May 31, 2024 • 13 mins
Alewife, a fish with a funny name, lives in the ocean and swims upstream to spawn in lakes along the east coast of North America. Historically, their vast populations fed everything from eagles to whales. But human-made obstructions like dams have blocked some of their largest migration routes for centuries. This is the story of how a group of determined citizens cleared one stream in Maine—and waited for the fish to return.
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Additional Music Credits
"Our Only Lark" by Blue Dot Sessions
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Matt Frassica (00:01):
One day last spring, I drove to the small
town of Vassalboro, Maine.
I just pulled into the parkinglot when a big guy in a big green
pickup pulled up next to me.
Nate Gray (00:12):
Got your keys?
Got them.
Get in the truck.
Matt Frassica (00:16):
I'm Matt Frasica and this is The Briny, a podcast
about how we're changing thesea and how the sea changes us.
Vassalboro is a long way from the ocean.
It's about 40 miles inland.
But I went there to find out about akind of fish that lives in the ocean
and travels upstream to reproduce.
(00:40):
Recently, those fish came backto their spawning grounds here,
For the first time in centuries.
And this guy had a lot to do with it.
Nate Gray (00:49):
Hi.
Matt Frassica (00:49):
How you doing?
Nate Gray (00:50):
Good, how are you?
Matt, good morning.
My name is Nate.
Nice to meet you.
Let's do this thing.
Alright.
Alright.
Like any good story, we're going tostart at the beginning, and end up at the
Matt Frassica (01:02):
beginning.
Nate Gray works for Maine'sDepartment of Marine Resources.
We drove down the road a few minutesto a small pond, surrounded by a park.
There were kayaks on thebank, and a picnic table.
But we were there to look into the water.
In the still water of the pond,you could see dozens of small fish,
(01:24):
undulating slowly, swimming in place.
These were the fish Icame to find out about.
They're called alewives.
Nate Gray (01:33):
Alewives are a member of the herring family, okay?
These happen to be anadromous alewives.
Alewives.
And anadromous means theylive sometimes in the ocean.
Okay, yeah, anadromous.
Okay, so we're gonna, we're just gonnacover some basic definitions here.
Anadromy covers that strategy, likethe Atlantic salmon, live in the
ocean, spawn in the freshwater.
(01:54):
So the vast bulk of their lives, thesealewives, will be spent in the ocean,
come in the freshwater to spawn.
It's a great strategy to get out ofthe ocean when there's a lot of hungry
mouths, and come into the freshwaterand spawn where there's fewer hungry
mouths and smaller hungry mouths.
Everything eats these things, fromwhales, bald eagles, raccoons,
minks, otters, cormorants, seals.
(02:18):
Everything pounds on thesethings when they can get to them.
And right now, it's a smorgasbord.
Matt Frassica (02:24):
Alewives live along the eastern coast of North America,
from Newfoundland to North Carolina.
And these particular fish have come along way from the ocean to get here,
up a major river called the Kennebec.
The Kennebec.
Nate Gray (02:38):
It's, we're about 75 miles from the mouth of the Kennebec as the
fish swims, so They'll start pre stagingin the mouth of the river always as early
as March Okay, going in and out withthe tidal flow in and out in and out the
water starts to warm up in a little bitfurther In a little bit further water
warms up in a little bit further They'llstart fully committing to the river
(02:59):
system in early April in a little bitfurther with the tide Okay, water starts
warming up, you get a few nice warm days.
Ooh, this is nice.
Gets a little bit warmer,they go further up.
Flows start coming down.
You get to that righttemperature and boom, they start
stringing and headed upstream.
Matt Frassica (03:19):
That's a couple months of swimming.
75 miles, upstream, with no food.
Nate Gray (03:25):
Nobody's interested in food.
They want to get here,make kids, and get out.
Matt Frassica (03:32):
After this adventure, the alewives will swim back downstream, and
do the whole thing again next spring.
The eggs they leave behind will hatchin a matter of days, and the juveniles
will stick around in the lake eatingplankton and growing big and strong.
