Is the Hudson River fresh or salt water?

For about half its length, the Hudson is actually a tidal estuary, where salt water from the ocean combines with fresh water from northern tributaries. The Hudson is tidal from the mouth of the Hudson in New York Harbor to the Federal Dam in Troy, a distance of about 153 miles.



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The “Salt Front” is the location where the river is 100 ppm salinity. 100 ppm salinity falls within acceptable drinking water standards.

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In the warmer months, you can find seahorses in the river's shallow water around piers and in grassy areas from Staten Island to the Tappan Zee Bridge in Westchester. Oysters were once plentiful in the mouth of the Hudson River. In 1911, records show a peak harvest of almost 25 million pounds!

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Women under 50 and children under 15 should not eat any fish from the Hudson River, including striped bass. Women who eat highly contaminated fish and become pregnant may have an increased risk of having children who are slower to develop and learn. Some contaminants may be passed on to infants in mother's milk.

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For Your Health- In 1976, the Upper Hudson River was closed to fishing due to extremely high amounts of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in fish. These levels posed a high risk of possible harmful health effects in humans. Since 1976, the manufacture of PCBs has been banned and their use phased out.

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This results in a total of 59 bodies floating down the lower Hudson every year (49 or 50 from NYC, 5 or 6 from Bergen County, and about 4 from Hudson County). 59 divided by 365 gives you about 0.16 bodies per day.

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Predators like blue crabs and sturgeons do eat zebra mussels, but have never been shown to control natural populations. Research on new control measures, including biological controls, is ongoing, but the changes we've seen to the Hudson's ecosystem probably are irreversible or at least long-lasting.

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An estimated 100,000 people in the Hudson Valley rely on the Hudson for their drinking water.

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Saving the River's Fish. For schools of migratory shad, sturgeon, river herring, blue crab, menhaden and striped bass, the Hudson is an unimpeded corridor from the Atlantic to their ancestral spawning grounds.

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Geology. The Hudson is sometimes called, in geological terms, a drowned river. The rising sea levels after the retreat of the Wisconsin glaciation, the most recent ice age, have resulted in a marine incursion that drowned the coastal plain and brought salt water well above the mouth of the river.

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Conservation priorities include: Brackish and freshwater tidal wetlands that provide essential habitat for diamondback terrapins, fiddler crabs, rails and killifish, river otter, turtles, bald eagles and other raptors, marsh wrens and herons, crayfish and dragonflies and blackbirds.

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The Hudson River lacked the necessary spawning and nursery capacity to maintain salmon. The first major tributary, the Mohawk River, entering from the west above Albany, was impassable due to the 70 foot falls at Cohoes.

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While there are orange individuals in the Hudson, these tend to be easy pickings for predators; one study of the diet of ospreys along the Hudson found that goldfish were a common prey of this fish-eating hawk. Thus the goldfish we catch are more likely to be olive green or brown than orange or gold.

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