Project Update - April 22, 2016

The beach at Wreck Pond in Spring Lake, NJ is ready for the summer season.

Although fish passage construction has temporarily stopped at Wreck Pond, our restoration work continues. This week marks our third fyke net set in Wreck Pond and our second net set in Black Creek. This sampling, designed to captured adult river herring migrating into the Wreck Pond Brook Watershed to spawn, has already resulted in the capture of 21 alewife in Wreck Pond. Of those captured, 11 have been implanted with PIT tags. While no river herring have been captured in our Black Creek net, our sampling efforts are allowing us to learn more about the local ecology of Black Creek. 
This week also marks our first detection of a PIT tagged fish. We currently have two antennas set up in the Wreck Pond Brook Watershed. Both are located near the confluence of Wreck Pond Brook and Hannabrand Brook, with one antenna located on the Wreck Pond Brook side and the other located on the Hannabrand side. A male alewife (Fish 507) has been detected over multiple nights by our Wreck Pond Brook antenna. 
Our educational effort is also starting to ramp up. We have several field trips planned in the next month for students from Communications High School and Wall High School. These trips allow the students to explore and experience, first hand, some of the concepts that we discussed with them during in class lessons conducted over the winter.

Zack Royle, Habitat Restoration Technician for the American Littoral Society, works on a tagged fish detection antenna in the Wreck Pond watershed.