Maine’s rivers are the one ones left within the US the place Atlantic salmon can return to spawn, and the best of those rivers is having one in all its best years.
After the elimination of the Bangor Nice Works Dam on the Penobcot River, ocean-going/river-spawning fish started to return in giant numbers.
As of late July, an estimated 1,489 salmon have handed by a fish raise at a spot referred to as Milford, probably the most which have been counted since 2012 when the dam was eliminated.
“We’re as much as 1,455 salmon. It’s been a very good 12 months up to now,” Jason Valliere, marine useful resource scientist for the Maine Division of Marine Sources instructed the Bangor Each day Information. “Let’s hope they hold coming and we see one other good push this fall.”
Maine is the one remaining state within the union the place wild Atlantic salmon run up river, however fishing for them is prohibited.
It’s thought that higher-than-normal spring and summer time rains swelled rivers to better plenty and stored them cooler, which led to better numbers of cold-water fish returning to spawn.
Different taxa that run up the Penobcot are alewives and blueback river herring, of which 5,490,195 had run up the Milford raise by July 22, shattering by greater than double the year-to-date document for the interval as much as the twenty second.
Maine’s Division of Marine Sources writes that alewives are necessary to the ecology of freshwater environments within the state as a result of they supply another prey merchandise for osprey, eagles, nice blue heron, loons, and different fish-eating birds on the identical time juvenile Atlantic salmon are migrating downriver.
Alewives present cowl for upstream migrating grownup salmon which may be preyed on by eagles or osprey, and for younger salmon within the estuaries and open ocean that is likely to be captured by seals.
Throughout america, 69 river dams had been faraway from American rivers in 2020, opening up 624 miles of waterways to circulate freely and serving to join populations of salmon species like Chinook, coho, and pink, in addition to steelhead, cutthroat, and bull trout, Bartram’s bass, better redhorse, longnose dace, and northern brook lamprey—the latter three of that are threatened or endangered within the U.S.
Usually, dams had been constructed way back to fortify trade, or to provide contemporary water and irrigation. As know-how and inhabitants densities have modified over the a long time, a shocking quantity of dams are powering or helping nothing, and as an alternative act as irrelevant tax leeches.
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This text by Andy Corbley was first printed by The Good Information Community on 13 September 2023. Lead Picture: Atlantic salmon in Maine – credit score FWS.