Dam Right
By Kate Livie
The Bloede Dam Removal and the Chesapeake’s Forgotten First Fishery
Dr. Matt Ogburn is searching for ghosts. Not the see-through spectral kind, festooned in chains like Jacob Marley. These are genetic ghosts. They apparate in native species of fish, showing themselves in behaviors passed down through the generations and, in some cases, the centuries. The Patapsco River, in particular, has recently become a haunt for this kind of waterborne ghost-spotting. Dammed first in 1761, and then multiple times over after that, the fish in this river should have forgotten long ago that the headwaters of this river spawned their great-great-great-great-fishly progenitors. But Ogburn, a senior scientist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, thinks it might be possible that modern shad can remember. Or at least, he’s interested to see if they can. “It’s a question I really want to answer. Will shad from a genetic stock go back up the river to spawn? Will it occasionally happen? There might be fish out there that will start coming back, and over time, you could build up a more migratory portion of the population.”
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ChesapeakeBayMagazine.com
May/June 2022
