Herring Hearsay

After we published this oration in FR&R (See “Dam Removal,” April 2002) the Bangor Daily News phoned to ask me if I had just been kidding around because, well, no real state law maker would talk that way, right?

Since then, Goodwin, the guides and the state have a plethora of new information on which to draw conclusions. This has been supplied by an exhaustive, two-year study funded by NGOs and state and federal agencies, with scientific oversight from NMFS, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, IF&W, the Maine Department of Marine Resources, Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the New Brunswick Department of Natural Resources and the St. Croix International Waterway Commission. Ten lakes were examined—three cohabitated by bass and alewives, six with just bass, and one with bass but alewives that only showed up in some years.

“There was no systematic difference in young-of-the-year smallmouth bass length or condition based on the presence or absence of anadromous alewives, nor was there an interaction between lake or year and alewife presence,” reported the researchers. They also collected data from bass tournaments on 13 lakes in Maine and New Brunswick and found “no systematic difference in the weight of tournament entries…between lakes with and without alewives.”

Before the study, Rick Jordan, IF&W’s regional fisheries biologist, had expressed to me his belief (shared by virtually none of his peers) that alewife recovery might indeed limit bass. But when I interviewed him on February 27, 2008, he told me that, on the strength of the study, he has concluded that reopening the two dam fishways at Woodland and Grand Falls to alewives poses no danger to bass. That’s what scientists do—they read studies, consider data and then draw conclusions.

At behest of the conservation group Maine Rivers, and with the enthusiastic support of the state management agencies, Senator Dennis Damon (D-Hancock), chair of the Marine Resources Committee, has sponsored a bill (LD 1957) to restore alewife access at the two fishways. The bill would allow recovery of the species in only about a quarter of its historic habitat in the St. Croix system. Interdiction would continue at Spednic Lake and West Grand Lake.

But on March 19, the Maine legislature’s Marine Resources Committee, cowed by the guides and the Passamaquoddy Indians (who have swallowed the guides’ wives’ tales hook, line, boat and motor), effectively killed the bill by recommending a “compromise.” Alewives would be allowed to pass the Woodland Dam but would continue to be blocked at the Grand Falls Dam. Alewife habitat between Woodland and Grand Falls is marginal, and the Canadians have been trucking alewives there anyway. So there’s no biological gain.

Providing the guides with grist for more obfuscation has been the recent advent of alien landlocked alewives to East Grand Lake, Big Lake and Grand Falls Flowage. In the Great Lakes ale-wives, which arrived in Lake Ontario via the Erie Canal or perhaps via a fisheries manager in the mistaken belief that they were shad, became landlocked and are a major scourge to salmonids. They contain high concentrations of thiaminase, an enzyme that degrades vitamin B-1 (thiamine) in some predator fish that eat them, thereby killing fry in the swim-up stage.

In the late 19th Century, the few native Lake Ontario landlocked salmon that made it past dams probably were already critically deficient in thiamine. No wild fish were seen after 1898. Landlocked alewives don’t appear to affect bass. And, while there’s no evidence that they affect Maine salmonids, they might because, unlike sea-runs which co-evolved with those salmonids and which are in and out of the system in a few weeks, they’re present all year.

The guides have argued that the landlocked alewives infesting the upper St. Croix system derive from sea-run fish. But the recent study used DNA analysis to establish that they are “genetically distinct from anadromous alewife populations” and are “almost certainly” the result of illegal stocking. Anyone who fears alien landlocked alewives (and fear is justified) should get behind anadromous alewife recovery.

Pat Keliher, director of the Maine Bureau of Sea Run Fisheries and Habitat, offers this: “My staff believes that anadromous alewives are going to displace landlocked alewives. They’ll outcompete them.”