the middle of them, they would separate at that point and then close in
to fill the gap. There could be no nullifying or breaking their united
persistence. Their onwardness, their desperate dashing against the
rocks, had its own logic--a logic which had nothing to do with hope,
reason, or choosing another alternative. No way out, in other words.
Slavery to the reproductive urge. These alewives are more dumb than
sheep. If you were to press your own sympathy hard enough, you might
feel a terrible lack of variety in them, or, paradoxically enough, of
daring. The lidless-eyed and plunging multitude seems brutally driven,
without a chance. This is “togetherness” with a terrible vengeance.
Perhaps there is something here that we know too, as fellow animals,
and lose sight of. At the risk of making one of those vaguely
anthropomorphic assumptions against which the objective scientists are
constantly warning us, I would guess that the self-motivation in this
onward mass of fish might be compared to those human crowds that take
action under stress, independently of the individuals that make them
up. Suddenly a crowd, hitherto a random combination of people, takes
on a frightening rhythm and purpose of its own. It is governed by
laws which go back infinitely farther in the history of life than the
immediate goal of its anger or exultation.
I have explained nothing. I can only say that when I first saw these
fish I was moved in spite of myself. Instinct is no more blind than
wonder. To have the human attributes of mind and spirit and the race’s
ability to control its own environment does not give me the wit to beat
the infinitely various will of life at its own game. All I could wish
for would be to join it.
I walked on down the banks of Stony Brook, past the Herring Run area
with its neat paths, bridges, and fish ladders, my shoes squashing in
the mud. The stream turns a slight angle at this point, gets broader
and shallower and begins to run through the little valley that ends
in tidal marshes and the Bay. The alewives, for a hundred yards at
least, were running up against the downward currents, massed almost
stationary, not in ranks, but ordered mutuality, with a long waving
like water grasses or kelp, and curving, twisting, swirling like their
medium the water as they moved very gradually ahead. There was no
indiscriminate rushing ahead. It was done to measure; but it seemed
to me that through their unalterable persistence I saw the heaving
of crowds of all kinds, of buffalo, cattle, sheep, or men. I had seen
as much motion in crowds pouring out of a subway entrance or massing
through a square. History was in their coming on, without its shouts
and cheers. They could not speak for themselves; but who knew how deep
the silence went?
Ahead of them there was a net; behind, down the broader reaches of
the brook, the greedy herring gulls dropped down into the water after
them, or stood along the bank in apparently glutted satisfaction, while
others screamed and sailed overhead. In spite of their slow gliders’
grace and local lethargy compared with swift sea birds like the terns,
gulls travel the rims of the world. They had always made me think of
far-distance, voyages unending. Many of them had congregated on a bald
hill that overlooks the run and were standing like white sentries under
the shafts of the northern sky beyond. From far off they sometimes
suggest rows of military crosses, and I have heard them compared to a
field of flowers. Soldiers, flowers, graves ... all these they might
suggest on the heights of fate, by their pure bold greed and unmatched
design. They stood on a wide stage.
V
The Nature of an Alewife
The fish kept moving up. I watched them swinging back and forth with
the current, great-eyed, sinewy, probing, weaving, their dorsal fins
cutting the surface, their ventral fins fanning, their tails flipping
and sculling. In the thick, interbalanced crowd there would suddenly
be a scattered dashing, coming as quickly as cat’s-paws flicking the
summer seas. They may have moved by “reflex” rather than conscious
thought, but what marvelous professionals they were in that!
The cold raw winds of April had heeled back, and May swung on. There
were an increasing number of days with the wind from the southwest,
smelling of sunny springtime. The local paper had it that the
temperature averaged a high of 66.6 degrees Fahrenheit and a low of
44.2 in the week between the second and the ninth of May. The following
week the average rose a little, going to between 67.5 and 47 degrees.
The first reported striped bass, a three-and-a-half-pounder, was caught
on the Cape the eighth of the month.
