Published Tuesday June 28th, 2011
ST. STEPHEN – Alewives will very likely come up at a public meeting Wednesday night in St. Stephen.
If the Canada/United States International Joint Commission does not raise the topic, conservation and environmental organizations will.
The commission and its St. Croix Board Watershed Board will hold their annual public meeting at the Milltown Legion Hall at 444 Milltown Blvd. at 7 p.m.
The commission, founded in 1909, administers the Canada/United States Border Waters Treaty.
The agenda for the meeting Wednesday includes a presentation on smallmouth bass habitat in Spednic Lake at the head of the river, above the dam from St. Croix to Vanceboro, Maine.
Alewives, also called gaspereau, were the sole topic of discussion at last year’s public meeting in Princeton, Maine.
The commission has a draft plan to reopen the upper reaches of the St. Croix River to this native anadromous fish. Sport fishing interests in Maine fear that opening fishways to alewives would imperil the commercially important smallmouth bass introduced in the 19th century.
Maine still blocks the river to alewives above Grand Falls in defiance of a Canada/United States treaty.
Opening the Grand Falls fishway would allow the alewives to return to spawning grounds up the main branch of the river to St. Croix/Vanceboro, and up the West Branch to the Grand Lake Stream dam.
This could allow the alewives to increase to millions of fish rather than the tens of thousands counted in recent years. Alewives, born in fresh water, go to sea where they feed before returning to their home rivers to spawn.
Aside from their use as lobster bait, they provide feed for many water and land creatures. People do eat them, but they are not considered a delicacy.
As of June 20, the St. Croix International Waterway Commission reported a total of 25,125 alewives coming through the Milltown fishway research trap.
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