Saving Seafood

$900,000 in Funding Recommended for Atlantic Salmon Habitat Restoration

July 30, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

NOAA Fisheries is recommending nearly $900,000 in funding for four partners to implement projects that restore habitat for Atlantic salmon in the Gulf of Maine watershed. The Gulf of Maine distinct population segment of Atlantic salmon is listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. It’s also one of nine NOAA Species in the Spotlight.

Atlantic salmon are an iconic species of the Northeast. They once returned by the hundreds of thousands to most major rivers along the northeastern United States. Now, they only return in small numbers to rivers in central and eastern Maine. These populations comprise the Gulf of Maine distinct population segment.

Proposed projects funded under these partnerships will improve fish passage. They will remove or modify dams, culverts, and other barriers blocking Atlantic salmon from reaching their habitats. They will also restore the structure and function of streams used by Atlantic salmon for spawning and rearing.

We’re recommending nearly $900,000 to fund the first year of four multi-year efforts:

  • The Atlantic Salmon Federation will implement five projects to restore access to Atlantic salmon spawning and rearing habitats in the Kennebec River watershed. They will also conduct a fish passage feasibility study at the Chesterville Wildlife Management Area Dam on Little Norridgewock Stream. ($213,854)
  • Project SHARE will replace undersized culverts at 13 sites, connecting habitat for Atlantic salmon across the Dennys, Machias, Pleasant, Union, and Narraguagus River watersheds. They will also conduct fish passage feasibility studies at the Great Works Dam and at Marion Falls fishway. Funding will also support freshwater habitat restoration work in the Narraguagus River watershed. ($303,225)
  • The Nature Conservancy will complete the final designs to remove Guilford Dam and restore the adjacent floodplain, which will reconnect habitat for Atlantic salmon in the Piscataquis River watershed. They will also restore access to high-quality habitat by improving fish passage at three high-priority road crossings over streams. ($250,000)
  • The Downeast Salmon Federation will support fish passage feasibility studies at the Cherryfield Ice Control Dam on the Narraguagus River and the Gardner Lake Dam on the East Machias River, to support future habitat restoration in these watersheds. Funding will also support fish passage improvements at the Gardner Lake Dam. ($131,000)

Degraded habitat is one of the largest obstacles facing the recovery of threatened and endangered species like Atlantic salmon. Habitat restoration helps repair areas that have been destroyed by development, blocked by dams, or otherwise subjected to habitat destruction. Through funding and technical assistance, NOAA supports projects that restore the habitats that threatened and endangered species need to recover.

Enviros Want Salmon Listed on Maine Endangered List

June 2, 2020 — A coalition of Maine conservation groups is calling on the state to add the Atlantic salmon to its list of endangered species.

Maine’s rivers were once full of the salmon, but their population was decimated by overfishing, damming and environmental factors. They return only to a few rivers, and are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act.

The environmental groups, including Downeast Salmon Federation, the Maine chapter of the Native Fish Coalition, Friends of Merrymeeting Bay and several others, sent their request to the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife on Monday. They said the salmon belong protected by the Maine Endangered Species Act because “the only viable Atlantic salmon population in the United States is the Gulf of Maine distinct population segment.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News

Conservation group removing barrier to salmon on Maine river

January 6, 2020 — A salmon conservation group plans to remove an old hydropower station straddling the Dennys River in Maine so more alewives and Atlantic salmon can make their way upstream into Meddybemps Lake.

The abandoned hydroelectric station, built in the 1940s, sits over an artificially narrowed bottleneck in the river in Washington County.

Work on removing the structure, which does not impound any water, is expected to begin Monday, the Bangor Daily News reported.

The project is expected to allow hundreds of thousands of alewives to repopulate the lake and to support a commercial alewife fishery in the river, as well as to help sustain the river’s ecosystem, according to the Downeast Salmon Federation.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

MAINE: Record number of Atlantic salmon eggs reported in Washington County river last year

January 6, 2020 — A record number of Atlantic salmon eggs were laid in the East Machias River last year, an indication that an eight-year effort to restore the endangered species in the river is paying off.

Biologists counted 61 redds, or nests that fish build for spawning, buried in several inches of river gravel spread between Crawford and East Machias. That’s six times the number of redds counted in the East Machias River since the Downeast Salmon Federation began tracking salmon egg nesting patterns there 20 years ago, said Dwayne Shaw, the federation’s executive director.

“This is just huge,” Shaw said. “A number like this hasn’t been seen in the river in decades.”