The willows that hung over the Herring Run were budding and flowering
out, lacing and fringing with many beads, a yellow-green; and leaves of
the red maples began to unfold, a light coppery russet color, hanging
like limp claws--and elsewhere, on higher ridges and other roads, the
oaks in their leafy variety of pink, yellow, gray and pale green, were
starting their fires with tenderness. Clouds of the shad-blow’s lacy
white blossoms came out everywhere between pitch pines and oaks, to
last only a few days and be replaced by beach plums whose flowers burst
out of their sheaths like popping corn.
The procession, down the brook and around its bend, made other rushing
sounds above the noise of the flow itself. The gulls in the valley were
crying out with “ho!” and “ha!” and “yi!” The shadow of a gull flying
high over us fell across the water and the alewives rushed to the side.
The backs of some of them were cruelly gashed. There was a dead one on
the bank, stiff and dry, flatly reflecting the blue in the sky like an
unpolished knife blade.
[Illustration]
They were close-packed going up through the ladders, herding, slipping,
slanting, struggling in relation to each other. I grabbed one out with
my hands. It shuddered, was almost still for a second or two, like a
man with his wind knocked out, then plunged in my hands and slipped
out onto the bank. It thrashed there in the grass, a twelve-inch fish,
with a gray-green back, and silver sides and belly that reflected the
magnificent surfaces of May, with grass, sun, and blue sky intruding
through the overhanging leaves and the brown earth. It shone with
violet, yellow-green, white and brown, pink and blue. It had an
inclusive majesty, a great natural art.
Its silver scales are large, like iridescent reflecting coins: and in
the water the alewife is able to alter the pigmentation of its skin so
as to blend with the background. It is able to do this very quickly, so
that it changes in color as it moves up the stream to correspond with
a darker or lighter bottom ... part of the whole various pattern of
adaptation which the fish show to the water around them.
During the course of evolution brain development among the fishes has
been slow. What brain power they have is closely related to their sense
organs, concentrated on their whole bodily co-ordination; in which,
so far as water action is concerned, they are man’s superiors. An
alewife’s body is marvelously fitted to situation--peace or turbulence,
light or dark, flood and ebb, ripple or rile. This inhabitant of the
sea weaves up through the overhanging springtime, and seems a part of
it, experienced as to its flowering.
For it is a salt-water fish, as I sometimes had to remind myself
later between the ponds and the Bay, although there is a landlocked
variety; and as such it is part of a prodigious tribe. As a member of
the herring family--the Clupeidae, it is related to the sea herring,
sprats, shads, pilchards, and menhadens. The sea herring is one of
the most important food fish in the world. In Europe whole societies
were affected by its shifts in abundance. Loss of control over herring
fisheries was instrumental in the breakup of the Hanseatic League.
In 1881 Thomas Henry Huxley said: “Man, in fact, is but one of a
vast co-operative society of herring catchers.” The yearly catch is
enormous. One school of herring may run not into millions but billions
of individual fish; though Huxley may have exaggerated the capacity of
the herring population to keep its level in the face of human demands.
To mention another important relative of the alewife, the common or
American shad is also a food fish, being something of a delicacy,
prized highly for its flesh and roe. It is a larger fish, weighing
between six and nine pounds; but it is not so abundant as the alewife.
The menhaden fishery is the largest in the country in terms of weight.
Some 800,000,000 pounds of this fish are harvested annually from the
Atlantic and Gulf coasts; its present fate is to be turned into fish
meal, scrap, and oil. In addition many tons of ground-up menhaden, or
“pogies,” are used by salt-water anglers to attract bluefish, tuna, or
mackerel.
All these herring species are similar in appearance, with silvery
scales, easily rubbed off, thin, deep bodies, and tails quite deeply
forked.
The alewife belongs to a group of great age in the earth’s history,
and one which has survived, for one thing, by reason of its numbers,
and not by any skill in speed or individual pugnacity. It depends on
the crowd rhythm for perpetuation. Its salt-water whereabouts are
comparatively unknown, although it is thought it may not go very far
afield; but in a run of alewives you might sense not numbers only,
but something of the sea’s capacious demands that made these fish to
measure. Green, gray, silver, they wear its colors, and seem built to
nose into its space, or be carried with its moods.
