Joanne Crouse, Age 8, Of Burlington, N.C., For Her Question:
What is an alewife?
You might find a young alewife in one of the streams of North Carolina. If it is around november. He will be perhaps two and a half inches long and about six months old. You might take the silvery little fish to be a sardine. But he is a close cousin of the sea dwelling herrlng and the herring is the most important of the food fishes in the world wide ocean.
A full grown alewife is about the same size and shape as a herring. When you put an alewife and a herring side by side, you can see that the alewife is quite a bit wider around the middle. The herring is a more slender fish. The two look alikes are cousins, and both of them are first cousins to the shad.
A1.1 these fish are delicious to eat and rich in food value. Every year, 15,000 tons of alewife are taken from the sea. That is enough meat to provide all the people in north carolina with seven square meals. Almost six times more herring are taken from the sea around the united states alone, to say nothing of herring caught in the rest of the world.
Alewife fishing is done off the shores of north america. These silvery swimmers are found in the atlantic ocean all the way from nova scotia to the carolinas. The harvest of alewife is sent to fish canneries. Some of it is salted. Sometimes the delicate roe is taken from the fish and canned. It is sad to learn that the alewife fish are not so plentiful as they once were. This, we think, is because too many of them have been taken from the sea and others have been poisoned by dirty river water.
The alewife needs the fresh waters of clean streams, for all of its life is not spent at sea. The parent fishes swim inland up fresh water streams to spawn or lay their eggs. Come June, a mother alewife may lay a batch of perhaps 100,000 eggs in the fresh water and leave them there.
Most of these eggs will be gulped by frogs and fishes, turtles and other hungry fellows near the stream. When the rest of the eggs hatch into midget fishes, most of them will be eaten, also. But a few will escape all their enemies. They will eat and grow and by november they will be about two and a half inches long and look like silvery sardines. Now they start down the stream on their way to the sea where they will spend most of their lives.
The herring is an ocean fish who never ventures into fresh water. He is born and lives and dies in the salty sea. But his cousin, the shad, follows the example of the alewife. When time comes to lay her eggs, the parent shad swims up the eastern atlantic streams all the way from the Saint Lawrencce River in Canada to Florida. The shad is more meaty than the herring or the alewife. But like the a1ewife, he is becoming less plentiful, because we allow chemicals and detergents and other drainage to poison his fresh water streams.