Restore Maine’s native fish

Over the past two centuries, Maine’s rivers have lost an incredible array of native species, due to the trinity of pollution, damming and overfishing. Two hundred years ago, there wasn’t a river in the state that didn’t have large populations of silvery alewives swimming upstream every spring. Millions of pounds of shad were harvested commercially from colonial times up to the early twentieth century. Other species such as tomcod, American eels, salmon and sturgeon were present in great abundance.

Now, it’s the isolated river in Maine that has healthy runs of any of these fish. A central requirement of the Clean Water Act is restoration of our rivers, and to many, that means restoration of a river’s full complement of native species; these fish co-evolved over the millennia, they depend on each other in countless ways, and thus they should be co-restored. The 1999 removal of the Kennebec River’s Edwards Dam, the 2002 removal of the Smelt Hill Dam on the Presumpscot, and the recent announcement of a major deal to restore fish passage to 500 miles of habitat on the Penobscot River are, despite the justified celebration attending them, in fact relatively small steps towards a much larger goal of rebuilding all our state’s rivers.

In the meantime, as native species have declined, much effort has gone into stocking of a few non-native species attractive to many recreational fishermen such as smallmouth bass. Two recent incidents related to these non-native fish illustrate what one advocate has called the state’s “multiple personality disorder” when it comes to fish restoration, and raise the question of what our ultimate goals really are.

The first incident was the state’s attempt this year to restore native alewives to the Sebasticook and Kennebec rivers by stocking them in feeder ponds on the Sebasticook’s west branch. Bass fishermen who frequent those ponds raised a ruckus, saying that they were concerned – despite the fact that there is no scientific evidence for this – that the alewives would wreck their bass fishing, by outcompeting or even perhaps devouring the bass.

The proposed alewife stocking was part of a Department of Marine Resources restoration plan, adopted with significant public input, and which has been carried out in many other watersheds whose lakes now boast happily-coexisting populations of bass and alewives. But the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, which has the responsibility of permitting the stocking, caved in to public pressure, and denied the stocking permits. Thus, the legally mandated restoration of a native species to its historic range was blocked by a department under fire from fishermen to protect a non-native species. This is not the only watershed in Maine where this conflict has played out to the detriment of the native species.

The second incident happened more recently, on the Machias River watershed. The Machias River is one of the state’s few remaining homes to native wild Atlantic Salmon, which have been the focus of intensive and expensive restoration efforts coordinated by the state’s Atlantic Salmon Commission. So it came as a shock to many when they found out that non-native smallmouth bass had been transferred into Fourth Machias Lake by IF&W biologists this year, and in previous years into Third Machias Lake. Now, bass prey on salmon, and the introduction of these fish into the Machias system was tantamount to giving the fox the keys to the henhouse. There’s an agreement between IF&W and the Atlantic Salmon Commission that they will talk at least once a year to discuss any potential management conflicts. Evidently these talks have not happened over the past few years.

There needs to be more coordination among state agencies if we’re to restore all our rivers’ native species. But there’s more required than that: currently, different agencies are responsible for different portions of Maine’s fisheries. IF&W takes care of freshwater fish, DMR takes care of what swims through salt water. The ASC deals with salmon rivers. That kind of Balkanization undermines any attempt to look at our rivers as ecosystems that provide a connection between our inland, freshwater reaches and the marine environment. And it is the native, sea-run fisheries of Maine – the tomcod, the sturgeon, the alewives and the salmon – that symbolize that connection, and whose presence has been missing from our rivers, and our lives, for far too long. No one is suggesting that we get rid of such recreationally enticing species as the nonnative smallmouth bass. But is it too much to ask that the state declare it a priority to restore our native fish, and that each and every management decision reflect that goal?

Naomi Schalit is the executive director of Maine Rivers.