Are there no individuals among them? It is perhaps no term to apply
with so manifestly united a company. In any case we are deceived if we
try to translate ourselves, our ability to choose, our eyes for pattern
and variation, into an animal that can see us at best as an occasional,
strange, blurred image appearing above the bank, and to whom everything
but the water world is unknown. In a sense we know too little, and so
do they, to discuss the matter.
Yet anyone, with a slipping, plunging alewife in his hands, knows it in
some degree for its uniqueness. This green-backed, silver-sided water
animal, smooth, supple, and muscular, with a sail-like fin on its back
is definite enough. Its body is convex-sided, coming to a thin edge
at the belly, shaped like shellfish, seeds, or Indian artifacts. From
its undershot jaw to its tail, it is clearly a tough fish, and in our
experience an adaptable one that knows its way.
This is the “sawbelly” all right. You can very easily feel the
serrations, or little teeth, with your fingers--it is one good way of
telling alewives from sea herring in the dark. But the name “big-eyed”
is perhaps most dramatically true of the alewife. Its black, round,
shining eyes are very prominent in proportion to its small head and
small mouth. They are large black disks like certain water-worn rocks,
or they are great bubbles coming up from a dark depth. I fancied,
seeing a tiny image of myself in the alewife’s eye, that I was
reflected in a deep, impenetrable well.
It is known that a fish’s eye is somewhat like ours in that it has
a lens, an iris, a cornea, retina, and optic nerve; but that it is
designed to see under water, which ours is not. In J. H. Norman’s
_History of Fishes_, he writes: “The eye, as is well known,
acts after the manner of a photographic camera, the two essential parts
being the screen or retina at the back, and the lens at the front,
which projects an image of the outside world on the screen. The lens
of a land vertebrate is somewhat flat and convex on both sides, but in
the fish it is a globular body, the extreme convexity being a necessity
under water because the substance of the lens is not very much denser
than the fluid medium in which the fish lives. The space between lens
and retina is filled with a transparent jelly-like substance, the
vitreous humor. The transparent outer wall of the eye, the cornea, is
somewhat flatter in fishes, and the space between this and the lens
is filled by the watery, aqueous humor. In land vertebrates the iris
of the eye is capable of great contraction, and, acting like the
diaphragm of a camera, regulates the amount of light allowed to enter
the eye. In fishes it generally surrounds a rounded pupil, and has
comparatively little power of contraction.”
I should add that an alewife’s eye is somewhat fixed, and not capable
of much movement.
Back of the eyes and mouth are the gill covers that protect the gills
underneath, which are weak and blood-filled, dark-red overlapping
layers, like petals, four on each side. As the fish’s gill covers open
and close, water passes over the gills, taking oxygen into the blood
stream. The alewife’s heart, which pumps blood to the gills, is located
directly below them.
This is a plankton eater, although it will eat shrimp, small fish,
or young eels, on occasion. It has no teeth, or such a semblance of
tiny, weak ones, back in its mouth, that they are of little use. The
particles of food that come through its mouth are strained through a
device known as gill rakers, which act as sieves or filters, in the
form of fine hairlike growths mounted on the gill arches, the bony
structures on which the gills are also arranged.
A female alewife can be recognized fairly readily by its size. On the
average the males run from ten to eleven inches and the females from
eleven to twelve, and the males are of course lighter. The proportion
of males to females on the inland run seems to be about fifty-fifty.
Alewives weigh anywhere between eight and ten ounces. Part of the
weight of both sexes during their spawning migration is accounted for
by the roe; in fact, their ovaries and testes may become so enlarged
as to fill up a large part of their bodies. The egg sacs of the female
vary in color from pink to yellow or yellow-orange, depending on their
stage of development. The milt, sometimes called soft roe, of the male,
is white and pink.
To sketch a fish so generally is scarcely to know it, but even if I
were able to give a good account of its complex skeleton down to the
last bone, or discuss all the actions of its nervous system as known
so far, I would not have done enough. Our bodies may have chemicals in
common with them, but we will never know the fish.
