bunker before they get too far up river.” Walter said the town is paying 2 cents per pound of bunker to help make it feasible for fishermen, while the state is contributing another 2 cents. The price has fallen to 8 cents, so, he gets 12 cents per pound. Read the rest here 20:22
To avoid another massive fish kill in the Peconic, limits on bunker fishing lifted by “episodic event set aside program,”
With unusually large numbers of bunker fish appearing in the Peconic River this spring, commercial fishermen will be allowed to net bunker in an effort to prevent the massive bunker kills seen last year, thanks to a ruling announced today by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. The interstate commission, which limits how many fish can be caught each year, has agreed to add New York to a special program that allows greater numbers of bunker to be harvested in places where bunker are occurring in higher abundance than normal. The decision was made specifically to reduce the amount of bunker in the Peconic Estuary, where bunker have been reported in unusually large numbers since last month. Commercial fishermen will be allowed to use seine nets to capture bunker in the Peconic River. Up to one million pounds of bunker are allowed to be harvested under the episodic event set aside program. Read the rest here 14:25
Nearly a month early, bunker appearing in large numbers in Peconic River
Almost a year after the major fish kills in the Peconic Estuary last summer, bunker fish are being seen in large numbers in the river almost a month earlier than usual this spring. During last summer’s fish kill, bunker fish were washing up dead by the hundreds of thousands on the shores of the Peconic and Flanders bays during the months of May and June. It was the worst fish die-off in decades, spurring a multi-agency investigation into its cause. That investigation found nitrogen-fueled algal blooms were to blame. Read the article, click here 10:10
Oxygen levels critically low at site of fish die-off in Peconic River, experts say
Oxygen levels remain critically low to nonexistent along a stretch of the Peconic River that has seen two massive fish kills in recent weeks, creating a large dead zone in which little life can survive, experts said.Over the two-day period since the most recent die-off of menhaden, when tens of thousands of fish massed in Riverhead boatyards,,, Higher levels of nitrogen and the alga blooms that accompany them have been cited as the main culprit for this week’s die-off. Read the rest here 12:14
