Fish
Adopting the Aquaculture of the Future in Thailand
Somporn Kaikaew is the owner of Prapapan Farm in Nakhon Pathom, a city 40 miles west of Bangkok. He farms tilapia fish and white shrimp across 160,000 square meters of land.
We hitch a ride on the back of Somporn’s pickup truck, driving along the dusty roads that separate the fish farm’s large ponds of water. His farm is tightly operated, with the ponds segregated neatly, along with bird traps and scarecrows to deter predators and sophisticated recirculation systems to keep the water clean.
There are thousands of monoculture fish farms in Thailand, but Somporn, 60, has been practicing polyculture fish farming for the best part of three decades. When asked whether it was a more complicated operation farming multiple species, he said it’s all he’s ever known.
Somporn Kaikaew (right) has been practicing polyculture on his fish farm for 30 years. Credit: Tommy Walker
“I’ve had this farm for 30 years and I’ve always mixed from the beginning. I copied from another farmer, it looked like it worked so that’s why I did it,” he said.
In Thailand, farming fish and shrimp together is one of the most common practices in polyculture farming. It’s also the first step toward bigger changes in sustainability that Thailand’s aquaculture and fishing industry could see in the coming years.
That’s the hope of aquaculture experts as they prepare to convince more of Thailand’s fishing farmers to shift to a more sustainable model in which marine species are grown within the same system. That system, which is already being successfully practiced on a few fish farms in Thailand as well as in many other places worldwide, is called Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture (IMTA). In IMTA, multiple organisms from different trophic levels — rungs on the food chain, essentially — are farmed together in such a way that they complement one another, thereby reducing waste and improving growth efficiency. This combination of sustainability and efficiency is better for the environment than monoculture — and more profitable, too.
At Prapapan Farm, we stop at one pond as one of Somporn’s farmers casts a mesh fish net and captures a couple of tilapia fish. A few meters away, another pond is filled with white shrimp.
“We feed both mixed and separate fish and shrimp. The benefit is we can sell both, but shrimp is the trend of the market [at the moment],” Somporn says.
Credit: Tommy Walker
Farming fish and shrimp together, as Somporn does, is a common practice in Thailand. And it’s the first step toward a more complex, sustainable system.
As Somporn explains, the fish’s feces help to make the water balanced and are consumed by the shrimp. The processing, he says, isn’t complicated; he’s able to sell the shrimp in just two months and the fish in five to six.
“In the past the old generation fed the fish and shrimp separately, but it’s not good money and slower for profit,” Somporn says. “But more of the new generation are mixing them together, which is good profit and good results and that’s why we do it this way.”
Thailand’s fishing industry plays a big role in the country, both economically and socially. The thousands of miles of coastline that span 24 provinces in the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea provide a rich source for local fishermen to catch millions of metric tons of fish and marine life each year. This crucially contributes to jobs, income and livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of people. The accessibility of seafood also means fish is a cheaper option and protein source for many Thais compared to chicken, pork and beef, especially for those living in coastal areas.
“In the past the old generation fed the fish and shrimp separately, but it’s not good money and slower for profit,” Somporn Kaikaew says. Credit: Tommy Walker
Thailand’s economy is also heavily dependent on exports, accounting for over half of the country’s GDP. The country’s shrimp exports produce billions of dollars for the local economy, despite the industry being affected by disease in the last decade. Overall, Thailand’s agriculture, forestry and fishing industry contributes to over eight percent of the country’s GDP. Around 1.5 percent of that comes from the fisheries industry as of 2021, data shows.
But some aquaculture experts hope more Thai fish farmers will fully incorporate the IMTA model within their farms in the future to increase revenue.
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Of course, the reasons to practice IMTA go beyond the financial. Dr. Pitchaya Chainark, an expert in coastal aquaculture at Kasetsart University, sees IMTA as a way to increase both Thailand’s fishing industry’s GDP and farmers’ income as well as create a balance of conservation and sustainable use of aquaculture resources.
“In Thailand there are not many [practicing] right now, as many prefer to do polyculture. IMTA is different, it is like a food chain. The species should have symbiosis and help each other,” she says.
