PEARL RIVER, La. -- Roughly 55,000 new fish are swimming in the Pearl River system, after a massive restocking effort Thursday.
Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries agents released the fish in two locations, setting roughly 30,000 fish into the water near Pearl River and another 25,000 upriver in Bogalusa. The fish are small sunfish of two types, Bluegill Sunfish and Redear Sunfish.
"They grow fast and mature fast, and they'll be well on their way," said Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries District Manager Tim Ruth. "Folks will be catching these fish, and they'll be interacting. They'll be showing up on the end of fishing poles and fishing lines pretty soon I'm sure."
Ruth led Thursday's restocking efforts.
"We're down a significant number of species," Ruth said. "The catfish, the freshwater drum. The freshwater mussels were affected, so we know those species were affected just from evidence from the kill. But a healthy river like the Pearl is going to come back. It's on its way back. We hope we can get that started a little quicker, introducing these bluegill today."
"The kill" was the massive fish kill in August 2011, caused by a leaking of black liquor from the Temple-Inland paper mill in Bogalusa.
That spill killed hundreds of thousands of fish and mussels in the Pearl River system.
"I know the river pretty well, but I've never experienced an incident quite like this," Ruth said. "We went through Hurricane Katrina, in which the lower end of the river was really devastated, and we saw within three years that fish were back, and some fish were even in excess of the numbers preceding Katrina."
Agents expect a quick recovery, but to be sure, they're beginning an intensive three-year monitoring program this summer.
"Fisheries biologists will be out here with nets and other gear, monitoring, sampling, seeing how many we can collect and comparing it to older data to see how the fish are doing," Ruth said.
According to Ruth, Thursday's restocking efforts "went extremely well." The fish were raised at a state hatchery in Alexandria.
"It's a great day," Ruth said, "especially seeing the disaster that happened, and how the community was affected and the people. To be able to come back and see some positive stuff going on, I think it's great."
