2024 Hudson River Seining Data Summary

Northern Stargazer

CURB’s 2024 Hudson River seining season was one to remember with several first-time catches and very high fish counts. Our season kicked off on February 9^th and continued through December 18^th. In all, we did 927 hauls of our seine net spread over 128 sessions of seining. These included 66 school/public program seining sessions, as well as an additional 62 staff/volunteer seining sessions.

Our overall catch count was 16,586, well ahead of our previous seasonal high of 9,965 in 2018. The catch consisted of 30 different fish species, as well as 9 species of invertebrates. In addition, we had 6 first-time catches for our location including yellow perch, crevalle jack, northern stargazer, spotfin mojarra, common carp, and seaboard goby.

Our largest catch totals were focused on comb jellies (5,215), moon jellies (3,443), Atlantic silversides (2,678), blue crabs (1,171), grass shrimp (1,091), and Atlantic menhaden (1,070). These 6 animals made up over 88% of our catch and were all top 5 seasonal counts. Comb jellies finished well ahead of our high of 1,283 in 2022.

The driving force behind the abundant catches, as well as some of the unusual marine species, was likely the drought. How so? The drought conditions that we experienced throughout the fall resulted in higher than usual salinity (salt) levels. Less rainfall, and in turn less freshwater runoff, equals a greater salt concentration. In fact we peaked at 20 parts per thousand (ppt) in November. This is one of our highest recorded salinity values. Our salinity in the fall tends to run between 8 – 12ppt. Saltwater is 33ppt. These conditions likely contributed to the very high jelly counts, as well as the presence of marine species like the crevalle jack, northern stargazer, and spotfin mojarra. The water temperature was also running warm for much of the fall, extending good catches well into November.

Please see below for a selection of graphs and charts from our data:

2024 Overall Catch