Spawning a fish tale in New Jersey’s Wreck Pond
An unexpected visitor draws attention to watershed restoration efforts in coastal Monmouth County
The recent ceremonial opening — on Earth Day — of a 60-foot fish ladder at Old Mill Pond dam in New Jersey’s Wall Township marked a new phase in restoration of the almost 13 square-mile Wreck Pond watershed.
The discovery, days earlier, of a blueback herring in Wreck Pond already had provided a new indicator of success for the work that had come before — in particular, a 600-foot-long culvert upgrade completed in 2016.
The way it’s shaping up, the Wreck Pond watershed restoration — a multiyear project led by the American Littoral Society and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — could be a model for others.
“We have never caught many bluebacks in the past at Wreck Pond. I think the last one I saw was in 2006,” said Capt. Al Modjeski, habitat restoration program director for the American Littoral Society. “Seeing one after 15 years of not seeing any is one of several measures of success of the restoration work we’re doing here to provide and reopen spawning habitat.”
Going for the triple win
Collectively called river herring, alewives and blueback herring migrate in the spring from the ocean to cool freshwater rivers to spawn. Once ubiquitous in the U.S. Northeast, their populations had plummeted by the second half of the 20th century due to overharvesting and blockage of their historic spawning habitat by dams and other obstructions.
Restoration monitoring already had shown an increase in the number of alewives in Wreck Pond since the 2016 upgrade to the culvert connecting the 73-acre pond with the ocean — work intended to help with river herring migration. While it apparently had been partially eaten by an otter, the recent blueback herring found in the pond provided additional evidence of success.
The upgrade was funded in part by $2 million of the more than $100 million the Service received from the Department of the Interior after Hurricane Sandy to improve the health of coastal habitats to benefit wildlife and people in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.
Part of a broader restoration effort with multiple objectives, it’s already led to reduced flooding and benefited water quality by improving tidal flushing between the ocean and the pond, said Danielle McCulloch Prosser, a New Jersey-based coastal biologist with Service.
Funded by the Service, Atlantic Coast Fish Habitat Partnership and the Spring Lake 5k, the new fish ladder opened on Earth Day at nearby Old Mill Pond is the next phase of this broader restoration.
Together, the new fish ladder, ongoing fish tagging and monitoring efforts, and the culvert — notable, in particular, for a severe weather water-control gate and for piping designed to let in the natural light fish prefer — could become an ecologically-responsible model for New Jersey coastal communities.
“This project is a win-win-win — for fish, flood-risk reduction and water quality,” McCulloch Prosser said.
Part of an encouraging trend
The work’s potential as a model is in part because the challenges in the Wreck Pond watershed, while specific, are not unusual.
Mostly built many decades earlier to power mills, many of the Northeast’s thousands of dams are now obsolete. Meanwhile, many of the region’s culverts — like the one upgraded at Wreck Pond — are undersized or poorly designed. They obstruct fish and wildlife on the move, and they pose flood risks because of limited capacity to handle heavy water flows.
With these limitations in mind, the Service and partners such as the American Littoral Society have removed and retrofitted hundreds of these structures in recent years.
In Fiscal Year 2020 alone, 73 stream barriers in the Service’s 14-state North Atlantic-Appalachian Region were removed with Service help — typically via ambitious collaborations involving multiple community, public and private partners.
Funding partners for the Wreck Pond project, for example, include New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection Flood Hazard Risk Reduction and Resiliency and Corporate Business Tax grant programs and the Borough of Spring Lake.
These collaborations and their outcomes galvanize additional action, said Eric Schrading, field supervisor with the Service’s New Jersey Field Office.
“The demonstrable benefits for natural systems and local communities at Wreck Pond are what the Hurricane Sandy Restoration program was intended for almost a decade ago,” Schrading said. “We’re eager to see the Old Mill Pond dam fish ladder in action, and we’re eager to find and get started on the next great aquatic connectivity project with our partners.”
