Dead Fish Wash Up on Kimbles Beach

KIMBLES BEACH — Hundreds of small silver fish washed up on the shoreline of the Delaware Bay recently near Kimbles Beach Road.
Diane Kenny, a part-time resident who also splits her time between here and Philadelphia, saw the fish scattered along the high-water line in the sand Aug. 13 while taking a walk along her favorite stretch of beach.
“I’ve been coming here for a year and a half and I never saw anything like it,” Kenny told the Herald. “At first, I thought it was just some bait left from fishermen, but then I saw that it went all along the beach.”
When the Herald visited the site, a fisherman who didn’t reveal his name didn’t seem alarmed. As he cast a net into the surf, he said the fish were peanut bunker and they occasionally are found washed up on the beach.
The Herald also contacted local fisherman Fred Uhlman, of No Bones Bait & Tackle in Wildwood, who said that he thought it must have been overflow from the nets on commercial fishing boats out for bunker.
“Bunker swim in giant schools,” Uhlman said. “When the boats bring in thousands of fish, they often lose hundreds that are then washed ashore.”
Bunker, also called Atlantic menhaden, is used as a baitfish as well as in the production of fishmeal, oil and fertilizer.
Bunker have been known to be killed off in large quantities during heat waves when large schools enter into a body of water with low oxygen content. The bunker schools tend to be very tightly formed and many fish succumb to hypoxia or the lack of oxygen.
Uhlman didn’t think this had happened in this case, he said, because the fish kill would have been much larger and the weather hasn’t been hot enough.
Contact Hart at (609) 886-8600 Ext 35 or at: jhart@cmcherald.com