Then in the fall, the young alewivestravel downriver to the ocean.
(03:54):
After four years of living in the ocean,they'll be mature adults and they'll
come back here to do what mature adultsdo and start the whole cycle over again.
But like a lot of fish species, alewifepopulations have been in decline.
Actually, for centuries.
To show me the reason, Natebrought me to another spot.
(04:15):
We pulled off on a gravel roadnext to an old brick building
that overlooked a rushing stream.
This building used to be awoodworking mill going back 200 years.
Nate Gray (04:26):
They made everything here from slays, chairs,
hammer handles, axe handles.
If it was made out ofwood, they could build it.
Matt Frassica (04:35):
The water behind the dam powered the mill, using the energy of
the pent up stream to run its machinery.
It's the same story in smalltowns all over New England.
Nate Gray (04:44):
They all have one thing in common.
That.
Water.
They're all on water,every last one of them.
Because it was horsepower.
That is one of the reasons thatwe saw the massive decline in this
particular species, river herring.
It's because of all these dams.
A
Matt Frassica (05:03):
couple hundred years later, most of those dams
aren't powering machinery anymore.
Nate Gray (05:08):
The vast, vast bulk of dams in this state do one thing, they sit there.
Matt Frassica (05:14):
Well, they do one other thing.
They block the migration of river herring.
So the first step in restoring thefish habitat is to take out the
dams, or build a fish ladder sothat they can swim around them.
Of course, taking out dams,building fish ladders, requires
working with another species.
Humans.
Landis Hudson (05:35):
We spent a fair amount of time listening to people and trying
to understand the personalities.
Matt Frassica (05:41):
Landis Hudson is the executive director of Main
Rivers, a non profit focused onhabitat restoration in the state.
She and Nate started working togetherin Vasselboro about 15 years ago.
Landis Hudson (05:54):
We had lots of meetings.
We just had lots of meetings and wewould invite the local conservation
commission, the land trust.
The two towns, trying to figure out howto tell the story that we wanted to tell.
And we wanted to make sure that we had asmany local voices as we could bring in.
Matt Frassica (06:13):
There were six old dams on this one small stream,
and each one required negotiationswith different landowners.
So Landis and Nate had tobe willing to compromise.
Landis Hudson (06:25):
We couldn't really be perfectionists and say, we'll only
do this if we can do it our way.
We We had to take each situation and saywhat's truly the best we can do here?
What is the most realisticthing we can do here?
If, if we had dreamed up on our ownhow we wanted to do it, it probably
never would have gotten done.
Matt Frassica (06:49):
One of those landowners was Ray Breton.
I feel like I'm the luckiest guy.
I have the prettiestproperty in this town.
Breton owns a giantred brick mill complex.
I used to make wool and textileshere, and at one time, the mill was
the biggest employer in the area.
Breton also owns that park, where Nateand I watched the alewives together.
(07:11):
That pond sits behind thedams on Breton's property.
He wasn't opposed to restoring the alewifehabitat, but he didn't want to lose his
dams, because then he'd lose the pond.
Ray Breton (07:23):
And everybody's like, how come Ray gets to keep his dams and
all the other ones got taken down?
Uh huh.
I says, you'd get a whole town upset.
This is the only place they have to go.
You know, we have four lakes in this town.
You can't swim in them.
You can't do anything.
Because they're surroundedby private land.
Yeah.
The town doesn't have anything.
All they got is what I givethem and I share what I got.
Matt Frassica (07:44):
So Maine Rivers and the state worked with Breton to come up
with fish passages to bypass the dams.
Now, bringing alewives back herewouldn't have been possible 25 years ago.
That's because there were a coupleof big industrial dams downstream
from here that blocked fishfrom getting this far upriver.
(08:07):
The first of those dams came down in 1999.
Reporter (08:10):
Maine makes some environmental history today.
With the help of a backhoe, theKennebec River is freed from the
Edwards Hydroelectric Dam in Augusta.
