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photo by Doug Watts

In 1995, the Maine Legislature passed a law that prevented upstream fish passage for alewives at two dams on the St. Croix River, an international boundary water.

Fish passage facilities on the river were closed because of the misguided assertion that growing numbers of sea-run alewives had caused the collapse of Spednic Lake's smallmouth bass populations in the 1980s. This claim had absolutely no scientific evidence to support it. Despite the objections of conservation organizations and fisheries experts on both sides of the border, the Legislature moved forward with the closure.

Since the closing, the St. Croix alewife population has crashed, falling from a high of 2.6 million fish in 1987 to only 1,300 returning adults in 2007.

LD 1957, An Act to Restore Diadromous Fish in the St. Croix River, hopes to halt the eradication of this once great population by over-turning the 1995 law and once again allowing native sea run alewives to reach their historic spawning grounds in the St. Croix River watershed.

photo by Jon Allen

Alewives (Alosa pseudoharengus) are an anadromous fish species, meaning that they are spawned in freshwater lakes and ponds and then travel to the ocean where they grow and reach sexual maturity before returning to freshwater to reproduce and thus complete their lifecycle. Alewives show a high degree of fidelity to their natal waters and without access to these waters, genetically unique populations of the species can be lost.

Virtually every river in Maine historically had an alewife population and the species is a critical component of our state’s river ecosystems. They are a valuable source of marine-derived nutrients and are a critical food source for a wide variety of other fish, bird, and mammal species, including: striped bass, cod, pollock, largemouth and smallmouth bass, trout and salmon, ospreys, eagles, kingfishers, cormorants, mink, otter, seals, and dolphins.

Alewives are not just ecologically important, but are also economically valuable. They are a primary bait source for Maine’s lobster industry, and commercial alewife fishermen generate substantial income from the harvesting of alewives each spring. Across the state, dozens of Maine municipalities have commercial harvesting rights to alewives on approximately 40 coastal streams and rivers. Thus, alewives provide significant revenues to the towns that lease the fishing privileges to fishermen.

In recent years, significant private and public resources have been spent investigating the interactions between alewives and smallmouth bass in the St. Croix watershed. This science has demonstrated beyond a doubt that the presence of sea-run alewives poses no threat to smallmouth bass in the St. Croix drainage. In fact, the data from these studies show that in some lakes bass populations benefit from having alewives present. This science was peer-reviewed by numerous state, federal, and independent fisheries experts from both sides of the border.

Alewife restoration has been a tremendous success in the Kennebec River and in many other rivers across Maine and New England. LD 1957 would bring this same success to the St. Croix and would provide real ecological and economic benefits for Downeast Maine.