Fish Town: Shad don’t jump, but with a little help, their numbers can
Monday, April 22, 2013 at 2:00PM
story by Bernard Brown | photos by Christian Hunold. Joe Perillo, a biologist with the Philadelphia Water Department, talks about the fishway and points to the fish crowder - a metal apparatus that forces the shad closer to the window so the Water Department can take a better photoWhen we think of migrating fish swimming upstream to spawn, we picture salmon heroically leaping up waterfalls — the stuff of inspirational posters. But the American shad is different. “Shad don’t jump,” Joe Perillo, a Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) biologist, plainly states. American shad stay in the water, and for millennia they swam gracefully up the Schuylkill River as far as Pottsville.
PWD,
Urban naturalist,
environment,
fish,
schuylkill river 















