A Celebration of Alewives

I just read in this week's Lincoln County News that there will be a "Celebration of Alewives" in Damariscotta Mills this upcoming Saturday, May 19. The fish ladder near the dam on the Damariscotta Lake will be inundated with transplants and visitors from away to watch thousands of the little silvery fish try to climb the ladder for the purpose of spawning. While watching them is certainly an interesting sight, I cannot help but think of what alewives really are to me: Garbage Fish.

Let me explain...


Although alewives are native to the ocean, they do spawn in fresh water, and as such can live without the salinity of the ocean with no problems. This has allowed them to invade the Great Lakes through the St. Lawrence Seaway to colonize in the fresh waters of Lakes Huron, Erie, Ontario and Michigan. I don't believe they've made it into Lake Superior, though. They were one of the first of many invasive species that have contributed to the ecosystem changing, and not for the good. Now, back in the 1960s and early 1970s, there were massive die-offs of these little silver invaders, and the beaches would be covered with dead, rotten, stinking fish. The beautiful white sands of the Michigan shoreline were literally covered with them. You couldn't walk down the beach due to the smell, and forget lying on the sand and enjoying the hot summer days. The only ones that enjoyed them were the dogs, since dogs absolutely LOVE to roll in the smelliest, stinkiest objects they can find. In fact, I think my current Lab isn't happy unless she's doused with Eau de Skunk.

To actually sit on the beach, you had to take a rake and shovels and spend a good part of your time raking up the area and burying them, all the while swatting at the flies that were mad at you for taking away their breeding grounds. I will admit, you were ready to dive into the water as soon as you were finished with all that work. So, while alewives may have been important to the local economy in the past, to me they are nothing but trash. Smoke them and eat them? No way!

I will admit though, that they are actually an invasive species that had some benefit in the Great Lakes. They became forage fish for trout and walleye, who previously fed on yellow perch. With the abundance of alewives, the perch were relieved of the pressures from bigger fish, and exploded, so much so that a couple hours of fishing would produce stringers of a couple hundred perch, all of them of a delicious eating size of twelve inches. Those days are gone, though, as the perch fishing pressure along with the other invasive introdutions (zebra mussels in particular) have changed the Great Lakes forever.