Thailand produces more tilapia than any other freshwater fish. Credit: Anupan Praneetpholkrang / Shutterstock
In an ideal IMTA system, a higher trophic species, such as a fish, would be paired with suitable middle trophic species, and then lower trophic species such as plants and invertebrates. The cycle would see the plants consume waste, such as fish feces, sediments and uneaten feed to boost their own growth. The trophic species would be grown in conjunction with each other, providing the farmer with more seafood to sell.
In China, IMTA has already provided an environmentally sustainable and profitable solution for nearly two decades. Professor Jianguang Fang of the Yellow Sea Fisheries Institute in Shandong says IMTA was implemented starting in 2000, mainly to combat “self-pollution” that had come from too many intensively fed aquaculture systems in Sungo Bay, Shandong province. According to Fang, the pollution caused high levels of sediment and nitrogen in water, which can cause an excess of nutrients that can decrease the amount of oxygen in the water. Now, fish farms on Sungo Bay have implemented IMTA systems with high and low trophic species, including fish, seaweed, shellfish and abalones. Because there’s a market in China for all of the farmed species, farming this way is boosting profits.
One aquaculture multi-species system at Sungo Bay also included kelp, oysters and seaweed. The farm became more sustainable and profitable when the density of seaweed was reduced — which sped up growth — which eventually led to the farmers’ income growing by a huge 97 percent.
Credit: Tommy Walker
Though only a few fish farms in Thailand are currently practicing IMTA, aquaculture experts — seeing the success IMTA has had in China and elsewhere — hope the practice will catch on more broadly.
In Thailand, Dr. Pitchaya is now waiting on the government’s decision to approve a proposal to work to increase the practice of IMTA. Government grants would assist farmers in the transition. The hope is that once more Thai fish farmers find success using IMTA, other farmers, seeing the financial benefits, will follow suit.“[We are] already speaking with the farmers,” Dr. Pitchaya says. “In Phuket we have two farms that are practicing, and we are trying to promote them to other provinces.” She wants to help smaller farmers by getting them to consider both the financial and environmental benefits. “If my proposal is accepted, I think next year more than 50 farms will be practicing IMTA,” she says.
The first instance of IMTA in Thailand was a cage aquaculture system in the coastal areas of Phuket. And it’s already had an environmental, societal and economic impact. Effluent waste has been reduced through the use of biofilters, and there are decreasing environmental costs. According to Dr. Pitchaya, IMTA has boosted the economy as well as employment at local levels. Thailand now hopes to expand and create earthen pond aquacultures in the east of the country.
But some farmers are still reluctant to change.
Phaisal Phanchatree is the owner of Phaisarnpanpa Farm, a monoculture fish farm in rural Bangkok. He operates his farm out of a garden space in front of his house. Like Somporn, he has also been in the fish farm industry for three decades.
“We have had this business for 30 years. It’s a family business, but I’m the main worker,” he says.
Phaisal Phanchatree runs a monoculture fish farm out of a garden space in front of his home in rural Bangkok.
Nearly a dozen small ponds, filled with different species of fish including tilapia, lie next to his driveway. A wooden structure covered with blue polyethylene liner separates each habitat, large enough for Phanchatree to maneuver between the ponds.
He believes focusing on one species is the “sincere” way. “It is not cheating the customer,” he explains. “We can sell the fish with the knowledge they were grown this way. It’s not only a selling focus, if we teach the customers how it works, and they are successful, they are going to return to buy fish from us. It’s sustainable.”
Although he insists he will always keep farming fish, he admits there is more money in farming several species, and acknowledges that shrimp is more profitable.
Credit: Tommy Walker
Some longtime fish farmers, like Phaisal Phanchatree, are committed to focusing on just one species and not interested in converting to IMTA.
“Some farmers have a low budget and add the shrimp to feed together, and the result is very good,” he notes. “The main reason is to save on expenses, to save money on the feed. We only focus on fish. If we include shrimp, we have more work, more equipment to buy.”