The alewife I took from the water eluded me. Cold-blooded fish,
warm-blooded man, the water’s triumph caught by the alien air. It
slipped my hand and knowledge. “An aquatic vertebrate?” A mystery,
though I recognized a life that shone with vibrant persistence, one of
nature’s particularized energies, a wild texture as old as the animal
world, a food that was the beneficent matter of all struggle and greed.
Were there more connections between us that needed exploration? How
much fright, how much nerve-threaded darkness, how much throbbing
electric quickness might not be receiving me in the distance of that
fixed eye? Perhaps we strangers all meet somewhere in each other’s
sight.
VI
Puzzles and Speculations
The Herring Run area, small center of commerce and history, had been my
starting point, but I had hardly begun to follow the alewives on their
whole migratory route between salt water and the ponds above. First
of all I had some background of local hearsay to bring into question.
Did the herrin’ really go all the way down to South America in the
wintertime? Was it true that each fish returned to the stream it was
born in? Did they come inland on their spawning journey and then die,
like the west coast salmon? I overheard a man say, “Poor fish! All that
work just to die!” But that was one interpretation I could dispose of
early, having seen them go back to salt water the year before. Did they
only come in from the Bay at night or on foggy evenings? To find out
would take more watching and waiting than I had done so far.
You might deduce this much to start with: the alewives, only a few at
first, started to come inland in the spring when the brackish waters
from the Stony Brook outlet were warmer than the Bay into which they
flowed, if only by a few degrees. They responded with sensitivity to
the temperature. If the earliest fish were the oldest, it was possible
that the later runs also corresponded to age groups, guessing by their
size, and that the youngest came last of all. Evidently schools of
alewives stay together during their ocean life according to the years
when they were spawned. Yet why, between March and June, any given
schools would come in when they did would be hard to tell.
There are places where you can watch the alewives approach, at the
junction between tidal and inland waters. At Damariscotta, Maine, they
swim up a wide tidal river until a fresh-water stream flows into it
from a height above. I was told that the fish are seen massing and
circling, sometimes for days, at this point, until by some communicated
decision, or joint response--perhaps to pressure of numbers, combined
with the right temperature conditions--they start going up. A cold snap
may make them drop back to tidewater. In the same way, cold weather may
discourage their coming in from Cape Cod Bay.
You can also see them schooling in the Cape Cod Canal at the entrance
to the Bournedale run, but not at Stony Brook where the outlet flows
into the Bay through low sand dunes, or sand flats at low tide.
Whatever the local topography may be, the alewives are evidently
attracted to the warmer currents and the lack of salinity in a stream
where it flows into salt water.
In general the cause of their moving in together from the offshore
depths is their sexual development. I have heard the speculation
that this is affected by the increase in light at this stage of the
season, but unfortunately know no more about it. In any case at the
age of four, or sometimes three, they are ready to spawn, to follow
out the new force that is in them, on an old track. Their timing, when
to migrate, is a question of generation, a decision that has to be
made once again in the earth’s timeless schedule. Perhaps there is a
comparison to be made once more with the weather, in which the element
of surprise is constant during the usual course of the season, the
intangible variant still plaguing prediction. The turns to storm or
sunshine have their own order in the years beyond the immediate one.
Who knows when anything will happen? Suddenly the cicadas start to sing
in the August trees. Why that day or hour? Because “conditions are
just right”? Perhaps, if we could ever track down all the conditions.
Natural acts may be repetitive, but no flight, or song, or new growth
has ever existed before at exactly the same time, pitch, or ratio. They
are part of the indefinite context of generation.
