Dead shad lie along the shore Monday at Clinton Lake. Wildlife officials say the fish naturally died of the cold.

Dead shad lie along the shore Monday at Clinton Lake. Wildlife officials say the fish naturally died of the cold.

Gizzard shad facts

When Lawrence resident Alex Hormell and his family took a walk by the Clinton Lake Dam on Sunday, he was shocked to see dead fish on the rocky bank.

“As far as you could see there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of fish,” Hormell said.

The fish are gizzard shad, and many of them die each winter from the cold, said Richard Sanders, fisheries biologist with the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks.

“Any time the water temperature gets below 60 (degrees) you’ll have some individual shad start dying off,” he said. “We’ve really had a cold winter this year.”

An unusually high number of shad died this year because in 2005 a larger number were born, Sanders said. Those shad are now getting old and are more susceptible to cold, he said.

“This is a normal occurrence every year, just not usually of this magnitude,” he said.

Sanders conducted a cursory examination of some of the shad and found nothing to indicate they died of anything other than the cold.

“If this was a contamination issue, it normally attacks more than one species of fish,” Sanders said. “There were no obvious bacterial problems.”