What Alternative Energy Taught Us About the Fish that Live in the East River

I've got a guest post up at the Public Library of Science blogs today!

Lesson 1: There are fish that live in the East River

Sure, New York City's East River has long been a punchline for jokes about industrial pollution and mafia homicide, but it's far from being a dead zone. That stereotype is one of Jonathan Colby's biggest pet peeves. There are many species of fish living below the water, he says, and diving birds, such as cormorants, that live above. You can even watch the cormorants--big, jet-black creatures with yellow beaks--doing their thing from the promenade along the Eastern edge of Roosevelt Island.

The River really was once in trouble, but it's rebounded in a big way since the 1980s. It's just that, until recently, Colby says, nobody had documented the results that successful clean up had on fish populations.

The impetus behind the East River's first wildlife study in decades: Hydroelectricity. Colby is a hydrodynamic engineer with Verdant Power, a company that's working on installing 1 megawatt of electric generation in the East River, using a system of spinning blades on posts--similar to wind turbines. To make sure the fish don't hit the fan, Colby had to document a baseline population and then monitor fish numbers and behavior over two years, while Verdant ran a 185-kilowatt demonstration project.

Monitoring happened round-the-clock, 24-7, using both traditional sonar and a new system called Dual Frequency Identification Sonar, or DIDSON. While basic sonar tells you that an object is in the water, DIDSON can show you what the object is--whether fish or plastic bag. The images produced by DIDSON look a lot like fetal ultrasound pictures. Suffice to say, the results might look a little abstract to you or me, but experienced analysts can get at least an Impressionist level of information out of it, including the direction the fish are traveling and, in some cases, what kind of fish are out there.

"There are like 1000 fish, per month, that just kind of live here [in the area surrounding Verdant's turbines] during the non-migratory period," Colby said. "During migratory periods, you can see upwards of 10,000 fish per month traveling through these waters."

Read the rest at PLOS

"East River, Manhattan and Roosevelt Island" by Susan NYC

• [Anonymous]

  Harpo Marx swam in the east river as a boy. He later said in his autobiography that he when he was swimming in country club pools as a successful show biz character, he could always tell if someone had learned to swim in the east river, because of the way they moved their hands outward (pushing away the trash and other floating “stuff.”

  I remember hearing George Carlin, years later, making the same remark. I’m not sure if he was aware of Harpo’s description of the “east river stroke.”

• [MandoSpaz]

  I’m pretty sure there are no fish living below the water in the East River. There are plenty of them living in the water, but once they get below it, they have trouble getting oxygen.

• [Anonymous]

  Neat story about fish. however, the alt. energy project here is TINY. The output will be 1MW, which is about enough to power AROUND 1,000 homes. In the NYC area, peak summer usage of electricity hit over 13,000MW this past July. I cannot imagine why city gov’t would entertain the idea of such a tiny, tiny contribution. My only speculation is that they intend on expanding it drastically if the impact on fish isn’t too much. The East River (and the Hudson) are affected by tides, so they have the potential to produce plenty of electricity. And, since water is so much more energy-dense than air, the speed and size of the turbines can be much lower for the same amount of power…hopefully we take full advantage of it!

  • [Maggie Koerth-Baker]

    Tiny is ok. We could double our hydro power capacity in the united states, without building any new dams, using installations between (if I’m remembering correctly) 1 mw and 10 mw.

• [Doug Sharp]

  Let me plug the North American Native Fishes Association – http://nanfa.org/ – “a not-for-profit, tax-exempt corporation dedicated to the appreciation, study and conservation of the continent’s native fishes.”

  NANFA’s website is a great place to learn about the cool fish who live in the lakes and streams of North America.

• [AnthonyC]

  “Not only do fish live in the East River–people eat them.”
  Once, long ago, this was a joke on The Nanny. Fran’s uncle caught lobsters and 10 pounds of shrimp. When asked if they ate them, they said, “What they, it was one shrimp!” and “Did you see those lobsters? They had 2 tails!”

  :-)

  • [jackbird]

    May god have mercy on my soul, but I think his uncle caught those fish in Jamaica Bay.

• [Harold]

  “To make sure the fish don’t hit the fan”
  That’s an elegantly crafted start to a sentence, and it made me smile.

• [Futurist]

  One of my favorite memories of my last NYC vacation was sitting on the edge of the east river somewhere in midtown at midnight, with a brown-bagged beer and watching a group of teenagers fishing. They were pulling huge perch out, one after another. Later in the evening one caught a 5-6 foot lime green eel, promptly pulled it up and chopped it’s head off with a cleaver and proceeded to get sprayed with blood from the flopping, dying eel.

• [Micah]

  Not only do fish live in the East River–people eat them. Walk along the promenade on the Manhattan side under the Manhattan Bridge some time and you’ll almost always see at least a few folks with fishing poles, who I’m pretty confident aren’t catch and release recreational fishermen.

  Occasionally these guys will even try to sell their catches on the sidewalks of Chinatown.

• [technogeek]

  Anyone who has taken an educational sail on the Clearwater when they’ve thrown out a trawl net knows there are definitely fish in the river. My own favorite was a _very_ pretty bright green eel, which slithered through the net and back into the water before we could get it into the tank so everyone else could see.

  (BTW, that’s something well worth doing. Yes, there are plenty of other boats on the river, but there’s something about being out there in something this large under sail which makes the river and its history much more real.)