Story of the Desperate Alewives

Story of the Desperate Alewives.... Love living by the great, gorgeous jewel - Lake Michigan! Soft cooling breezes on hot days, the roar of the waves on stormy nights and the stench of dead alewives in June... I caught a whiff of them today which is kind of shocking because the smell of alewives has been pretty rare over the past 20 years. I can remember as a kid you could smell them rotting by the ton on Chicago's lovely beaches (and most beaches of the Great Lakes) especially after high stormy winds. In July 1967 they estimate nearly a billion alewives died-off on Chicago's beaches. A billion fish carcasses rotting in the summer sun. Oh my nose remembers, a major memory as I rode my banana bike around during the summer of love. That smell traveled miles west of the lake where I grew up. They no longer had any natural predators (humans had overfished all the lake trout). Although they're a species of herring -and not even native to the area but somehow got here from New England. Must not be that tasty because they're used as bait rather than human consumption. So after '67, fresh water salmon-chinook and coho were added to the lake to eat the alewives. It worked - but too well. The stench went and the alewives with it. Now the alewife population is too low so the salmon population has begun to die off which then is killing the fishing/tourist industry. Man! life is complicated. New solution? A few years ago Michigan and Illinois decided to not re-introduce salmon to the lake for awhile (Wisconsin's tourist industry was not happy) so that the alewife population could increase again and there would be enough for the present salmon residents to eat. Sooooo maybe that whiff of dead herring this afternoon is a good omen - a sign the plan is working...