The river flows free, thedam soon will be no more.
Landis Hudson (08:25):
It was a lot of headaches, a lot of frustration, a lot of work, but
it essentially opened up the watershedand made it possible for the fish to
move upstream to try to make their wayto their historic spawning grounds.
Matt Frassica (08:41):
Removing that dam allowed the fish to get upstream,
but it also showed people thatthe ecosystem could bounce back.
Landis Hudson (08:50):
Within hours of this dam being removed, the fish
were making their way up the river.
So it was a combination of the physicalwork, but also opening people's
imaginations and saying, oh, just becausethe dam has been here for, oh, a lot
longer than a hundred years, doesn'tmean that it belongs here forever.
And it doesn't mean that a riverthat's essentially been obliterated
(09:12):
cannot come back to life.
Matt Frassica (09:18):
The good news is, according to Nate, once you get the dams out or
give the fish a way to get around thedams, they pretty much take it from there.
Nate Gray (09:25):
River herring restoration.
Outside of the human scope ofthings is relatively simple.
Put some fish in, wait fouryears, fish come back, okay?
It's when you add the human element andthe politics of it, you know, nobody
likes change, I want to keep my dam,you know, where the struggle comes in.
These are relatively easy fish to restore.
Matt Frassica (09:43):
Once they have a way, yes, they'll go.
Yep.
After the alewives maketheir way upstream, they get
to one Final fish ladder.
Nate Gray (09:53):
So like all good stories, we're going to finish where we
Matt Frassica (09:56):
began.
On the other side of this ladder is theirgoal, China Lake, where they'll spawn.
This is a gigantic pelican case.
Yes.
At the top of the fish way at the top ofthe ladder is a big box with a machine,
Nate Gray (10:09):
and
Matt Frassica (10:10):
there's a counter that counts the fish as they come into the lake
Nate Gray (10:13):
passive field counter.
So it has two electricfields, each tube, 12 tubes.
Three stainless steel bands, center bandis a signal, the outer band's a feel,
Matt Frassica (10:21):
okay?
2022 was the first year thatfish could swim all the way
to China Lake after 200 years.
And in that first spring, more than 800,000 fish made the trip, which is a lot.
In 2023, the second year China Lakewas open for spawning, Nate and
(10:45):
Landis counted almost two million.
Fish.
Alewives are an unusuallyresilient species.
There's no guarantee that complexecological systems can just bounce back
from centuries of human interference.
(11:06):
And outside of Maine, alewiveshaven't rebounded like this.
Even elsewhere in New England, inthis tiny sliver of their range.
Still, watching theecosystem right itself?
It's an unusually hopeful story.
We're used to hearing about declines.
about habitat loss andspecies headed for extinction.
(11:28):
But all the alewives need isfor us to get out of their way.
Nate Gray (11:39):
This simple, simple, infinitely complex, active nature is so reliable
and so comforting to know that it stillworks just the way it was intended.
I like seeing the Fed loons, I likeseeing the Fed eagles, I like seeing the
LWIs getting chased, I like seeing that.
There's a beauty there, that isbeyond sublime, it really is.
(12:04):
How do you sell that, that idea to people?
Matt Frassica (12:08):
Well, you must have done
Nate Gray (12:09):
it.
Well, you must do it.
To undersell it, and just simplyput it in a fish way, you've failed.
Because you'll be right back, fish willbe plugged up by beaver boards and, and
gunk, and nobody will be paying attention.
Matt Frassica (12:31):
The most important piece of habitat restoration isn't the physical
removal of dams or building fish ladders.
It's convincing people thatthe habitat is worth fixing.
That the fish, and the entirefood web they support, can come
back, if we give them the chance.
(13:02):
The Briny is an independent podcast, withoriginal music and sound design by me,
and additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
The
Briny is a proud member of HubSpoke, a collective of independent
producers making great podcastsout of a love of the medium.
(13:23):
If you're a fan of the BrinyCheckout out there, a podcast
that explores big questionsthrough intimate stories outdoors.
