Valley losing money over fish kill
Brent Finnegan -- August 14th, 2006
JMU prof Maria Papadakis says that her recent study shows an estimated loss of $680,000 due to the mysterious deaths of tens of thousands of adult smallmouth bass and redbreast sunfish in recent years. Fewer and fewer fisherman are getting their freshwater licenses, because there aren’t many fish left. Papadakis’ estimate doesn’t account for the loss of tourism dollars, so that number is probably higher than 680k.
Dead fish are still washing up on the banks of the north and south forks of the Shenandoah River. In 2005, 80 percent of the smallmouth bass in the Shenandoah River died of bacterial lesions. Environmental experts are not in total agreement over why the fish are dying. Could be ammonia, parasites, parking lots, meth labs, animal manure, or any other point or “non-point” source. Tom Graham covered this issue on Insight earlier this year. You can listen to that program online.
Oh well. I’m sure the issue is in good hands with our state climatologist (a position which may not even exist).
-finnegan
I vaguely remember some research being done by a JMU biology group that looked at the effect of dumping lime into virginia rivers in order to drop the acidity of the water (a state program). The river acidity was thought to be the cause of many species of fish dying out. The acid coming from various sources of pollution. I wonder if it’s related. Trying to balance an out-of-balance ecosystem rarely works.
Yeah, the thing about this is–we want to point the finger at someone or something and say “so-and-so’s carpet factory is the reason all these fish are dying” but the cause has so far been elusive.
It’s gangs killing the fish. There I said it. Everyone was thinking it, I just said it.