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| Image: US Army Corps of Engineers |
Of all the species that were once absurdly abundant in American landscape—the bison, the passenger pigeon—the American shad are often forgotten, Sarah Laskow writes in Atlas Obscura.
These impressive fish, the largest type of herring in North America, used to migrate each spring up the eastern seaboard’s great rivers to their spawning grounds, in such great numbers that colonial fishermen could drag thousands out of the water in just a couple of days.
Shad are the East coast’s analog to salmon; as John McPhee reports in his book on shad, The Founding Fish, some reports of abundant salmon in the newly colonized “New World” may actually have just been referring to shad.
In the 21st century, though, despite our yearning for local food, shad is conspicuously absent, in part because now they’re much harder to come by. The problem isn’t that we aggressively overfished shad populations or consciously exterminated them. We just made it much, much harder for them to reproduce.
Read the full story in Atlas Obscura HERE.
These impressive fish, the largest type of herring in North America, used to migrate each spring up the eastern seaboard’s great rivers to their spawning grounds, in such great numbers that colonial fishermen could drag thousands out of the water in just a couple of days.
Shad are the East coast’s analog to salmon; as John McPhee reports in his book on shad, The Founding Fish, some reports of abundant salmon in the newly colonized “New World” may actually have just been referring to shad.
In the 21st century, though, despite our yearning for local food, shad is conspicuously absent, in part because now they’re much harder to come by. The problem isn’t that we aggressively overfished shad populations or consciously exterminated them. We just made it much, much harder for them to reproduce.
Read the full story in Atlas Obscura HERE.
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