Image Copyright USFWS

An engineer, a politician, and a fish walk into a dam. The engineer says, “We could have built it bigger.” The politician says, “We should have built it cheaper.” Fish don’t talk, but if they did, they probably would have asked for a ladder.

Dams were built in the 18^th century to power mills, and in the 1940s to provide cheap electricity and irrigation opportunities – when they were considered great achievements of engineering that would benefit generations to come. Across the nation, dams have been utilized for energy production, flood control, irrigation, and water storage. But, if they are not appropriately planned, sited, and maintained  dams can have devastating impacts on fish populations.

In the early 1900s rainbow smelt supported a robust recreational and commercial fishery in the Northeast, but today NOAA Fisheries Service has listed them as a species of concern in this region. One of the problems in the Northeast has been the loss of suitable spawning habitat due to development like dams, which can prevent fish from moving upstream. But now there may be light at the end of the tunnel for rainbow smelt in southern Maine.

At the end of July, the Great Works Regional Land Trust (GWRLT) announced the removal of Shorey’s Brook dam and the restoration of the Shorey’s Brook on Raymond and Simone Savage Wildlife Preserve in Eliot and South Berwick, Maine.  Fish surveys are already showing rainbow smelt as far upriver as the former location of the dam and further upstream will be suitable for spawning habitat. If other dam restoration projects across the U.S. can be taken as indicators, rainbow smelt may soon be taking advantage of upstream habitats.

Larger scaled restoration efforts are also progressing in Maine. Earlier this summer, Talking Fish reported the demolition of the Great Works Dam on the Penobscot River in Maine – a restoration effort that will open thousands of miles of upstream habitat to Atlantic salmon and other fish for the first time in almost two hundred years. And, here at CLF we have been working to restore native alewives – an important prey species in both marine and fresh waters for many fish, mammals, and birds – to the St. Croix River in Maine. Read more about that work here.

The pressures on our fisheries are enormous, with overfishing, bycatch, pollution, ocean acidification, and habitat destruction all playing a part. We need a better way to plan in the face of all these different stressors. Partnering among local, regional, state, and federal stakeholders in the Northeast alone has culminated in 299 projects to improve and restore fish habitat in rivers, marshes, and estuaries.

New England’s need for habitat conservation and restoration is great, and other regions have similar challenges. Restoring damaged ecosystems to ecological and economic productivity is a fundamental component of the National Ocean Policy, and one more reason why the National Ocean Policy is right for New England.

Pressure is building to reopen the St. Croix River to the alewife, a critical forage fish.

Earlier this week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a letter adopting the recommendations made in our lawsuit seeking  to restore alewives, a key forage and bait fish, to the St. Croix River.

As noted last month, CLF initiated a lawsuit against the EPA due to its failure to review and reject the Maine law that requires an existing fish passage facility at the Grand Falls dam to be closed. You can find the blog post here, explaining why we sued EPA.

As I said in the press statement, “EPA’s letter is a gratifying sign that we’re finally making substantive progress in restoring this important fish to the St. Croix River watershed. As EPA now agrees, this law is scientifically and legally unsupportable. We hope that further litigation is unnecessary to ensure that the state follows the directive of EPA in allowing alewives to return to their native waters.”

Since CLF filed its complaint, the Passamaquoddy Tribe, joined by other Maine Tribes, has formally requested Maine’s Governor Le Page to repeal the state law and, in the alternative, asked the International Joint Commission to invalidate the law. See a copy of the letter here. CLF is working with the Tribes to achieve the goal of restoring alewives to their native waters in the St. Croix watershed

This story was the subject of a front page article by Colin Woodard in the Maine Sunday Telegram. You can find that article here.

The St. Croix River (Photo credit: NOAA Photo Library)

•  Tuesday, June 5 – “Taking Stock of New England Fish: Part 3” – TalkingFish.org interviews Mike Palmer, Research Fisheries Biologist in the Population Dynamics Branch of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center. In this post, Mike Palmer explains how uncertainty comes into play in stock assessments and how it is accounted for.

• Thursday, June 7 – “CLF Lawsuit to Protect Alewives in Maine” – Last week, CLF filed a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in an effort to overturn a Maine law that has prevented the alewife, a key forage fish, from accessing its native habitat in the St. Croix River in Maine.

• Friday, June 8 – “Fish Talk in the News – Friday, June 7” – Interesting stories this week: bad grades for ocean policy, mermaids, yeast research, and environmental and health risks of imported shrimp.

Image courtesy of USDA @ flickr.

Last week, CLF filed a lawsuit against the EPA and Curtis Spalding, EPA Regional Administrator, Region 1. (You can find a copy of the suit here, and copy of the press release here.) I want to take a moment to explain why this lawsuit is important.

The alewife is a critical “keystone” species in marine and fresh waters – it is an important source of food for many fish and marine mammals and for numerous birds.  The alewife is a native fish to many Maine rivers and is anadromous, meaning it starts its life in freshwater ponds and lakes, migrates down river to the ocean where it spends most of its life and then returns to its native waters to spawn.

