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

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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.

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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.”

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