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Plan to Reopen Fish Ladders to be Aired in Augusta

March 26, 2008 - AUGUSTA -- For 13 years, Maine fishing guides and sport camp owners have successfully blocked alewife runs into the St. Croix River watershed, protecting the valuable smallmouth bass population from a fish they view as an invasive pest and a threat to their livelihoods. But this year, the sports fishing industry is on the defensive as legislation pushed by Gov. John Baldacci's administration to re-open fish ladders gains momentum.

The issue is drawing attention from outside the state, a change from 1995 when the Maine Legislature blocked alewife access in a move that attracted only local interest. What's different today is that river herring - a category that includes alewife and blueback herring - are now clearly in trouble.

During the past decade, the fish have experienced "drastic declines" throughout much of their range in the western Atlantic, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service. That decline caused the agency to list river herring as a "species of concern" in 2006. Groups such as the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which manages fish stocks that travel along the East Coast, and the Pew Charitable Trusts, a national nonprofit working to protect stocks of sea herring, are following the issue.

The Canadian provincial and federal governments also are involved. Canada believes the closure violates international agreements and continues to truck fish past the dams in order to sustain a remnant run of the oily fish, which are eaten by groundfish such as cod and haddock, as well as birds, including osprey and bald eagles.

Commercial fishermen who harvest alewives for lobster bait support the fish-ladder legislation because they believe a healthier alewife stock in Maine will help them block a proposed moratorium on alewife fishing in the state. That ban is being considered by federal fisheries regulators.

The state bill, which would re-open fish ladders at Woodland and Grand Falls in the lower portion of the St. Croix, also enjoys more support among state agencies than previous efforts have. In 2001, several biologists from the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife spoke out against a similar measure, which the Legislature killed. The biologists believed that opening the river to large-scale alewife runs posed too much of a risk to the sport fish population.

This year, IFW biologists are supporting the bill, citing recent studies indicating that alewives and bass can coexist and that large numbers of alewives have been spawning in the watershed, since prehistoric times.

There are so many people either supporting or opposing the bill that the Legislature's Marine Resources Committee will hold Monday's public hearing at the Augusta Civic Center rather than in a State House committee room. For those in the sport fishing community, the issue generates anger and anxiety.

In the remote corner of the state adjacent to the St. Croix,- there are few good-paying jobs, and fishing guides can earn as much as $250 a day, said Dale Tobey, president of the Grand Lakes Stream Guides Association. At least 140 people work as guides or at the 28 sporting lodges on the watershed, Tobey said. A state-funded study in 1999 concluded the industry generated $5.5 million a year.

Fishing guides and camp owners have bitter memories of what happened in the 1980s, when a resurgence of alewife runs that followed fishway improvements in Milltown, a Calais neighborhood, coincided with the disappearance of all the juvenile smallmouth bass on Spednik Lake. The sport fishermen blame the alewives, which they describe as voracious eaters that consume the food supply of bass and other freshwater game fish.

"The state is going to let them come in and wipe out everything," said Lance Wheaton, who owns a sporting camp on East Grand Lake. "If this happens, land prices will go down. Who wants to own a camp with no fish?"

He said the fish ladders installed at dams enabled alewives to navigate past natural falls that had served as barriers. Only a few alewives had ever made it above the falls at Milltown before the Oshway improvements, said Wheaton, who lives on Grand Lake in a community called Forest City, population 11. He has worked as a guide for more than 40 years, and his father and grandfather also worked as fishing guides on the river.

East Coast alewife populations are declining because ocean trawlers are catching them, and now the sport fishermen will have to suffer, Tobey said. "It's not our problem," he said. "They can't regulate their fishery in the ocean. Why should we have to suffer because of it?"

The alewife advocates include conservation groups, marine biologists and alewife fishermen. They say the St. Croix River - which connects a huge expanse of inland lakes and streams to the sea - offers an ideal breeding habitat for alewives. The alewife is native to the watershed, they say, noting that the smallmouth bass is an "exotic" sport fish that was first stocked in Maine lakes in the 19th century. Because of industrial pollution and the lack of adequate fish passage around dams, alewife runs have been minuscule for much of the past two centuries.