The federation counted 12 redds in 2016, four in 2017 and 10 in 2018. Over the past 20 years, the East Machias River on average has yielded about 10 redds a year.

With each redd containing about 4,000 eggs, the 61 redds are carrying about 240,000 eggs — enough, given the rigors of nature and the presence of predators, to produce about 2,000 salmon that will survive in the river over the next two years and become smolts, fish mature enough to go to sea, Shaw said.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Hundreds of dead fish prompt call for changes at Ellsworth dam

June 16, 2017 — River herring are dying in droves this month in Ellsworth after passing through Leonard Lake Dam, according to a Maine conservation group calling for safer passage for the fish.

“Community members have reported seeing hundreds of dead fish floating down stream below the dam and the Route 1 bridge on multiple occasions over the past 12 days,” said Brett Ciccotelli of the Downeast Salmon Federation. “Dead fish have been seen as far downstream as the city’s Harbor Park.”

Some of those fish appeared to have parts chopped off, while others suffered slashes across their sides or were missing eyes, indicating they struck turbines in the dam, according to the group.

The federation says “thousands” of adult river herring have been killed since early this month while returning from their spawning grounds farther upriver. The group made similar claims following another large-scale fish kill back in October.

“Their life history — needing fresh water to lay their eggs and returning to the same rivers year after year — makes dams without safe downstream passage particularly dangerous to river herring,” Ciccotelli said.

Brookfield Renewables, the parent company that owns the Ellsworth dam, is in the midst of a five-year process for renewing its federal license for the dam for another 30 years.

Ciccotelli argued that one requirement of that renewal should be an upgrade to the fish passage through the dam to reduce the number of fish kills.

Brookfield did not immediately return messages Friday requesting comment.

In October, Brookfield said in a news release that it was “constantly working to minimize the potential environmental impacts associated with our operations and activities.”

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Conservation group boosts alewife restoration efforts

April 25, 2017 — If Maine’s once enormous population of alewives is ever to be restored, it will take the continuing efforts of a dedicated group of volunteers.

That was the message last week to more than a dozen people concerned with the health of the alewife runs in Surry, Penobscot and Orland from Brett Ciccotelli, a fisheries biologist with the Downeast Salmon Federation.

Ciccotelli spoke at a meeting at The Gatherings in Surry aimed at increasing the number of volunteer monitors who will count alewives as they return to Downeast streams in the coming week.

Ciccotelli talked about the importance of the alewife to the Maine ecosystem and briefly reviewed how Maine has managed the alewife resource in recent years.

He also explained how the Downeast Salmon Federation was collecting data with an eye to increasing the number of the small river herring that make a successful journey from the sea to their freshwater spawning grounds each spring and then return to the sea again in fall.

Anadromous alewives return from the ocean each spring to travel up Maine’s rivers and streams to lay their eggs in lakes and ponds. Schools of tiny young fish migrate out at summer’s end, to spend some time in the estuary and the ocean maturing, before returning three to four years later to the river they were born in to start the cycle again.

Alewives play an important role in the food web, serving as a forage species that feeds small mammals, birds and larger fish. The decline in the alewife population, Ciccotelli said, “probably contributes to the loss of groundfish” such as cod and haddock in the Gulf of Maine.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

MAINE: ‘It’s a part of life here’: Down East smelt fry a celebration of spring, local foods

April 19, 2017 — If he peeked around the corner from where his fish-frying station was set up, Evan Emerson could see the place where he and others caught the fish in the first place.

The smelts — small, silvery fish that can be caught in great abundance each winter and early spring in the Pleasant River in Washington County — are the star of the show at the yearly Columbia Falls Smelt Fry, held by the Downeast Salmon Federation for the past 17 years.

Emerson, 28, has been frying up smelts at the event since he was 15 years old. He has always at the end of an assembly line of volunteer cooks who line up outside the Columbia Falls Community Center to shake the pre-cleaned, whole fish in a light cornmeal breading, drop them with a satisfying crackle of hot fat into their specially made fryer and, after six to seven minutes, pull them out, hot and ready to eat.

Emerson makes the call as to when the smelts are done. It’s his watchful eye that judges when they’ve gone from merely cooked to a perfectly crispy golden brown. By the end of the day, more than 300 pounds of smelt caught and quickly frozen in the weeks leading up to the event are cooked.

“We add just a little bit of olive oil. That’s what gives it the golden brown color,” said Emerson, whose smelt camp lies just a few hundred feet from the town center. “Some people remove the bones, some people don’t. Everybody’s got their way of eating it. … I’ve been cooking them for years, but I’ve been fishing for them for as long as I can remember.”

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News