Sunday, September 10, 2023

IS THERE HOPE FOR MAINE'S ATLANTIC SALMON?

 

It wasn’t so long ago that the first Atlantic salmon caught in Maine’s rivers each season was delivered to the President of the United States.  

The tradition began in 1912, after a Bangor angler named Karl Andersen caught a salmon in the Penobscot River on April 1, and sent it to President William Howard Taft.  Maine’s salmon were already in trouble by then, with a multitude of dams blocking their access to spawning grounds and too many of the remaining fish being removed by both commercial and recreational fishermen; as time passed, sewage and other pollution added to the salmon’s woes.

Conditions in the Penobscot worsened, and the tradition of the Presidential salmon was suspended during the Eisenhower administration, in the late 1950s.  It began again in 1984, when President Lyndon Baines Johnson was gifted with a salmon from another Maine stream, the Narraguagus River, but the tradition came to another, and so far final, end in 1992, after angler Claude Z. Westfall delivered a Penobscot River fish to President George H. W. Bush at his summer home in Kennebunkport.

After that, the health of Maine’s Atlantic salmon runs continued to decline, to the point when, in 2000, they were included on the federal endangered species list.  The salmon, which used to run up all of New England’s major rivers, had died out along much of their former spawning range, despite significant, costly, and ultimately futile efforts to restore them to waterways in most states between Connecticut and New Hampshire.

Only in Maine did the runs survive, and they remained at serious risk, with seemingly fewer fish returning each year.  The salmon faced a world of adversity, from dams that blocked their access to spawning grounds, to polluted waters in their natal streams, to walls of nets that intercepted adult salmon as they fed and grew in the Atlantic Ocean west of Greenland.

But there are a few encouraging signs that suggest that those Atlantic salmon that spawn in Maine’s rivers might just be in the earliest stages of a recovery.

For now, the nets off Greenland are no longer a threat.  In 2018, two salmon conservation organizations, the Atlantic Salmon Federation and the North Atlantic Salmon Fund, agreed to fund alternative economic development, scientific research, and marine conservation education initiatives, in exchange for ending Greenland’s commercial salmon fishery.  Unfortunately, that agreement sunsets in 2029.

But perhaps because the nets have been removed from the water, perhaps because of more favorable environmental conditions, or perhaps because of a lot of hard work being done up in Maine—or, most likely, some combination of all three—a few more salmon seem to be returning to Maine’s rivers today.

There are still very few fish by historical standards. 

Scientists believe that, when its run was still healthy, between 75,000 and 100,000 Atlantic salmon returned to the Penobscot River each year.  As the run collapsed, those numbers dropped to just a few hundred, and there was real fear that the fish might be extirpated from the state.  But there are signs of things, perhaps, getting better. 

More than 1,500 salmon returned to the Penobscot this year, following on the heels of a 2022 season when 1,320 were counted.  Those were the second and third highest returns in the past decade, although little more than half of the 2,900 or so salmon tallied in 2011.  

It’s hard to call a run that, at best, is about 2% of a healthy population a positive sign, yet when you can move from hundreds of returning fish to over a thousand, and see such returns in consecutive years, it can still be a positive trend.  Counts of salmon returning to the Penobscot have exceeded 1,000 fish in four out of the last five years, a contrast to the immediately preceding period, when returns topped out at 840.

Sean Ledwin, director of sea-run fish programs for the Maine Department of Marine Resources, believes that the increased returns could be a sign that conservation measures are beginning to have an effect.  He also suspects that an increase in river herring numbers might be helping the salmon, by diverting the attention of seals and other predators.

Still, if Maine’s Atlantic salmon can recover, it’s going to take a lot of work, money, and time.

Right now, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service has two fish hatcheries dedicated to nothing but Maine’s Atlantic salmon.  One, the Green Lake National Fish Hatchery, is located in Ellsworth, Maine; the other, the Craig Brook National Fish Hatchery, is located in Orland.  The latter hatchery maintains brood fish from seven Maine rivers, the Penobscot, Machias, Narraguagus, Sheepscot, East Machias, Dennys, and Pleasant rivers, and produces about 3 million salmon eggs each year.

Some of those eggs are planted directly into the rivers.  Others are grown out at the Green Lake hatchery for releasr into the Penobscot, which receives about 850,000 juvenile salmon each year.  Salmon are released at every stage of their lives, from eggs to adults, to maximize the chances of some surviving.  

Releasing juveniles forces the fish to survive two or three years in the wild before returning to the river; while that may help produce fish most likely to survive the marine environment, it also results in many young salmon falling victim to predators in the rivers, along the coast, and in the open ocean.  Releasing adults enhances survival rates, but could also produce salmon that, at least as juveniles, are better suited to survival in a hatchery than in a natural environment.

Unlike many hatchery operations in freshwater and on the Pacific Coast, which have created genetic issues by mixing different strains of fish and developing strains more able to thrive in hatcheries than in the wild, the federal hatcheries working to restore Maine’s salmon are making every effort to get the genetics right.  The genome of each brood fish is recorded, and computers used to determine which fish should be paired to maintain the highest possible level of genetic diversity.

Released salmon may be tagged in various ways, ranging from a fin clip to an acoustic tag, so that biologists may recognize them when they return to the rivers.  At this point, it appears that about 92 percent of the returning fish have hatchery origins, which suggests that at least a few of the returning fish were hatched in the river.

The percentage of salmon hatched in the river, rather in hatchery tanks, will hopefully increase with time, but no one reading this is likely to fish for Maine’s Atlantic salmon in their lifetimes.  Assuming that everything goes according to plan, federal fisheries scientists hope that the salmon might be taken off the Endangered Species List in about 75 years.

And there are plenty of reasons to worry that things won’t go according to plan.  A warming ocean could impact the survival of salmon before they return to the rivers, either by limiting their food supply or by creating conditions more favorable to predators that feed on the fish.  A changing climate and land development may further degrade coastal rivers.  And people might just lose interest in the salmon’s survival.

Still, the recent increase in salmon returns provide reason to hope that Atlantic salmon may yet be restored to the rivers of Maine.

And that sort of hope is more than the salmon had just a few years ago.

 

No comments:

Post a Comment