“I’m not interested in mixing species in the future,” he adds.
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Sukkritt Nimitkul, a lecturer at the department of aquaculture in the faculty of fisheries at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, says with prices and competition increasing, farming one aqua species may not be enough in the future for many farmers.
“It’s a tough sell for the farmers. I think they have run out of margin,” he says. “When you have a lot of margins, you can afford to be reckless but now you don’t have that anymore because the labor prices are going up.”
“Shrimp is the trend of the market,” says Somporn Kaikaew. Credit: Amnat30 / Shutterstock
“The older generations have their old ways and don’t want to change. When you do polyculture, you must make sure that the last three months of the species’ lifespans come together. That requires a lot of rotations, planning, categorizing and moving around. So that is quite complicated and time consuming for some farmers.”
But Sukkrit believes change is inevitable.
“Farms will be forced to change in the future, in my opinion, because now the gap [in] the margin is closing,” he says. “Adapt or die will be my word. You must adapt, or the businesses will go out of business.”
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How Unfamiliar Fish Are Helping Mainers Fight Food Insecurity
As a fisherman in Maine’s groundfish industry, Geordie King is used to uncertainty: Once your net is cast, you never know what it will haul up when it returns, if it returns at all. This unpredictability holds true in general when it comes to the sea, which swayed King’s 49-foot, teal-hulled gillnetter, the Brittany Lynn, in gentle rolls as we sat in her wheelhouse, the boat’s engine idling beneath our feet. But even for King — who, after fishing in the Gulf of Maine for 40 years, was used to his work being affected by the volatility of innumerable factors — the abruptness with which the pandemic upended the fishing industry was remarkable.
“It pretty much came to a dead stop for several months,” King remembered, his eyes searching somewhere beyond the wheelhouse’s window, where the water of Casco Bay sparkled in the tilted winter sun. “The markets momentarily dried up, trucking dried up … the whole infrastructure came to a grinding halt. So that basically put a stop to fishing.”
Geordie King, owner of the Brittany Lynn, has been fishing in the Gulf of Maine for 40 years. Credit: Kea Krause
It wasn’t the fishing itself that was the problem. In fact, many boats were able to safely resume operations within the first year of the pandemic — the coastal breeze supplied adequate air circulation; the open ocean, with no land in sight, provided ample social distancing. But as Susan Olcott, the director of operations of the nonprofit Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association (MCFA), lays out, just about every other aspect of the industry was in crisis. Fishermen “didn’t have a market for their catch. Restaurants were closed and overseas markets were not happening,” Olcott explains. “It was not profitable for people to keep fishing.”
When the pandemic struck, MCFA had already been supporting Maine’s fishermen and working waterfronts for 15 years. And as Olcott, along with Ben Martens, MCFA’s executive director, witnessed the pandemic’s havoc on the community, the nonprofit launched a program called Fishermen Feeding Mainers (FFM) to help out people like King as they navigated the unfolding disaster. Using federal Covid relief funding, FFM purchased fish at the Portland Fish Exchange from groundfish captains, which guaranteed competitive prices. By investing in their fish, FFM enabled fishermen to return to work, confident that they would receive fair pay for their catch. In turn, FFM would make good use of the fish: by donating it to local food banks and the food programs of public school districts.
Credit: Kea Krause
Fishermen like King and his crew on the Brittany Lynn saw their entire industry screech to a halt when the pandemic began.
In the four years since its launch, FFM has overseen the distribution of over 850,000 pounds of fish to 280 schools, food banks and community groups, including school districts as far north as Fort Kent on the Canadian border, where fresh fish is near-impossible to source. The program has been such an important source of healthy protein to the schools in Fort Kent that Melanie Lagasse, Unified Valley food service director, will make the five-and-a-half-hour drive to Portland to pick up the FFM fish herself. “The only thing it costs me is my time and fuel,” Lagasse says. And fishermen and fishworkers, including King and his crew on the Brittany Lynn, continue to benefit from the program, which King says buys species like pollock, hake and grey sole — less popular groundfish species — for a more than decent price.
