MAINE MONITOR • June 4, 2023
Maine’s spring alewife runs are a delicate dance around changing water conditions and obstacles both natural and human-made. This ephemeral phenomenon happens in dozens of places up and down the Maine coast, and the Presumpscot is a microcosm of how these runs have been reshaped by people — through development, overfishing, infrastructure and climate change. Federal fishery managers rated alewives at low risk of extinction in a 2019 study and declined to list them as an endangered species. But the recovery has a long way to go. State officials say that current runs are about 5% the size of what they were even a century ago.