What about the alewives during their years in the sea? Very little
seems to be known. According to _Fishes of the Gulf of
Maine_ by Bigelow and Schroeder: “The alewife is as gregarious
as the herring, fish of a size congregating in schools of hundreds of
individuals (we find record of 40,000 fish caught in one seine haul
in Boston Harbor) and apparently a given school holds together during
most of its sojourn in salt water. But they are sometimes caught mixed
with menhaden, or with herring. Alewives, immature and adult, are often
picked up in abundance in weirs here and there along the coast, and
it is likely that the majority remains in the general vicinity of the
fresh-water influences of the stream-mouths and estuaries from which
they have emerged, to judge from the success of attempts to strengthen
or restore the runs of various streams.... But it is certain that some
of them wander far afield, for catches up to 3,000 to 4,000 pounds per
haul were made by otter trawlers some 80 miles offshore, off Emerald
Bank, Nova Scotia at 60 to 80 fathoms, in March 1936.”
They also say, with circumspection: “It seems likely from the various
evidence that the alewives tend to keep near the surface for the first
year or so in salt water, and while they are inshore when older. But
practically nothing is known of the depths to which they may descend if
(or when) they move offshore, there being no assurance that those taken
by trawlers were not picked up, while the trawls were being lowered or
hauled up again.”
The view that most of the alewives stay in coastal waters near the
fresh waters where they were hatched seems to be generally accepted,
though the proof is sometimes hard to find. They occur at various
depths in the sea as well as considerable distances offshore. They are
as likely to be found in deep as in shallow waters. I am told there
are recorded views that landlocked alewives winter in the deep waters
of Lake Ontario, and that shad, a close relative, have been found with
near-bottom animals in their stomachs. I also have the information that
during the summer of 1956 draggers in Passamaquoddy Bay were catching
a large quantity of alewives and that “it looked as if they were near
bottom.” Despite some having been picked up in weirs close to the shore
at various times during the year, they have not commonly, if at all,
been taken by draggers on the continental shelf except when approaching
the shore during the spawning season. In other words their oceanic
whereabouts have not been pinned down. All we can say, still presuming
stocks are local along the coast, is that mature alewives move in from
deeper waters offshore in the springtime, progressively later from
south to north.
What might seem to be a curious exception to the rule is a run in
St. John Harbor, New Brunswick, that occurs in the dead of winter.
Alewives are taken there in late January and early February; but I find
that this may not be so peculiar a phenomenon as it sounds. To begin
with, St. John Harbor is joined with the Bay of Fundy, and when the
fish move into it they are still at sea. The reasons for their move
at that time is not clear, but as there appears to be winter seining
of alewives farther down the coast along the shores of neighboring
Charlotte County, it is at least not unbelievable. The alewives then
start through the harbor and move up the St. John River to their
spawning grounds in the usual migratory months of April and May. I am
told by the St. Andrews Biological Station that: “The inflow of the St.
John River, particularly in April and May, dilutes the harbor water,
especially at the surface. Whether it attracts alewives to the harbor
or carries them there by deep circulation is a question.” This last
point brings up the problem, quite beyond my powers to understand, of
how the alewives orient themselves, how they find or are attracted to
the waters in which they spawn. We may know very little about their
life at sea, but their ability to find a particular stream or river may
be an even greater mystery, which is not lessened by the probability
that they have been there before. Whether as first-year spawners or
repeaters the alewives seem to come back to the streams from which they
migrated during the first summer and fall of their lives--when they
were not more than a few inches in length. Not consistently--a certain
amount of shifting between schools and change of locale may go on. Many
go astray like migrating birds, or men out of crowds perhaps, but in
general they do tend to return to their home streams. As a proof of
this, ponds that were empty of alewives have been stocked with them,
and the spawn returned as adults in three or four years’ time. This is
the “parent stream” theory. With salmon it has apparently been shown
to be a fact; although it is not so much the stream they were born
in to which they return as the stream in which they grew up. Salmon
eggs have been taken out of one river, moved to another, and then the
hatched fry were tagged. They migrated to the sea and returned to spawn
in the second river where they had their growth.
So what is to account for the alewives being able to find a “parent
stream” that might be only a few yards wide, out of all the great
stretches of the Atlantic coastline? They left it when they were no
more than one and two-fifths to four inches long, but somehow, growing
up in the sea, they must always have been oriented to that home base.
They may have stayed reasonably near by, but even so this ability is
hard to fathom.