‘Without water they die very quickly’: Drought-starved streams feed ecosystem concern

Vince Spaits grew up close to Coplay Creek, and he's been fishing there and in other Lehigh River tributaries for well over 40 years.

He's never seen water levels as low as they are right now amid unrelenting drought conditions.

With no quenching rain yet assured, the situation has sparked wildfires , generated fire warnings and burn bans , and led to calls for water conservation across eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The impacts on the ecosystem of local waterways could take years to repair, according to members of the Lehigh River Stocking Association . Spaits, the nonprofit organization 's vice president, walked the Coplay on Nov. 10 and found entire stretches of the creek completely dry. There were hundreds of dead fish across a variety of species, including sunfish, white suckers, shiners and dace.

"I even found a somewhat large eel, and I found trout," the Whitehall Township resident said, stressing the unseen impacts that extend to plant life, and the macro-invertebrates and benthic organisms the fish rely on as food: "They survive in the water, they need the water to live and breathe, and without water they die very quickly."

Raccoons and heron were seen feeding on the carcasses, but Spaits worries about what the loss of fish will mean in the longer term for the ecosystem's food chain.

"Everything that lives in there, when it dries out completely it kills it, and it will take a while for that to rebound," said Tom Gyory, the stocking association's treasurer and manager of its co-op nursery in North Whitehall Township.

The Lehigh Valley's official rainfall measurement has totaled 1.61 inches since Sept. 1, including a record-low 0.02 of an inch in October and the 0.29 of an inch that fell Nov. 10-11. The prior days' measurable rainfall came Oct. 24, with about 0.01 of an inch, and Sept. 29 with 0.03 of an inch.

The precipitation deficit as of Friday totaled 8.78 inches since Sept. 1 and 5.44 inches for the year, compared to normal levels.

"That's quite a bit to ask for all at once," said Mike Lee, lead meteorologist for the National Weather Service 's regional forecast office in Mount Holly, New Jersey. "And to get there, ideally we'd have a couple of systems come in and drop a couple of inches at a time."

"We are not getting those 5 inches of rainfall in a week or maybe the next two weeks," he told lehighvalleylive.com last Tuesday, pointing to a ridging pattern that has been favoring high pressure across the area.

The weather service forecast for Lehigh Valley International Airport, where the official measurements are recorded, calls for a 40% chance of showers Wednesday night into Thursday this week.

The Lehigh River Stocking Association is coming off a 2024 season that saw the worst mortality ever at its nursery pond, according to Gyory. One of about 150 co-op nurseries that raise fingerlings supplied by the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, the pond a couple of 100 yards from the Lehigh lost about half of its 2,000 springtime trout. Fish and Boat sent out a biologist, who diagnosed a common bacterial infection, and supplied antibiotic-medicated fish feed as well as replaced the 1,000 or so trout that had died, Gyory said.

Today, the drought is cutting flows to the pond, making it more stagnant than normal with increased levels of fish effluent, Gyory said: "Right now we're still worried that it's going to cause more mortality."

Founded in 1991, the association stocks 27 miles of the Lehigh from Northampton to Jim Thorpe.

"What's really nice is we see some natural reproduction going on in the Lehigh," Gyory said. "We see small brown trout that we know were born there, so it's really been becoming a destination fishery — people come from all over to fish in the Lehigh now."

Spaits's observations of the Lehigh, compared to its tributaries, are that its levels remain sufficient for fish to find spots to ride out the drought. That's also the hope of Brian Wagner, chairman of the Pennsylvania Council of Trout Unlimited Conservation Committee.

"The trout kind of know what to do, how to survive, so they'll go to the areas where they're getting the proper habitat and things like that," Wagner told lehighvalleylive.com .

Wagner has been noticing Lehigh Valley streams that are spring-fed doing OK, while freestone streams with less spring-fed recharge are "getting pretty low and skinny-looking."

He doesn't fish as much this time of year, he said, since it's the spawning season for species like brown and brook trout. Visitors to streams might spot oval areas called redds where a female trout has cleaned away the gravel to make a little pit where her eggs will be deposited for the male to fertilize.

The drought has not impacted Pennsylvania's fall trout stocking , as the last of the year's 3.2 million trout stocked by the Fish and Boat Commission were released, spokesman Mike Parker said. Co-op nurseries like the Lehigh River Stocking Association release a million more. It's been a slightly different story in New Jersey, where low-flow conditions on rivers and streams delayed the fall stocking of some 20,000 rainbows averaging 14-16 inches in length and up to 1,000 broodstock trout that are 3-year-old rainbows averaging 18-22 inches, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection.

One impact of the drought on Pennsylvania fishing is occurring in the Lake Erie area, according to the Fish and Boat Commission. For decades, the commission has stocked about a million nursery-raised steelhead trout annually in the 20 or so streams that flow into Lake Erie, where they then grow to adulthood before returning to their nascent stream to spawn.

"This is the time of year when people fish for steelhead ," Parker said, as the spawning run kicks off in fall and continues through winter into early spring.

Steelhead fishing, however, is reliant on rainfall, and low-flow conditions can result in the trout getting stuck in spots rather than continuing their run upstream. Parker urges steelhead anglers planning a trip to Lake Erie to be aware that conditions haven't been ideal for a strong steelhead run.

Elsewhere in the state, fall can make for great fishing of species like bass, catfish, walleyes and muskies as they are eating more — and are more responsive to bait — before they become less active over winter, according to Parker.

The dry spell has led to drought declarations this month in 35 Pennsylvania counties and a drought warning in New Jersey . Dozens of public water suppliers in Pennsylvania have asked users to conserve water.

The reservoir in New Jersey's Spruce Run Recreation Area off Interstate 78 outside Clinton is noticeably low, as water has been released there and at nearby Round Valley's reservoir to augment the low flow in the Raritan River that is the primary source of water for New Jersey Water Supply Authority customers, according to Executive Director Marc Brooks.

Visitors to Spruce Run have observed old foundations and wells visible as the water level has receded.

"And once things like this happen, it's a long road back," Spaits, from the Lehigh River Stocking Association, said of the historic drought conditions. "And even federal and state agencies can't do much to put bugs back into the river. That has to happen in a natural way and over time."

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