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 certainly one of 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 known as Milford, essentially the most which were counted since 2012 when the dam was eliminated.
“We’re as much as 1,455 salmon. It’s been a great yr to date,” Jason Valliere, marine useful resource scientist for the Maine Division of Marine Assets informed the Bangor Each day Information. “Let’s hope they preserve 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 larger plenty 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 raise by July 22, shattering by greater than double the year-to-date report for the interval as much as the twenty second.
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Maine’s Division of Marine Assets writes that alewives are essential 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 similar time juvenile Atlantic salmon are migrating downriver.
Alewives present cowl for upstream migrating grownup salmon that could be preyed on by eagles or osprey, and for younger salmon within the estuaries and open ocean that could be captured by seals.
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Throughout america, 69 river dams had been eliminated from American rivers in 2020, opening up 624 miles of waterways to stream 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, larger redhorse, longnose dace, and northern brook lamprey—the latter three of that are threatened or endangered within the U.S.
Typically, dams had been constructed way back to fortify business, or to produce contemporary water and irrigation. As expertise and inhabitants densities have modified over the many years, a stunning quantity of dams are powering or aiding nothing, and as an alternative act as irrelevant tax leeches.
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