Herring Stocked in Bronx River with Connecticut's help

Fish don't vote, but that didn't stop South Bronx congressman Jose Serrano was more than happy yesterday to meet and greet a bunch of flipping-flopping silvery alewife herrings, which have not populated the Bronx River since the Dutch settlers dammed it up back in the 1600s.

• Serrano, among those involved in cleaning up the once severely polluted estuary, came up with the federal funding to begin reseeding it with the small fish - which, it is hoped, will draw other fish and birds on the food chain to the river.
• Serrano, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Bronx River Alliance and other organizations tipped the first ceremonial netfull of the 12-inch herring into a bucolic stretch of the river running through the Bronx Zoo. Then Steve Gephard, supervising fisheries biologist with the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, and his workers opened the valve on a tank atop a truck, giving 200 of the adult alebacks a watery slide down a large hose into the river.
• Once their eggs hatch, Gephard explained, the fish will work their way down the river, past the industrial wasteland alongside the Sheridan Expressway and Hunts Point and out to sea. Four or so years from now, they'll return up the river, to spawn once more.
• The advantage of having aleback herring once again in the river? "What we are doing is restoring an essential cog to the Bronx River ecosystem. At some point in the near future, you're gonna have thousands of these fish coming back. And others will come later."

"We're saying that we care about this river," said John Calvelli, senior vice president for public affairs for the WCS, which runs the zoo. "We're saying that it's going to be clean three to five years from now, and we're saying that we'll be here waiting for them to come back." [Daily News Bronx, by B Kappstatter]

Tom Anderson from Sphere commented: It would be easier to take the Daily News seriously is they had bothered to get the name of the fish right. There are blueback herring and there are alewives (both of the genus Alosa and both related to American shad), but there are no aleback herring. Also I'm pretty sure that pickled herring are made from sea herring, not river herring.