They recently launched their new seasonand it's all about the theme of silence.
You can find out more and hear allthe Hub and spoke podcasts at hubs.
Spoke audio.org,
(13:46):
hub and spoke audio collective.
One day last spring, I drove to the small
town of Vassalboro, Maine.
I just pulled into the parkinglot when a big guy in a big green
pickup pulled up next to me.
Nate Gray (00:12):
Got your keys?
Got them.
Get in the truck.
Matt Frassica (00:16):
I'm Matt Frasica and this is The Briny, a podcast
about how we're changing thesea and how the sea changes us.
Vassalboro is a long way from the ocean.
It's about 40 miles inland.
But I went there to find out about akind of fish that lives in the ocean
and travels upstream to reproduce.
(00:40):
Recently, those fish came backto their spawning grounds here,
For the first time in centuries.
And this guy had a lot to do with it.
Nate Gray (00:49):
Hi.
Matt Frassica (00:49):
How you doing?
Nate Gray (00:50):
Good, how are you?
Matt, good morning.
My name is Nate.
Nice to meet you.
Let's do this thing.
Alright.
Alright.
Like any good story, we're going tostart at the beginning, and end up at the
Matt Frassica (01:02):
beginning.
Nate Gray works for Maine'sDepartment of Marine Resources.
We drove down the road a few minutesto a small pond, surrounded by a park.
There were kayaks on thebank, and a picnic table.
But we were there to look into the water.
In the still water of the pond,you could see dozens of small fish,
(01:24):
undulating slowly, swimming in place.
These were the fish Icame to find out about.
They're called alewives.
Nate Gray (01:33):
Alewives are a member of the herring family, okay?
These happen to be anadromous alewives.
Alewives.
And anadromous means theylive sometimes in the ocean.
Okay, yeah, anadromous.
Okay, so we're gonna, we're just gonnacover some basic definitions here.
Anadromy covers that strategy, likethe Atlantic salmon, live in the
ocean, spawn in the freshwater.
(01:54):
So the vast bulk of their lives, thesealewives, will be spent in the ocean,
come in the freshwater to spawn.
It's a great strategy to get out ofthe ocean when there's a lot of hungry
mouths, and come into the freshwaterand spawn where there's fewer hungry
mouths and smaller hungry mouths.
Everything eats these things, fromwhales, bald eagles, raccoons,
minks, otters, cormorants, seals.
(02:18):
Everything pounds on thesethings when they can get to them.
And right now, it's a smorgasbord.
Matt Frassica (02:24):
Alewives live along the eastern coast of North America,
from Newfoundland to North Carolina.
And these particular fish have come along way from the ocean to get here,
up a major river called the Kennebec.
The Kennebec.
Nate Gray (02:38):
It's, we're about 75 miles from the mouth of the Kennebec as the
fish swims, so They'll start pre stagingin the mouth of the river always as early
as March Okay, going in and out withthe tidal flow in and out in and out the
water starts to warm up in a little bitfurther In a little bit further water
warms up in a little bit further They'llstart fully committing to the river
(02:59):
system in early April in a little bitfurther with the tide Okay, water starts
warming up, you get a few nice warm days.
Ooh, this is nice.
Gets a little bit warmer,they go further up.
Flows start coming down.
You get to that righttemperature and boom, they start
stringing and headed upstream.
Matt Frassica (03:19):
That's a couple months of swimming.
75 miles, upstream, with no food.
Nate Gray (03:25):
Nobody's interested in food.
They want to get here,make kids, and get out.
Matt Frassica (03:32):
After this adventure, the alewives will swim back downstream, and
do the whole thing again next spring.
The eggs they leave behind will hatchin a matter of days, and the juveniles
will stick around in the lake eatingplankton and growing big and strong.
Then in the fall, the young alewivestravel downriver to the ocean.
(03:54):
After four years of living in the ocean,they'll be mature adults and they'll
come back here to do what mature adultsdo and start the whole cycle over again.
