The Shad Foundation An international non-profit organization for the study, protection, and celebration of shad around the world.
What’s new	Tenualosa ilisha How it started. In the summer of 1995, my colleague and I peered into a fish ladder through an algae-stained window, hoping to witness a great biologic event: the return of the Columbia River's Pacific salmon. The fish ladders at Bonneville Dam were in fact filled with silver migrants, but oddly, few salmon could be counted among them. Another fish -- once foreign to the Columbia -- accounted for the great silvery flood: the American shad. Shad made their way to the Columbia after 1871 when Seth Green planted some fry in the Sacramento River, California. By 1938, when Bonneville Dam was completed and counts at the fishways were first tallied, only a handful of shad-some 5,000-returned. Over the next 50-odd years the shad count at Bonneville exceeded 3 million. Oh, stubborn Nature! While folks on the East Coast struggle to save their shad runs, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on restoration, shad remain depleted. But shad on the West Coast thrive greatly. Spurred on by our curiosity and discovery that there were 30+ recognized shad species world-wide, my colleague, Curt Ebbesmeyer, and I launched the Shad Foundation. It is a world-wide organization for those interested in shad. In the beginning, we began publishing the Shad Journal, which included articles on many of the shad species worldwide. Now the Journal, freely available in electronic form, has been largely replaced by an e-mail discussion group. We encourage you, whatever your interest, to contribute to the shad discussions by joining our shad e-mail group. In 2001, a conference on the status of shad worldwide was held in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. -Rich Hinrichsen
New book by John McPhee! The Founding Fish
The Shad Journal
Vol. 1, No. 1; 1996 (HTML) Vol. 1, No. 1; 1996 (PDF) Vol. 2, No. 1; 1997 (PDF) Vol. 2, No. 2; 1997 (PDF) Vol. 2, No. 3; 1997 (PDF) Vol. 2, No. 4; 1997 (PDF) Vol. 3, No. 1; 1998 (PDF) Vol. 3, No. 2; 1998 (PDF) Vol. 3, No. 3; 1998 (PDF) Vol. 3, No. 4; 1998 (PDF) Vol. 4, No. 1; 1999 (PDF) Vol. 4, No. 2; 1999 (HTML)
Shad discussion group
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Contacts
The Board of Trustees Webmaster: hinrich@seanet.com
Other
Related sites World Wide Distribution of Shads Shad hatcheries Shad 2001 Conference (20-23 May) Last updated: 12/12/02