As on many Maine rivers, alewives on the St. Croix River were all but extirpated due to pollution and the damming of the river. However, in the early 1980’s, the population of alewives in the St. Croix River was restored, reaching more than 2.5 million a year due to cleaner water and effective fish passage at the dams on the river.  But in 1995 the Maine legislature passed a bill specifically designed to block alewife passage at the Woodland Dam and Grand Falls Dam on the St. Croix River, based on what turned out to be unsubstantiated claims that alewives were causing a decline in the non-native smallmouth bass population in the St. Croix watershed. In 2008, even after those claims were found to be without merit, the Maine legislature amended the law to allow alewives passage only at Woodland Dam, restoring only 2% of the natural habitat previously available to alewives – effectively preventing them from accessing 98% of their natural habitat in the St Croix above the Grand Falls Dam.

As a result of this change, as I said in my letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, “the Maine Legislature intentionally and effectively changed the water quality standards for that section of the St. Croix [from Class A] to Class B.” As we allege in our suit, this action obligated the EPA to review and reject that change pursuant to its non-discretionary duties under the Clean Water Act (or CWA).

Under the Clean Water Act, any change to an existing water quality standard must be consistent with the state’s anti-degradation policy and must be submitted to the EPA for review. The de facto change to the water quality standards of the St. Croix was not submitted to the EPA for review, nor did EPA review the change for approval or disapproval, as required.

As a result, Maine was allowed to circumvent its responsibilities, and the EPA failed to fulfill its legal obligations.

As I said in the press release, “The law is fundamentally at odds with the legal requirement that the St. Croix River provide natural habitat unaffected by human activity for these fish and EPA has a continuing obligation to review and reject this change in that requirement.”

I was joined in my statement by Bill Townsend, a longstanding member of CLF and one of the deans of Maine’s environmental community, who noted that when he served as President of Maine Rivers, it obtained the funding and data to support studies that alewives are not detrimental to small-mouth bass populations, the original basis for the law. “The failure of the Maine Legislature to change the law in the face of that evidence and of the EPA to take every possible step to address that wrong is unacceptable.”

For more, find copies of my letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson here, CLF’s filing here, and our press release here.

Stay tuned for more!

The following op-ed was written by CLF Maine Director Sean Mahoney and published on Saturday, December 18 in the Portsmouth Herald.

On Monday, Dec. 20, a committee of the New England Fishery Management Council will meet in Portsmouth to continue the effort to develop a new management plan for Atlantic herring.

Atlantic herring are not only valuable as bait for lobstermen, but are a key forage fish for bigger fish and marine mammals such as striped bass, cod, tuna, dolphins and whales. The work of the council’s Herring Committee is critically important not just for the sustainability of Atlantic herring but for the continued viability of these other fisheries and tourism-related industries such as whale watching.

The Atlantic herring fishery is currently dominated by midwater trawling vessels. These vessels are large (up to 150 feet) and often fish in pairs, where their small-mesh nets the size of a football field, can be stretched between two boats. These small-mesh nets are efficient killing machines. The problem is they are also indiscriminate killing machines — any fish or marine mammal that is ensnared by the small-mesh nets is unlikely to survive, even if they are thrown back into the water after the nets are hauled on deck. These dead fish — referred to as bycatch or discards — include not just the fish that prey on Atlantic herring, such as stripers or haddock, but also the Atlantic herring’s cousins — alewives and blueback herring.

Alewives and blueback herring (collectively referred to as river herring) are anadramous fish — they are born in freshwater, spend most of their lives in the ocean, and then return to freshwater to spawn. The rivers of New England were teeming with river herring up to the 1980s. But in the last 20 years, their numbers have dropped precipitously. For example, until 1986 the number of river herring returning to spawn in the Taylor River averaged between 100,000 to 400,000 a year. But by 2000, that number had declined to 10,000 to 40,000 a year, and in 2006, only 147 river herring returned to the Taylor River. This is a tragedy for New Hampshire’s wildlife conservation.

The causes of the dramatic decline in the numbers of river herring include the fishing practices of the midwater trawl vessels. While at sea, river herring can often be found in the same waters as Atlantic herring and fall victim to the indiscriminate fishing practices of the midwater trawlers. In 2007, bycatch documentation showed that three times the amount of river herring was taken in one tow of one of these industrial vessels as returned that year to the Lamprey River, which boasts New Hampshire’s largest remaining population of river herring.

The meeting of the council’s Herring Committee will focus on management steps to curb this wasteful practice. Central to the success of any management effort must be a robust monitoring program, catch caps on river herring to serve as a strong incentive to avoid areas where river herring are known to aggregate and strong accountability measures to be applied when those catch caps are exceeded.

If river herring are to avoid the fate of Atlantic salmon — another anadramous species all but extirpated from New England’s rivers where they once teemed — a critical step is putting an end to the indiscriminate fishing practices of the midwater trawl boats pursuing Atlantic herring. All other efforts to improve the access to and water quality of the waters river herring spawn in are of little value if they are killed before they get there.

> Read more about CLF’s regional ocean conservation work