Monday, May 7, 2007
Photos by John Patriquin/Staff Photographer
Southern Maine Community College science professor Jack Ney has been the leader of a years-long effort to restock alewives in Cape Elizabeth's Great Pond. Here, he shows a culvert under Old Ocean House Road that will be restored to allow the fish to travel more easily from the ocean into Alewife Brook and on to the pond. The restoration work involves fitting the culvert with a new liner.
Photos by John Patriquin/Staff Photographer
Annual alewife runs in Alewife Brook, above, died out in the 1980s, probably because of road work, low water levels and beaver dams. The fish were harvested as bait for lobster traps and for use as farming fertilizer.
CAPE ELIZABETH - There was a time when Alewife Brook sparkled with flashes of silver in May, as thousands of alewives made their way against the current, traveling from the ocean to their spawning ground in Great Pond.
Historically, lobstermen harvested the small fish for bait, and farmers plowed them under the earth as fertilizer. Along with blueback herring, alewives remain a prime source of food for the larger fish, birds and mammals of Casco Bay.
Annual alewife runs in this brook died out in the 1980s, however, probably because of road work, low water levels and beaver dams.
John Ney, a science professor at Southern Maine Community College, has been on a mission to restore the fish runs. Working with state and federal agencies, Ney began stocking Great Pond with the fish in 1999. The pond has been stocked most years since then, with the ultimate goal of establishing a permanent migratory population.
Ney and his students plan to return to the brook Tuesday to remove small sections of three beaver dams, increasing the flow of water and giving the alewives open passage back to the pond.
"We just have to disrupt beaver land for a few weeks," Ney said. "They build the dams back up fast."
Ney expects the alewives to return any day. Last year was the first year when he documented returns from the stocking program, so this year is a critical one, he said.
Alewives reach a length of 10 to 11 inches as adults and have a life cycle similar to that of the Atlantic salmon. They spawn in fresh water, usually in mid-May or early June. Adults migrate to the ocean about four weeks later. The juveniles grow in the pond or lake, then migrate in September or October. They generally stay in the ocean for three years, then make their way back in springtime to where they were spawned.
"Fish that were raised in Great Pond will return to Great Pond," said Mike Brown, a scientist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources.
The department has teamed up with Ney. Alewives are raised at the Brunswick Fishway, then are trucked to various lakes and ponds across Maine, including Great Pond.
Alewives, which are classified as river herring -- along with blueback herring -- are not endangered in Maine. The numbers have hung steady in the past decade, Brown said, but in many areas farther south along the Atlantic seaboard, river herring populations have collapsed. Some scientists believe that has contributed to the decline of groundfish in the Atlantic. They blame the loss of habitat and a surge in the striped bass population.
The consistent flow of water helps alewives make the run upstream. That issue will come into play during upcoming culvert restoration projects affecting Alewife Brook. The town plans to restore two culverts that run side by side beneath Old Ocean House Road, and the state Department of Transportation intends to replace a larger culvert beneath Route 77. Both projects call for slipliners, which are plastic pipes set within the existing metal culverts. The concept is much cheaper and easier than replacement.
Brown and other environmental officials have concerns about slipliners, however. They tend to speed up the water, making it difficult for fish to swim upstream; and they raise the height of the entrance into the old culvert.
Brown said his agency will be involved in the engineering for both projects, in an effort to protect the fish passages.
"How successful the town is at implementing and installing the culvert and keeping it clean will really affect how successful the run of alewives will be in the future," Brown said.
Mike McGovern, Cape Elizabeth town manager, said the town will work with the state and federal agencies to make sure the alewife resource is protected. That could mean some changes to the slipliner to slow the water down, and the addition of small channels into the plastic tubes.
The results of the project are important, Ney said, but there is a greater lesson that he tries to convey to the students.
"I'm trying to instill in them a feeling of scale. You don't need a $3 million fish ladder to make a difference," Ney said. "It is the small-scale things that will accumulate into substantial changes."
Staff Writer Trevor Maxwell can be contacted at 791-6451 or at:
Reader comments
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I remeber as a teen carrying buckets of Alewife, Horn Pout I think Mom called them, from the beach up to Alewife Pond and depostiting them above the dam. I would love to see them return now that my wife and I live here.report abuse
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