Maryland Probes Worst Fish Kill in a Decade

Maryland officials were investigating Friday what caused at least 500,000 fish to die along two Chesapeake Bay tributaries in the second major fish kill to strike the area in less than a month.

Water samples from the Pocomoke River and its Eastern Shore Virginia tributary, Bullbegger Creek, have been forwarded to labs as far away as Florida to make sure the huge school of menhaden that died was not killed by chemicals or the dreaded toxic microorganism Pfiesteria piscicida.

Thousands of fish were found floating belly-up at the mouth of the Pocomoke on Thursday, while tens of thousands more were piled along the banks of the creek in what officials described as the area’s worst fish kill in a decade.

The scope of the fish kill surpassed a similar incident early this month in which 200,000 menhaden, yellow perch, catfish and other freshwater varieties died in tributaries of the Magothy and Patapsco rivers. Maryland officials at the time called that fish kill the worst since the 1980s.

Officials, including Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening, have done their best to assure the public that the dead fish show no signs of the lesions associated with Pfiesteria, which in 1997 caused a panic in Maryland that briefly jeopardized the economic health of the local seafood industry.

Pfiesteria is a microscopic organism that emits a toxic enzyme. It has killed billions of fish along the inland waterways of the East Coast in recent years.

“We’re testing everything to determine whether Pfiesteria had a role. But the situation looks as if a lack of dissolved oxygen may have done [the fish] in,” said Quentin Banks, spokesman for the Maryland Department of the Environment.

The Magothy and Patapsco fish kill reported July 1 was attributed to drought conditions that allowed phosphorus and nitrogen to build up in shallow areas, causing algae blooms that robbed the water of oxygen and left fish gasping.