Less Fish Dying at Stonewall Jackson Lake
Officials are still awaiting test results to determine what killed
the fish.
WBOY-TV
28 May 2010
By Jessika Lewis
JACKSONVILLE -- Fish are dying at a slower rate in Stonewall Jackson
Lake in Lewis County, according to West Virginia Division of Natural
Resources biologist Kevin Yokum.
All of the fish dying now are crappie, Yokum said, and the total dead
has now reached about 1400.
When DNR representatives began investigating the kill on Monday, May
24, they also found two small bass and about 12 bluegill dead, Yokum
relayed.
Those fish were so badly decayed, though, that Yokum believed they may
have been dead prior to the start of the kill.
Similar kills at Pymatuning and Tamarack Lakes in Pennsylvania seem to
indicate that the crappie are dying from a bacterial infection, Yokum
hypothesized.
The dead crappie had brown lesions on them that Yokum considered
consistent with that theory.
Investigators are awaiting water quality tests and fish health analysis
to determine what killed those fish, a DNR news release states.
Health assessments on samples taken from some of the dead fish will be
done by the United States Geological Survey’s Leetown Science Center
and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Northeast Fish Health Center,
and should help to fill in the gaps, the release indicated.
Officials in West Virginia maintain that the kill does not pose any
harm to humans, so they have chosen not to issue a “do not eat”
consumption advisory for fish in the lake.
An advisory team made up of members from the DNR, West Virginia
Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the Bureau of Public
Health normally handle making recommendations to release that kind of
advisory, explained Brett Preston, Assistant Chief of Warmwater
Fisheries for the DNR.
As of Friday, that team had not met to discuss the possibility of
issuing such a release, and Preston announced that he would be
uncomfortable doing so because there has been no evidence to show the
need for such an advisory.
The West Virginia DEP’s preliminary water quality test results suggest
that the fish deaths were not tied to industry or discharge in the
lake, DEP spokeswoman Kathy Cosco pointed out.
Still, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection and Health
along with its Fish and Boat Commission asked the public not to eat any
of the fish at Pymatuning and Tamarack Lakes because of the fish kills
there, a news release from the Pennsylvania DEP declares.
Despite the lower numbers of fish dying in the Lewis County lake, on
Friday, May 28, DNR staff located dead crappie in the Oil Creek area of
the lake, which is about a mile from the Jacksonville area where the
fish were originally reported dead, the DNR release says.
The DNR requests that anyone who comes across a concentrated number of
dead fish at the lake contact its offices at 304-924-6211 or
304-558-2771.