Quite literally, fishermen are feeding Mainers with the help of MCFA. “We broke a million meals after two and a half years,” reports Olcott. Today, that number has risen to 1.25 million meals donated to the food insecure.
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Though the goal was to help Maine’s fishermen, in doing so, the folks at MCFA entered into a broader discussion about fish and food insecurity. “Seafood, for so long, has just been outside of local food conversations,” Martens explains. Paraphrasing the sustainable seafood expert Barton Seaver, Martens elaborates on the widely held belief that “food comes from farmers and seafood comes from the ocean.” This idea “really reflects the mindset of most people when you’re thinking about our food system and what you’re eating,” Martens says. “One of our goals is to put the fishermen back into the food system.”
Haddock on its way to be donated to a food pantry. Credit: Scott Gable
Part of that effort is confronting ideas we hold about eating fish, one of which is scarcity. “We tell the story about the decline of the groundfish fishery in Maine, and in New England, and a lot of that is attached to cod,” Martens says. While cod was indeed overfished in the 1990s and isn’t expected to recover to sustainable levels until 2030, there is growing evidence in the Gulf that other groundfish populations, like monkfish, pollock and grey sole, are stable. “One of the neat things about Maine fisheries that we can say with good conscience as an organization is that if it’s from Maine, it’s sustainable,” Olcott says. The domestic seafood industry is already highly regulated, but in the Gulf of Maine, there are additional factors that add to sustainability, particularly in the groundfish fleet: Businesses are independently owned and operated, which means a lot of fishermen end up in inadvertent roles as stewards of the fishery. They’re cognizant of the value of harvesting in sustainable ways, and many participate in electric monitoring and gear modification programs.
Amid this ongoing sustainability conversation, one of the bigger challenges FFM faces has also proven to be one of the program’s more replicable features: the purchase and supply of underutilized species. Identifying and developing markets for lesser-known types of fish is not only sustainable but positions fisheries everywhere to weather some of the more severe economic consequences of climate change. But selling people on trying unfamiliar fish comes with some hurdles. Most people are acquainted with cod, less so with pollock, hake and grey sole, even though these fish can all be substituted for most recipes calling for a flavorful, flaky fish.
A mural at MaineHealth Food Pantry highlighting local and culturally important foods, including grey sole. Credit: Kea Krause
Expanding what can be considered culinary, which FFM tries to do with various types of outreach including developing and distributing their own value-added monkfish stew to regional grocers, is a type of messaging that could be adapted by other fisheries nationwide. “We are in a really interesting position where we can slowly start to rebuild those markets with fishermen landing more consistently,” says Olcott. And while perhaps it is a little harder to make people more adventurous about what species they’re eating, how they’re eating it, FFM is finding, is very consistent.
Though there is less of a market based on species, there is one for whole, intact fish. With their bones and skin, along with their meat, whole fish provide more nutrition and more flavor when cooked, and they can be used in a variety of preparations, as opposed to fish that have been processed down into filets and other cuts. At the MaineHealth Food Pantry at Maine Medical Center, a shopping-model food bank where visitors can browse shelves and coolers for food, groundfish from FFM has become a sustaining protein. “Because we’re a hospital-based food pantry, we have certain standards on the healthy food that we’re offering,” Rachel Freedman, the food pantry’s program manager, tells me. “And our focus along those lines is really on culturally important food.” Species of fish that turn flaky and white when cooked swim the oceans worldwide, which makes the groundfish donated by FFM especially important at the Food Pantry: They can be used to replicate just about any dish that calls for white fish, and they are also halal.
Volunteers at the MaineHealth Food Pantry at Maine Medical Center unload deliveries. Credit: Kea Krause
Located in Portland’s old Greyhound bus station, the Pantry distributes between 17,000 and 19,000 pounds of food a week to an average of 550 community members and their families. Many of the Pantry’s customers are new to Maine, and the United States more generally, with over 80 percent of visitors speaking French, Portuguese or Spanish as their primary language. With such a diverse clientele, the Pantry has “cultural brokers,” community members that help visitors navigate the space and the products that are available.
