Fish kills remain a problem

Just when you thought they would end, fish kills continue to be a problem in several of Virginia’s best-know streams. Kills have reoccurred this spring for the third consecutive year in the Shenandoah River, one of the state’s top smallmouth bass streams.

On Sunday, an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 dead fish washed ashore along several miles of the tidal Potomac River. They included perch, striped bass and croakers. The kill is being investigated by Virginia and Maryland officials who earlier had predicted water-quality problems in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries because of pollution.

On the Shenandoah, the current kills do not appear to be as extensive as those that wiped out large numbers of smallmouth bass and redbreast sunfish last year, but they have involved new species, namely suckers.

From March through May, many smallmouth and sunfish in the North Fork of the Shenandoah have been found with lesions and some of these have died, according to Julia Dixon, a Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries spokesperson. The cause of the lesions is unknown, but they can expose fish to fatal infections from otherwise harmless bacterial.

No deaths have been observed in the South Fork, but collections of fish in late May showed that about 20 percent of the bass and sunfish had lesions. Also in late May a large number of northern hogsuckers died in the main stem of the Shenandoah in Clarke County, Dixon reported. The fish are being studied in a U.S. Geological Survey laboratory in Leetown, W.Va.

http://www.roanoke.com/outdoors/billcoc ... b/xp-68521