Fish and other wildlife return to a river quickly after a dam has been removed.
Image credit: US Fish and Wildlife Service
Transcript of the Audio Podcast:
Rivers full of nature’s bounty… on this CurrentCast.
During colonial times, fish were so plentiful in Maine’s Sebasticook River, they could be caught with bare hands.
But dams built in the name of progress blocked fish runs. Unlike many dams, which now have ways for fish to get upstream, the Fort Halifax Dam did not. Nate Gray, of the Maine Department of Marine Resources says a fraction of the fish in the river were caught and trucked around the dam each year until it was removed:
Gray: “It was like throwing a switch on the wall. You went from basically a static one hundred thousand fish run to this relatively enormous fish run, which amounted to literally millions.”
The return of the spawning fish to the river shows how quickly Mother Nature can recover.
Support for CurrentCast comes from the Mitsubishi Corporation Foundation for the Americas. Learn more online at http://www.currentcast.org.
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