Though many of the Pantry’s products are novel to its community members, whole fish spans cultures and languages, and it has become one the Pantry’s most in demand items. “We have folks that are shopping who are from Southeast Asia, that’s what they want. We have folks who are shopping who are from Central Africa, that’s what they want,” says Freedman. “Across cultures, the whole fish is definitely the hottest ticket item.”
At the Pantry, visitors can find a variety of pamphlets and cookbooks by immigrant women living in Maine that offer local substitutions for recipes of their home countries where fish like tilapia is more common. “Some people come in and they’re like, ‘I just got here last week,’” Freedman says. “And some people are a little bit more established. But everyone’s kind of working on, ‘I’m used to this thing. What do we have here in Maine that I can still use in cooking that feels familiar and comfortable and important?’”
Credit: Kea Krause
The MaineHealth Food Pantry distributes between 17,000 and 19,000 pounds of food a week to an average of 550 community members and their families.
On a slick and windy day, the Pantry was in full swing, with volunteers dashing out to trucks and vans in the parking lot to unload the week’s donated goods, including fish from FFM. In all the activity, Nicole, a Congolese cultural broker, showed me pictures of a fish stew she cooked with some of the FFM fish. In addition to her cultural broker role, Nicole prepares culturally and traditionally important food for newly arrived families who are living in temporary housing — usually at a hotel — and do not have access to kitchens to cook themselves. The dish she showed me radiated warmth — it appeared to be bubbling away on a stove — its ingredients, like the fish, perhaps novel but nonetheless nourishing.
“As Maine becomes more diverse, it’s a neat opportunity for Maine seafood, kind of in both directions,” Olcott reflects on the program benefiting both the fishermen and underserved communities.
“It’s just a win-win,” says Vincent Balzano, a third-generation fisherman, who also is a part of the FFM program. “The program establishes a floor for official prices and also allows us to give back to the public.” Balzano still recalls some of the feedback he received when he first got involved with the FFM program and his catch was distributed among food banks. “About a week later, we received a heartfelt thank you from a woman — an elderly woman — that hadn’t eaten haddock in years because she couldn’t afford it,” he says. “I got a better return than I had been getting, the processor that processed the fish was able to keep their cutting room operating and keep their employees paid. And the end result was a woman was able to have a treat that she hadn’t had in years. For me, that really struck a chord.”
Geordie King on the Brittany Lynn. Credit: Kea Krause
Back on the Brittany Lynn, King used the same phrase, win-win. As he puts it, the FFM program “takes the lows out of the lows” but also makes people feel good as fishermen. And he gets to keep doing what he loves, which is fishing. King missed it during the pandemic and misses it when he hasn’t been out in a while. “When you lose sight of land, it’s just a different world,” he says. “Not everything about fishing is rosy, but I do love the natural environment. Most fishermen will tell you that’s a big part of why they love it. We get to see whales, birds, porpoises. The beautiful blue seas and the stars. We see it all.”
And who wouldn’t want to experience a different world, one in which the role of uncertainty is diminished? For Martens, that added stability is what FFM’s work is all about. “For these people that live in some of the most disruptive times in history for their businesses — we’ve got climate change, we’ve got marketplaces that are all over the place, we’ve got regulations that are changing, we’ve got gentrification up or down our coast,” he notes. “These communities are changing faster than they probably ever have. All of these things are contributing to uncertainty. But there are places that we can bring a little bit of certainty back, a little stability back. And this program is one piece of that equation.”
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‘Take It Down and They’ll Return’: The Stunning Revival of the Penobscot River
About a week before the removal of the Great Works Dam on the Penobscot River in Old Town, Maine, Dan Kusnierz dragged his sons to the riverside to take their picture in front of the aging structure. They had just come from a little league game. “They were being goofy and didn’t understand it,” Kusnierz, the water resources program manager for the Penobscot Indian Nation, recalls. It was 2012, and with the dam’s removal imminent, the river — New England’s second-largest — was about to transform.
