Maine’s rivers are the one ones left in america the place Atlantic salmon can go back to spawn, and the most efficient of those rivers is having one among its best years.
After the removing of the Bangor Nice Works Dam at the Penobcot River, ocean-going/river-spawning fish started to go back in massive numbers.
Lately July, an estimated 1,489 salmon have handed by way of a fish elevate at a spot known as Milford, essentially the most which have been counted since 2012 when the dam was once got rid of.
“We’re as much as 1,455 salmon. It’s been a just right yr so far,” Jason Valliere, marine useful resource scientist for the Maine Division of Marine Assets advised the Bangor Day-to-day Information. “Let’s hope they retain coming and we see every other just right push q4.”
Maine is the one closing state within the union the place wild Atlantic salmon run up river, however fishing for them is unlawful.
It’s concept that higher-than-normal spring and summer season rains swelled rivers to larger lots and stored them cooler, which led to larger 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 elevate by way of July 22, shattering by way of greater than double the year-to-date document for the duration as much as the twenty second.
Maine’s Division of Marine Assets writes that alewives are vital to the ecology of freshwater environments within the state as a result of they supply an alternate prey merchandise for osprey, eagles, nice blue heron, loons, and different fish-eating birds on the similar time juvenile Atlantic salmon are migrating downriver.
Alewives supply quilt for upstream migrating grownup salmon that can be preyed on by way of eagles or osprey, and for younger salmon within the estuaries and open ocean that could be captured by way of seals.
Throughout the US, 69 river dams have been got rid of from American rivers in 2020, opening up 624 miles of waterways to go with the flow freely and serving to attach populations of salmon species like Chinook, coho, and purple, in addition to steelhead, cutthroat, and bull trout, Bartram’s bass, larger redhorse, longnose dace, and northerly brook lamprey—the latter 3 of which can be threatened or endangered within the U.S.
Typically, dams have been constructed way back to reinforce trade, or to provide recent water and irrigation. As generation and inhabitants densities have modified over the a long time, a shocking quantity of dams are powering or aiding not anything, and as an alternative act as inappropriate tax leeches.
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This newsletter by way of Andy Corbley was once first revealed by way of The Excellent Information Community on 13 September 2023. Lead Symbol: Atlantic salmon in Maine – credit score FWS.