But like a lot of fish species, alewifepopulations have been in decline.
Actually, for centuries.
To show me the reason, Natebrought me to another spot.
(04:15):
We pulled off on a gravel roadnext to an old brick building
that overlooked a rushing stream.
This building used to be awoodworking mill going back 200 years.
Nate Gray (04:26):
They made everything here from slays, chairs,
hammer handles, axe handles.
If it was made out ofwood, they could build it.
Matt Frassica (04:35):
The water behind the dam powered the mill, using the energy of
the pent up stream to run its machinery.
It's the same story in smalltowns all over New England.
Nate Gray (04:44):
They all have one thing in common.
That.
Water.
They're all on water,every last one of them.
Because it was horsepower.
That is one of the reasons thatwe saw the massive decline in this
particular species, river herring.
It's because of all these dams.
A
Matt Frassica (05:03):
couple hundred years later, most of those dams
aren't powering machinery anymore.
Nate Gray (05:08):
The vast, vast bulk of dams in this state do one thing, they sit there.
Matt Frassica (05:14):
Well, they do one other thing.
They block the migration of river herring.
So the first step in restoring thefish habitat is to take out the
dams, or build a fish ladder sothat they can swim around them.
Of course, taking out dams,building fish ladders, requires
working with another species.
Humans.
Landis Hudson (05:35):
We spent a fair amount of time listening to people and trying
to understand the personalities.
Matt Frassica (05:41):
Landis Hudson is the executive director of Main
Rivers, a non profit focused onhabitat restoration in the state.
She and Nate started working togetherin Vasselboro about 15 years ago.
Landis Hudson (05:54):
We had lots of meetings.
We just had lots of meetings and wewould invite the local conservation
commission, the land trust.
The two towns, trying to figure out howto tell the story that we wanted to tell.
And we wanted to make sure that we had asmany local voices as we could bring in.
Matt Frassica (06:13):
There were six old dams on this one small stream,
and each one required negotiationswith different landowners.
So Landis and Nate had tobe willing to compromise.
Landis Hudson (06:25):
We couldn't really be perfectionists and say, we'll only
do this if we can do it our way.
We We had to take each situation and saywhat's truly the best we can do here?
What is the most realisticthing we can do here?
If, if we had dreamed up on our ownhow we wanted to do it, it probably
never would have gotten done.
Matt Frassica (06:49):
One of those landowners was Ray Breton.
I feel like I'm the luckiest guy.
I have the prettiestproperty in this town.
Breton owns a giantred brick mill complex.
I used to make wool and textileshere, and at one time, the mill was
the biggest employer in the area.
Breton also owns that park, where Nateand I watched the alewives together.
(07:11):
That pond sits behind thedams on Breton's property.
He wasn't opposed to restoring the alewifehabitat, but he didn't want to lose his
dams, because then he'd lose the pond.
Ray Breton (07:23):
And everybody's like, how come Ray gets to keep his dams and
all the other ones got taken down?
Uh huh.
I says, you'd get a whole town upset.
This is the only place they have to go.
You know, we have four lakes in this town.
You can't swim in them.
You can't do anything.
Because they're surroundedby private land.
Yeah.
The town doesn't have anything.
All they got is what I givethem and I share what I got.
Matt Frassica (07:44):
So Maine Rivers and the state worked with Breton to come up
with fish passages to bypass the dams.
Now, bringing alewives back herewouldn't have been possible 25 years ago.
That's because there were a coupleof big industrial dams downstream
from here that blocked fishfrom getting this far upriver.
(08:07):
The first of those dams came down in 1999.
Reporter (08:10):
Maine makes some environmental history today.
With the help of a backhoe, theKennebec River is freed from the
Edwards Hydroelectric Dam in Augusta.
The river flows free, thedam soon will be no more.
Landis Hudson (08:25):
It was a lot of headaches, a lot of frustration, a lot of work, but
it essentially opened up the watershedand made it possible for the fish to
move upstream to try to make their wayto their historic spawning grounds.
