By: Sophie Chivers, Megan Maloney & Delphine Demaisy
Earth Day at the nation’s greenest college is quite the celebration. While most of the College of the Atlantic (COA) community spent the day on campus learning about our environment and sharing food, plants, and music, we—the COA Fisheries, Fishermen, and Fishing Communities class—spent April 23rd in Somesville with Billy Helprin and Rusty Taylor from the Somes-Meynell Wildlife Sanctuary. Our main goal was to help prepare the river for this year’s alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus) and blueback herring (Alosa aestivalis) run. This work is part of a greater effort to restore the anadromous fish populations in Somesville and other Downeast Maine rivers. Our class worked on two of the three ladders, focusing on moving barriers to ensure that the fish would travel up the stream efficiently. We couldn’t think of a better way to honor our local ecosystem on our favorite day of the year.
Photo by Jessica Bonilla
We started at the first ladder, the one closest to the ocean on the mill pond. Here we heard from Rusty Taylor, an associate of the Sanctuary and a local elver fisherman, among other things. He told us about the skill required to elver fish, the challenges with regulations of the fishery, and elver biology. Elvers are juvenile American eels (Anguilla rostrata) migrating from open ocean to freshwater to grow and develop. When they are fully grown, they will return to the Sargasso Sea to spawn. Elvers are amazing—they can scale a dam over 100 feet even though they are only 1 to 2 inches long. They don’t have this kind of obstacle in Somesville, the dam there is only 6 feet high, but the feat is impressive nonetheless. We could feel Rusty’s passion for his work and it was clear that he has a wealth of knowledge about both the fresh and saltwater environments. Rusty fishes near this river—the elvers in this watershed are harvestable
River herring, on the other hand, are not harvested from this watershed. They are managed jointly between the state and the towns, making them one of Maine’s few municipally co-managed fisheries. The town of Mount Desert, the municipality that Somesville belongs to, has decided not to harvest anadromous herring because they feel that the run cannot sustain commercial or recreational harvest. At the first ladder, we learned about how the cement ladder is carefully designed specifically for river herring passage—the wooden baffles that make up the steps are v-notched to allow sufficient flow even at low water levels. When the herring reach the top of the ladder, they meet a metal gate separating a deep cement pool from the abutting mill pond. For the fish to pass into the watershed Billy, Rusty, or other volunteers must lift the gate, allowing each fish to be counted before entering the river.
Photo by Jessica Bonilla
Counting the fish is important because it gives us a picture of the population and allows the community to track how their conservation efforts are improving their run over time. Alewives and bluebacks return to their natal streams, so local conservation efforts are effective: if more fish get in and spawn, more fish will return in later years and the populations will grow. The count is also important for a town that wants to reopen a commercial fishery in their streams. The Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) requires that towns reach a certain population threshold, 235 fish per surface acre of spawning and nursery habitat, before harvesting (Maine Department of Marine Resources 2020). The DMR also analyzes scale samples from the town, 100 throughout the season, determining the average age and rate of return that a run has.
The second ladder is more of a challenge. The fish ladder and the dam each have their own little channel, so the trick is making sure the fish swim up the ladder and not up the dam. Alewives will typically follow the channel with the most flow, so the first step was to reduce the water coming over the dam by putting sandbags over the top of it. The next step was to put mesh panels in to block off the entrance to the dam’s channel—we had to make sure that any outgoing herring could escape over the dam, but that most of the incoming ones would go up the ladder.
Photo by Jessica Bonilla
At the third ladder, the challenge was similar. The fish struggle to find the entrance to the ladder, so we restored a funnel-like structure made of rocks and cleaned out the ladder. This is where the fish enter Somes Pond and where most of them finish their journey.
The Somes-Meynell Wildlife Sanctuary has been involved in this work since 2005, when the then director, David Lamon, noticed how few fish were making it upstream. He focused mostly on renovating the ladder, coordinating engineering studies and applying for grant funding to do the work. Since then, the Sanctuary has been working with partners like the College of the Atlantic, Acadia National Park, and local community members to keep passage clear and stable, count the fish, and coordinate with the Department of Marine Resources. The current director of the sanctuary, Billy Helprin, has continued this work. The run serves as a central educational piece where local students, and students from afar, of all ages can come to learn about anadromous fish, natural resource management, and hands-on conservation. Taylor also echoed the importance of the educational work being done on the run—“One of the most important things about this small alewife run in this community is awareness. The fish are a great vehicle for education of all ages…This restoration program has brought so much of that vitality back to the community. From Osprey dropping alewife on top of a tourist’s car with a surprise thud, to groups of students from near and far having such a unique hands on-learning experience, I am really proud to be a part of it all.”
COA students have been volunteering at the fish ladders every Earth Day since the first Fisheries class took place in 2016. We are incredibly thankful for Billy, Rusty, and everyone who has put effort into restoring this wonderful place. We hope that we may continue this tradition of service and share the joy of watching herrings swim up the river for years to come.
For more resources on river herring:
The Maine River Herring Network is a coalition of a broad range of stakeholders working to coordinate river herring restoration, research, harvest, and management.
The Downeast Fisheries Trail website’s Fisheries Then—by Natalie Springuel and Julia Beaty—and Fisheries Now—by Julia Beaty.
The Downeast Salmon Federation for all things fish passage!
And Maine Department of Marine Resources for their river herring facts, regulations, and more.
For more COA adventures with River Herring see this article by Emma Ober; this one done by Katie Clark, Melisa Chan, and Meret Jucker; this one by Savannah Bryant and Emma Kimball; and these videos done by Annaleena Vaher and others.
Marine Studies at COA 