For nearly two centuries, the Penobscot had been choked with logs and pulp as the timber and paper industries — both long-standing cornerstones of Maine’s economy — used it both as a lumber byway and waste receptacle. From just 1830 to 1880, more than eight billion feet of timber floated down the river. To power all this industry, dams were erected, 119 in the Penobscot River Basin alone. Two in particular, the Great Works and the Veazie, posed an outsized threat to the river’s health.
A stereograph from the 1870s shows the view from Ripogenus Falls on the Penobscot River. Credit: A.L. Hinds / Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library
Perhaps irrelevant to his children posing for a picture at the time, Kusnierz, who is not Penobscot but has served the Nation for 20 years, was one the members of an unprecedented coalition of scientists, Indigenous people and conservationists working to remove both dams in order to free the Penobscot River and hopefully restore its health in the process.
The river had been sick for generations. Butch Phillips, a Penobscot Nation elder, recalls growing up on Indian Island, the Penobscot tribe reservation located near Old Town on the river, in the 1950s. By that time, the Penobscot was unrecognizable to the body of water it had once been, with drifting logs so gridlocked at times on the eastern side of the island that the river was impassable for boats and people alike. This posed an ongoing dilemma for the Penobscot people who, prior to the construction of a bridge in 1950, used canoes to travel to and from the mainland.
The Veazie Dam before removal. Credit: Joshua Royte / The Nature Conservancy
Despite the discharge coming from the mills, the river was still central to the Penobscot Nation’s everyday life. “[The river] was our playground,” Phillips says. “We were either canoeing on it, fishing, swimming in it and in the wintertime we were skating on it.” But the relationship had been affected. Living so closely with a body of water like the Penobscot for so many generations, he explains, “you develop a river culture. We are river people, we’re canoe people. And when you take away that element, that river and the use of the river, then you take away the culture as well.”
One of the worst blows to the river, though, was to its 12 species of sea-run fish. The Great Works, Veazie and Howland dams, all built in the 19th century, severed access to the river’s headwaters, which fish like alewives and shad, shortnose sturgeon and Atlantic salmon used as spawning ground. When the dams were erected, the effects on the fish population were almost immediate: By the 1850s, salmon no longer inhabited most of the rivers in southern Maine and their populations continued to decline so dramatically that in 1889, the US government opened the Craig Brook National Fish Hatchery in Orland, Maine to support the besieged fish. For the next 50 years, it was the primary source of salmon eggs for the region.
Credit: Kea Krause
The Craig Brook National Fish Hatchery has been raising Atlantic salmon, an iconic species of the northeastern US, since the late 19th century.
Yet salmon numbers continued to decline. By 1948, the final year of the commercial fishing industry for wild Atlantic salmon, only 40 were reported caught in the Penobscot watershed. In the late 1980s, around 2,000 salmon made it to the Veazie Dam (the first dam fish returning from the ocean encounter on the river), a number drastically whittled down from the species’ original population of about 200,000 annually. In 2009, wild Atlantic salmon were added to the endangered species list.
These were the stakes when the dams’ licenses were up for renewal in 1998, and leaders of the Penobscot Nation saw an opportunity to make a significant change to the status quo. The tribe’s plan was to purchase the dams — and then destroy them. So they joined with the Atlantic Salmon Federation to open a dialogue with the dam owner, a company called PPL Maine, to buy them. The cohort gathered more participants — American Rivers, the Natural Resources Council of Maine and Trout Unlimited — and formed an alliance called the Penobscot River Restoration Trust.
Alewives spend most of their lives at sea but rely on Maine’s inland waters for spawning habitat. Credit: Bridget Edmond / The Nature Conservancy
The river was in crisis: In addition to the dwindling salmon population, only two alewives were counted at the Veazie Dam in 2010 (NOAA estimates historically the river had 14 to 20 million), arguably one of its most alarming health indicators yet. Alewives, a type of river herring native to the Penobscot, feed just about everything and everyone, from the bottom of the food chain up. With no alewives, there would be no otter or fishers or osprey or eagles.
