Forest and Stream, June 16, 1892

Dead Bluefish in Chesapeake Bay.

Sea -- Finfish - Catch : BluefishInfrastructure -- Utilities - Dynamite

BLUEFISH have made their appearance in Chesapeake Bay in enormous schools and among them are some very large specimens measuring 3 to 4ft. in length. At Easton, Md., on June 2, dead bluefish were reported floating at the surface in considerable numbers and it is suspected that certain parties are killing the fish with dynamite to get them for manure. The light keeper at Sharp's Island saw twenty dead fish while going from the lighthouse to the shore on June 1. Passengers on the steamer B. S. Ford saw many of them between Claiborne and Baltimore. Commissioner McDonald thinks it impossible that the fish were killed by the explosion of dynamite, but they may have been lost by some fisherman or by the capsizing of a boat. He believes that the use of dynamite for killing fish should be prohibited by all the States, for in certain localities, as in the narrow inlets of the Labrador coast, the fisheries could be entirely destroyed by this means. The explosion of dynamite over oyster beds would kill every oyster within a considerable radius. We have referred already to the use of this deadly substance in Great Egg Harbor Bay within the last five years ostensibly for clearing out wrecks, but really for the illegal destruction of sheepshead, and we have shown how entirely successful the savage practice has been in exterminating the fish, which were slowly increasing in numbers up to 1887.