2022 Seining Season in Review
CURB recently wrapped up its 2022 Hudson River seining season. From February 9th through December 8th, the team completed 685 hauls of the seine net. It was a season full of diverse catches, including six fish caught for the first time at our location.
We collected and counted 9,426 animals, which was 2nd all-time in our 17 years of sampling. This was just short of our record of 9,965 in 2018. An average season produces a catch of 5,062 animals.
Our top 10 catches included 2,608 Atlantic silversides, 1,964 Atlantic menhaden (record), 1,543 moon jellies, 1,283 comb jellies (record), 658 blue crabs, 545 mummichogs, 354 grass shrimp, 114 striped bass, 113 sand shrimp, and 73 white perch. Atlantic silversides, Atlantic menhaden, moon jellies, and comb jellies accounted for over 78% of our catch.
In all, we caught 35 different species during the 2022 seining season. New catches included blackcheek tonguefish, emerald shiner, smallmouth flounder, spot, spottail shiner, and tautog. The blackcheek tonguefish was just the third ever caught in the Hudson River.
The largest single day catch of the season occurred on 6/8, producing 1,099 animals. This consisted of 1 bay anchovy, 1 Atlantic silverside, 1 Atlantic tomcod, 12 blue crabs, 13 comb jellies, 846 Atlantic menhaden, 211 moon jellies, 1 mummichog, and 13 grass shrimp. All of this was caught in just 5 hauls of the net.
While our overall catch numbers were very high, there were notable declines for several species. The table below features a selection of catches from this past year. The pink boxes are some of the species that saw counts below our seasonal average, while the blue boxes were above average.
Anchovies, hogchokers, naked gobies, northern pipefish, shrimp, and striped bass all had significantly low totals relative to average. Atlantic tomcods have been trending downwards for some time but had a bit of a bounce back year. Hogchokers and northern pipefish have also had steady declines over the last decade with very low numbers in the last year.
See below for a selection of additional graphs:
Complete data from the 2022 seining season, as well as archived data going back to 2005, is available on the seining page of our website.