“The impacts of a dam are especially local,” says Laura Rose Day, executive director of the Penobscot River Restoration Trust. So while the Trust engaged in years-long negotiations with PPL, community outreach became an equally key component to the project’s success. Rose Day, along with Cheryl Daigle, an outreach coordinator for the project, and Butch Phillips, who was tapped as an ambassador for the Penobscot people, set out on a lengthy effort to share the good news of the project with the community. Individually, they logged hours of knocking on doors, maintaining tables and booths at sports shows, hosting the Penobscot River Revival Festival and just persistently showing up for people who came to them with questions and concerns.
The Great Works Dam mid-removal. Courtesy of the Natural Resources Council of Maine
It wasn’t always easy to find receptive minds. “In the broadest sense, change is an obstacle,” Molly Payne Wynne, the project’s monitoring coordinator and project associate, explains. “You’re essentially coming into a community, and you’re asking that the one thing that they see every day, or the one constant that they know — this structure in the river — you want to remove that and totally change the visual and what that means for them.”
“The key to all of these projects is finding the right equation to meet public and business and Indigenous and other rights and interests and needs, based on the place,” Rose Day reflects. Daigle says she often found herself translating the science of the project for people and also managing the varying perspectives of how a river should be: “Part of it is not being afraid to venture into that territory where there’s conflicting views about use of a resource.”
Credit: Stephen G. Page / Shutterstock
“We are river people, we’re canoe people. And when you take away that element, then you take away the culture as well.” –Butch Phillips
For his part, Phillips discovered that there was a dearth of knowledge community-wide when it came to the tribe’s relationship to the river. “My ancestors have been on this river for literally thousands of years,” he notes. “And that connection goes really deep because through those many, many generations, the people depended on the river and the surrounding land for their everyday living: Their food, their shelter, their weapons, their transportation, clothing, everything came from the river and the land.”
Phillips felt it was crucial to add that perspective to the project. “I was talking about the connection of Penobscot to the river and the fish and all the creatures, and to many of those listening, it was the first time they heard it,” he says.
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Daigle’s experience reflected a similar revelation: that communicating the science was important but, perhaps, what mattered more were small moments of communion that involved the river itself. After the dams were purchased, as some of their impoundments were being let out, there was an effort to move the river’s freshwater mussels to safety. For several weeks, Daigle, along with close to seventy volunteers, waded through the waters of Penobscot, moving the mollusks out of harm’s way. “It was sort of this intimate act to move these mussels, and build a little sense of community around that,” Daigle recalls.
The project was unprecedented in its ambition and its success. The Trust ultimately raised $60 million to purchase the Veazie, Great Works and Howland dams in 2008. In 2012, the Great Works Dam was the first to go, followed by the Veazie in 2013. The Trust was unable to convince the community of Howland to remove its dam, and so a compromise was reached in which a fish bypass was added to the dam to allow an open route for returning fish. As a result, nearly 2,000 miles of habitat was opened for salmon and other species.
The Howland Dam bypass enables fish to pass safely through. Credit: Brandon Kulik / Kleinschmidt
In the nine years it took to come to an agreement with PPL, which included generating more power at alternate dams so there wouldn’t be a decrease in hydroelectricity, scientists were able to seize the opportunity to really study the river, and what happens to one before and after a dam removal.
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When you dam a river, it’s like flooding a house. Water pools and settles, as does sediment, and what you get is a warm, still environment, nothing like the lively, textured existence of a flowing river. But when you remove a dam, the river’s rebound is robust and swift. In 2018, just six years after the removal of the first dam, more than two million river herring (which includes alewives) were counted passing through a local fish lift in addition to 772 salmon. “When we do on-the-ground restoration actions with these fish, they respond immediately,” says Payne Wynne. “It’s fascinating. And it’s unique in the restoration world, because in other spheres of restoration, it can take decades to see any real response to the actual, immediate restoration activity.”
The breaching of the Veazie Dam in 2013. Courtesy of the Natural Resources Council of Maine
Though the agreement and planning took several years, when the Great Works and Veazie dams were finally demolished, the river’s recovery was dramatic and swift.
