Following Dam Removals & Bypasses, "Stunning" Recovery For Alewife Populations In Multiple Maine Rivers

[hatrack]

For a few weeks each summer, the Sebasticook River in Benton, Maine, is paved with flashing silver scales, so thick it seems you could almost walk across. The alewives have returned for their annual migration. On a mid-May weekend, Benton held its annual Alewife Festival on the riverbank. With the tunes of a local steel drum band in the background, families made fish-themed crafts, sampled smoked alewives and watched the migration in progress. Below Benton Falls Dam, fishermen hauled alewives into their boats one full net at a time.

Looking at this scene, it’s hard to believe that 35 years ago, fewer than 800 alewives were making this trip upriver. Last year, they numbered 9 million. The story of Maine’s alewives is a conservation success decades in the making—and unmatched on the rest of the Atlantic coast.

EDIT

The alewife, or river herring, doesn’t sound like a source of such enthusiasm. The name supposedly comes from the fish’s rotund silver bellies, an unflattering comparison to female tavernkeepers. The species lives mostly in the Atlantic Ocean, from Newfoundland to South Carolina, but in early summer the adults migrate as far as 100 miles inland to spawn in ponds and lakes.

Alewives aren’t considered a game fish, though some people do catch and smoke them. But they are a linchpin for Maine’s river ecosystems—one that basically disappeared from many of those rivers for decades. They act as a “biological conveyor belt” of nutrients between the ocean and inland waters, said Rustin Taylor, the executive director of the Alewife Harvesters of Maine. Seals, otters, bald eagles, ospreys, pollock, trout and other carnivores eat alewives. The fish fed generations of Native communities and colonial and industrial American towns. The Passamaquoddy tribe’s name for the species, siqonomeq, translates to “the fish that feeds all.”

EDIT

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06072026/maine-dam-removal-efforts-lead-to-fish-comeback/

[AverageOldGuy]

1. Is the "alewife". . .

. . . the same fish referred to as the “pogie” or the “menhaden” in the Mid-Atlantic and Gulf Coast states?

[KS Toronado]

2. Appears to be a herring

Alewife, (Pomolobus, or Alosa, pseudoharengus), important North American food fish of the herring family,
Clupeidae. Deeper-bodied than the true herring, the alewife has a pronounced saw-edge on the underside;

[niyad]

3. Rather like the salmon returning on the West Coast.

[2naSalit]

7. Pacific Salmon...

Are considered a keystone species, for the reasons mentioned about the Alewife, they feed the forests of Idaho and Utah. No other species bring ocean derived nutrients that far inland, nutrients essential for healthy forests from microbial communities up the food chain to grizzly bears, the top carnivore. Even the trees and pther flora are fed by the salmon return.

One of the reasons, besides other human encroachments, inland forests of the northern Rockies are suffering from diseases and pestilence is due to the dams on the Columbia River. The flora benefit from the leavings after animals have eaten and spread fish remains all over the place, the nitrogen and phosphates from the ocean are crucial to forest health. They don't get that far inland any other way.

I fought, for years, to have them removed, along with thousands of other concerned citizens.

[Chasstev365]

4. Swinming in Lake Michigan in Chicago as a kid in the 1970's, the dead Alewife would start drifting into the beach area

I think this is one of the reasons I have a fish phobia to this day.

https://www.wttw.com/touring-chicagos-lakefront/invasive-species-that-have-disrupted-lake-michigans-ecology

[yardwork]

5. Swimming in Lake Erie in the 1960s was also a trip.

[hoosierspud]

6. It was a problem in Michigan City, IN in the '60's, too.

It smelled to high heaven.