Juvenile alewife with eyes blown out of its skull from falling
25 feet over
the American Tissue Dam, Cobbosseecontee Stream, Gardiner, Maine.
Welcome to Maine:
Alewives Need Not Apply
If you were a native animal which has lived in the fresh and salt waters
of Maine for 9,000 years; fed countless generations of people, fish, bear,
mink, otter, osprey and bald eagles; been driven to extinction by dams and
pollution but still maintains a slender hold on survival in a few Maine
rivers today ...
If you were that animal, you would be surprised to find many Maine people
don't want you back.
If you were that animal, your name would be the alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus).
The alewife is an animal once as familiar to the people of New England as
the chickadee, the cod, the monarch butterfly or the white-tailed deer.
The arrival of tens of millions of alewives to the rivers of New England
was long known by all as a sure-fire sign of spring. Alewives were caught
by the millions from our rivers and streams, some to be smoked or pickled,
others to fertilize fields of corn, others to be used as bait for cod, striped
bass and halibut.
To survive, alewives must migrate from the ocean to their spawning grounds
in freshwater ponds. Alewives have been doing this in New England for 9,000
years.
In 1735 the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed
the first law in North America to protect a native fish in freshwater. The
fish they chose to protect was not the Atlantic salmon, the brook trout
or the sturgeon, but the alewife. The law reads in part:
"An Act to Prevent the Destruction of the Fish called Alewives.
"Notwithstanding the provision of law already made for removing incumbrances
obstructing the natural or usual course of fish, in their season, in brooks
and rivers, yet no sufficient remedy is provided where such obstruction
is occasioned by dams erected for mills, &c. which is to the grievous
damage of his Majesty's good subjects in diverse parts of this province,
more especially where such dams have been made across rivers through which
alewives or other fish have been wont to pass, in great plenty, into ponds,
there to cast their spawns; wherefore, to prevent the like inconvenience
and damage for the future --"
Despite this 1735 law, which required all dam owners to let alewives pass
through their dams or face heavy fines, and countless more laws with the
same intent passed during the next two centuries, one by one the rivers
and streams of New England were closed off to the spring migrations of the
alewife.
By 1970, alewives were extinct from more than 95 percent of their homes
in Maine and New England. By 1970, for the first time in 9,000 years, most
people living in New England had never seen an alewife in their lives, nor
had their parents or grandparents.
Thirty four years later, the situation has not improved significantly. Alewives
remain shut out of most of their native homes in New England's rivers, as
are Atlantic salmon, American shad, Atlantic sturgeon and striped bass.
With the passage of the federal Clean Water Act and removal of gross pollution
from our rivers and lakes, efforts to restore alewives to Maine have escalated.
So quickly that many Maine people have been caught off guard, having lived
so long without even the memory of sea-run fish swimming in the rivers and
ponds near their homes.
The absence of sea-run fish from Maine rivers and ponds has been so long
that some Maine people are now opposed to letting these native fish come
back and have stopped the restoration of sea-run fish, including alewives,
to their native habitat in many Maine rivers, streams, lakes and ponds.
Maine is the only place in the United States or Canada where citizens and
state fisheries biologists have opposed the restoration of alewives to their
native homes in the state's coastal watersheds. Despite their refusal to
provide any scientific evidence to support their claims -- and the refutation
of their claims by innumerable scientific studies -- many Maine citizens
and state fisheries biologists continue to oppose allowing alewives to return
to their native homes in Maine's rivers, lakes and ponds.
Because of this opposition, decades-long efforts to restore the native sea-run
fisheries of two of New England's largest river systems -- the St. Croix
and Androscoggin -- have severely faltered; and this opposition is now threatening
100 years of efforts to restore the sea-run fisheries of the Kennebec and
Penobscot Rivers.
Below is a wide range of information about our friend the alewife.
Final
Interagency Study of Interactions between Alewives and other fish in Lake
George, Canaan, Maine. (PDF)
A
Documentary History of the Alewife in Maine and New England (in press) (MS
Word document).
Quality
of recreational bass and pickerel fishing in a complex of native Alewife
ponds (web link)
Efforts to restore
alewives in the Buzzards Bay watershed, southeastern Massachusetts (web
link).
Efforts to restore alewives in coastal
watersheds of New Hampshire (news story).
Efforts to restore alewives in New Bedford,
Mass. area (news story)
Biologist stops a fish kill of alewives at
hydro-electric dam on Suncook River, New Hampshire (news story).
Maine Rivers launches educational
effort to save native alewives in Maine (web link).
Cranberry bog in middle of river threatens
survival of Cape Cod alewife run (news story)