Matt Frassica (08:41):
Removing that dam allowed the fish to get upstream,
but it also showed people thatthe ecosystem could bounce back.
Landis Hudson (08:50):
Within hours of this dam being removed, the fish
were making their way up the river.
So it was a combination of the physicalwork, but also opening people's
imaginations and saying, oh, just becausethe dam has been here for, oh, a lot
longer than a hundred years, doesn'tmean that it belongs here forever.
And it doesn't mean that a riverthat's essentially been obliterated
(09:12):
cannot come back to life.
Matt Frassica (09:18):
The good news is, according to Nate, once you get the dams out or
give the fish a way to get around thedams, they pretty much take it from there.
Nate Gray (09:25):
River herring restoration.
Outside of the human scope ofthings is relatively simple.
Put some fish in, wait fouryears, fish come back, okay?
It's when you add the human element andthe politics of it, you know, nobody
likes change, I want to keep my dam,you know, where the struggle comes in.
These are relatively easy fish to restore.
Matt Frassica (09:43):
Once they have a way, yes, they'll go.
Yep.
After the alewives maketheir way upstream, they get
to one Final fish ladder.
Nate Gray (09:53):
So like all good stories, we're going to finish where we
Matt Frassica (09:56):
began.
On the other side of this ladder is theirgoal, China Lake, where they'll spawn.
This is a gigantic pelican case.
Yes.
At the top of the fish way at the top ofthe ladder is a big box with a machine,
Nate Gray (10:09):
and
Matt Frassica (10:10):
there's a counter that counts the fish as they come into the lake
Nate Gray (10:13):
passive field counter.
So it has two electricfields, each tube, 12 tubes.
Three stainless steel bands, center bandis a signal, the outer band's a feel,
Matt Frassica (10:21):
okay?
2022 was the first year thatfish could swim all the way
to China Lake after 200 years.
And in that first spring, more than 800,000 fish made the trip, which is a lot.
In 2023, the second year China Lakewas open for spawning, Nate and
(10:45):
Landis counted almost two million.
Fish.
Alewives are an unusuallyresilient species.
There's no guarantee that complexecological systems can just bounce back
from centuries of human interference.
(11:06):
And outside of Maine, alewiveshaven't rebounded like this.
Even elsewhere in New England, inthis tiny sliver of their range.
Still, watching theecosystem right itself?
It's an unusually hopeful story.
We're used to hearing about declines.
about habitat loss andspecies headed for extinction.
(11:28):
But all the alewives need isfor us to get out of their way.
Nate Gray (11:39):
This simple, simple, infinitely complex, active nature is so reliable
and so comforting to know that it stillworks just the way it was intended.
I like seeing the Fed loons, I likeseeing the Fed eagles, I like seeing the
LWIs getting chased, I like seeing that.
There's a beauty there, that isbeyond sublime, it really is.
(12:04):
How do you sell that, that idea to people?
Matt Frassica (12:08):
Well, you must have done
Nate Gray (12:09):
it.
Well, you must do it.
To undersell it, and just simplyput it in a fish way, you've failed.
Because you'll be right back, fish willbe plugged up by beaver boards and, and
gunk, and nobody will be paying attention.
Matt Frassica (12:31):
The most important piece of habitat restoration isn't the physical
removal of dams or building fish ladders.
It's convincing people thatthe habitat is worth fixing.
That the fish, and the entirefood web they support, can come
back, if we give them the chance.
(13:02):
The Briny is an independent podcast, withoriginal music and sound design by me,
and additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
The
Briny is a proud member of HubSpoke, a collective of independent
producers making great podcastsout of a love of the medium.
(13:23):
If you're a fan of the BrinyCheckout out there, a podcast
that explores big questionsthrough intimate stories outdoors.
They recently launched their new seasonand it's all about the theme of silence.
You can find out more and hear allthe Hub and spoke podcasts at hubs.
Spoke audio.org,
(13:46):
hub and spoke audio collective.
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