But the river at one time supported huge alewife runs that could only have been possible if the fish had access to the lakes and streams in the watershed for breeding, according to a 2007 study by Lewis Flagg, a veteran Marine Resources official, who examined archeological findings and written accounts. He also found letters from alewife fishermen petitioning for the removal of obstructions in the river. The study found that the alewife runs were severely diminished in 1825 when a dam was built in Calais. The alewife run remained low until 1981, when a much more effective flshway was built at the Milltown dam. In seven years, the number of alewives surged from 170,000 to 2.6 million.

Alarmed by the problems at Spednik Lake, the sport fishing industry protested to state officials and the Legislature. After the closure of the Vanceboro fishway at Spednik Lake in 1988, the Grand Falls fishway in 1993, and the Woodland fishway in 1995, the number of returning alewives fell to a trickle. In 2007, just 1,300 alewives returned to spawn, even though the state has been stocking them at Woodland since 2001.

The state closed the fishways by creating a drop of at least 2 feet, making them impassable because alewives can't jump. Salmon, which can jump, still use the fishways.

The Department of Marine Resources, which has jurisdiction over alewives, plans to take a cautious approach to restoring the fish runs, limiting the total number of spawning alewives to 120,000 a year. The plan calls for keeping alewives out of West Grand Lake, where the state runs a salmon hatchery, and also for the time being out of Spednik Lake, where state bass poptilations are still recovering from a crash during the 1980s.

Nevertheless, those 120,000 spawning alewives will produce from 300,000 to 600,000 returning adult alewives over five years, most of which can be harvested by alewife fishermen and sold for lobster bait, according to Patrick Keliher, director of the Bureau of Sea Run Fisheries and Habitat for the Department of Marine Resources.

Attempts to restore the river's salmon runs have failed, but the St. Croix' alewives have proven to be resilient, said Fred Whoriskey, a scientist who heads research for Atlantic Salmon Federation and is based in St. Andrews, New Brunswick.

"This process is about beginning to repair the river from the bottom up," he said. "It gets us back to where we can hope to restore the ecosystem."

Keliher said studies have shown that bass and alewives in other parts of the state can share the same watershed. "We are not going to see an impact," he said. "We have never seen an impact anywhere."

In the mid-1990s, Marine Resources completed a 10-year study of alewives in Lake George in Canaan that found they had no harmful effect on resident fish populations at six alewives per acre of water - the population density the department plans to achieve if the Legislature approves the bill.

A separate study, published in 2006 by Theodore Willis, a research scientist at the University of Southern Maine, found no evidence that alewives have systematically harmed smallmouth bass populations. In fact, the study, which analyzed state data collected in eastern Maine lakes, found evidence that bass grew faster in the presence of alewives than in their absence.

Moreover, an analysis of the tournament data of fishing clubs in Maine and New Brunswick found little difference in the size of the bass caught in lakes that had alewives and those that didn't. A diet analysis of alewives and bass found that zooplankton and algae were the most common food sources for both types of fish and there appeared to be enough for all. That study was coordinated by Maine Rivers and reviewed by a scientific advisory committee that included representatives from the federal, state and provincial agencies involved with the management of the St. Croix River.

Wheaton derided the USM study, which contradicts restdents' observations - among them the mysterious disappearance of juvenile smallmouth bass in Spednik Lake. Willis notes that explosive growth in the alewife population was not the only potentially adverse condition on the lake at the time. Spednik Lake also experienced significant water draw-downs that may have left many smallmouth bass eggs high and dry. There is hardly any data available about the lake during the 1980s, so scientists can't really say what happened, Willis said.

SOURCE: KENNEBEC JOURNAL

DATE: 03-02-2008


Lakes: Spednik Lake
Regions: Lincoln


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