The degree of the project’s success — the river’s surprising return — has bolstered hope that future efforts like it will only continue to improve the outlook for Atlantic salmon and other fish species. Though the Trust has since dissolved, work continues to remove dams further upstream along the Penobscot’s many tributaries, which would open up more cold-water spawning habitat to all the sea-run fish. But as the nearly 15-year effort of the Trust demonstrates, dam removals are arduous, persisting battles. A win is not to be taken for granted.
In contrast to the river herring, the salmon population’s recovery has been more modest, with around 1,500 returning to the Penobscot this year — the most since 2011 but still just a slight 10-year increase. “It’s a really hostile environment for Atlantic salmon in the North Atlantic right now,” says Rory Saunders, NOAA Fisheries’ Downeast coastal salmon recovery coordinator, referring to the challenges posed by climate change. “The Penobscot run in particular is almost entirely dependent on the hatchery at this point.”
A pregnant salmon at the hatchery is held up for inspection. Credit: Kea Krause
At the hatchery this fall, 250 mature females prepared to spawn, their dappled bodies taut with eggs. The fish had migrated to the likes of Newfoundland and back, and now they swam lazily in their tank, a sign of late pregnancy. I stood in the tank observing the Fish and Wildlife techs as they scooped each female gently up in a net — taking hold of her tail and lifting her delicately, always supporting her head — for the inspection of a biologist.
The fish weren’t quite ready to spawn, but they were getting there, and learning this distinction took years of experience, of plucking expectant females from tanks and pinching their bellies, of discerning the difference between the feeling of a ziplock baggy full with water and one that’s bursting. These fish would need another week. Then the techs would do it all again—scoop, pluck, pinch.
Once the females spawned, the eggs would be fertilized and incubated, and eventually some would be placed in man-made salmon redds, tiny depressions made in the sand normally by the wiggle and swoop a female’s body, through a hole drilled in ice. This is the ritual—tender and technical—of saving the last wild Atlantic salmon on the planet.
“The Penobscot project is a tremendous first step, but it’s not a silver bullet. We need to continue to think about upstream habitat,” acknowledges Saunders. There are hopes to remove more dams along the Piscataquis River, a tributary to the Penobscot, which would allow for access to more good, cold water for the salmon, but this could take years.
Still, there is much to celebrate. “We went from 2,000 animals to five million animals in the span of 12 years. That’s as good-news-story as you see in ecology, as you see in natural resources,” says Saunders. The return of the salmon holds significance to the Penobscot Nation as well. “It’s not just the fish,” explains Kusnierz. “It’s restoring a huge part of the culture of the tribe. Those are their relatives that have long been gone and are here again. That’s what the vision of the tribe was in those negotiations. [It] was kind of the opposite of ‘build it, and they will come.’ It was ‘take it down and they’ll return.’”
Butch Phillips and Barry Dana of the Penobscot Nation offer a blessing at an event celebrating the Great Works Dam’s removal. Credit: US Fish and Wildlife Service
In the tradition of the Penobscot Nation, Phillips has collaborated on the construction of two different birch bark canoes and in one instance, took the boat up the Penobscot toward Mount Katahdin, toward the headwaters. Phillips, along with other community members including one of his sons, was retracing the path of generations before him — up the river and toward the mountain, which never seemed to disappear from view despite the constant bend and curve in the water’s trajectory.
At one point, after a particularly tough paddle through an ancient waterway on the west side of the river, Phillips turned to his son. “I told him, Let’s stop, and we laid on the ground,” he recalls. The moment was one of providence: “We’re walking in the same footsteps as our ancestors have for thousands of years.” This was in 2002, prior to the removal of the dams, and the group had to maneuver the canoe around them on their journey. The restoration project was in its nascent stages then, and the hope to someday see the river healthy and unrestricted still seemed like a moon shot, even to Phillips.
“I’m just so happy that I lived long enough to see at least a portion of our river free-flowing, so that the sea-run fish can ascend the river and go to their ancestral spawning ground as they did before the dams went up,” says Phillips. “As my ancestors witnessed.”
The post ‘Take It Down and They’ll Return’: The Stunning Revival of the Penobscot River appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
