A Well Seasoned Story

By Chris Chiller

Unless you are an avid angler, you might find stories about fish a bit off-putting but this is the story of a murder of a particular fish and the battle to keep their cousins viable. But let’s start at the beginning of the discovery of the Northeast. 

In 1614, Adrian Block sailed up Long Island Sound and into the Connecticut River. He was only 74 miles by straight line from the mouth of the Hudson River, the southernmost river system habitat of the Atlantic salmon before colonization. Historical accounts suggest that at the time of Block’s voyage, the Atlantic salmon run numbered in the tens of thousands just in the Connecticut River. It was probably the largest salmon habitat on the East Coast. But you can’t legally fish for salmon in the Connecticut River in 2026. What? Why? What happened?  

The Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar, is a 28-30-inch fish that runs 25-35-pounds. They are known as the Leaper or the King of Fish. These fish have a complicated life cycle. They hatch inside a nest, called a redd, prepared by their mother. The small juveniles are called alevins in the nest. As they grow the tiny fish, now called fry, will live in shallow parts of streams and become 2-3-inch parr, finally transforming into silver smolts at about 6 inches long. They begin leaving the shallow freshwater streams where they were hatched, migrating toward the ocean. Here is where nature took a dramatic twist. 

The cells in their gills change their chemical balance so that the smolts can tolerate salt water to extract oxygen. It is as amazing biologically as the chrysalis releasing a butterfly. The smolts leave their rivers in the spring and North American Atlantic salmon spend a year or two off the west coast of Greenland, eating invertebrates and smaller fish and growing to full adult size. After four years, the fish return to the exact river of their origin in the fall, to begin the reproductive cycle over again and must struggle upstream against storm water, shallow culverts, and somehow over the remaining dams in their path to reach their preferred spawning stream. Unlike their West Coast cousins, Atlantic salmon do not necessarily die after spawning, and can return a second time to spawn. Amazing! What a fish!

These are tough creatures who survive in the open ocean and return to reproduce, but by 1814 Atlantic salmon in the Connecticut River were gone, their distinct DNA lost. While we have become sadly familiar with species full extinction caused by industrial chemical dumping or over exposure to human or animal waste, what happened to the fish was the result of an industrial revolution in the landscape of New England. 

Here, there is another sad chapter in the book of unintended consequences. While no one set out to eliminate an important food and sport fish, the net effect could not have been more efficient if they had deliberately done it. In the early 1700s, colonial entrepreneurs realized that the wide rivers near the shore were fed by smaller tributaries coming down from sharp ridges. The elevation drop with plenty of upstream rain made mill ponds above dams the power source of the industry. Connecticut was soon dotted with dams used to produce cotton and silk cloth or thread, each a locked door to fish desperate to spawn. There are still the remains of mills that grew up out of the water power available, each a marker of one less path for salmon trying to get upstream.

It is a grim reality. In 1798 a 16-foot-tall dam was built in Hadley Falls, Mass., which prevented the fish from reaching any upstream tributaries. Because the fish needed shallow cold water to spawn, they needed access to the upstream tributaries. It was check and mate for the salmon! Blocked from their spawning areas, the Connecticut River Atlantic salmon didn’t just decline, they suffered what biologists term extirpation (local extinction). Because the population was unique to the  fish who spawned in the river drainage, this was the erasure of a distinct DNA. The same fate awaited the salmon farther up the coast into Rhode Island, Massachusetts and southern Maine. 

Efforts to modify dams with fish ways which tried to mimic natural streams or other bypass mechanisms got underway in the 1870s and by the late 1950s were somewhat successful. The implementation of fish lifts and ladders in the mid twentieth century were more effective and rewarded the efforts of engineers and money spent to put them in place. And they looked less goofy than fish escalators!

Since the Admiral Inn Mysteries series lives in Maine, we should focus on the situation where the story is set. The Downeast Salmon Federation offers the following blunt assessment, “Currently, the only remaining wild populations of the U.S. Atlantic salmon are found in rivers in central and eastern Maine, including the Dennys, East Machias, Machias, Pleasant, Narraguagus, Cove Brook, Sheepscot, and Ducktrap rivers. These remaining populations comprise the Gulf of Maine distinct population segment (DPS), which was listed under the Endangered Species Act in 2000 and is genetically distinct from hatchery origin stock.”

Where are we currently? Is this just one more depressing story of ecological disaster? Not necessarily. Downeast Salmon Federation tells us that the natural runs of the Leapers in Maine was over 100,000 in 1830 and has lately been reduced to a count of just 1,517 in 2024. Of these, 86% went into the Penobscot river drainage, and an estimated 91% were hatchery fish. Small numbers, but much greater than zero and a minor miracle. The trendline seems to be slowly going up. 

Why so few? This might seem as fictional as The Groom in the Grave but the life cycle of the salmon was threatened by an incidental discovery by the US Navy. In 1963 the nuclear submarine Nautilus solved a marine mystery as the sub cruised through the Northwest Atlantic looking for nothing in particular but on their way to somewhere probably classified. Nautilus observed and reported concentrations of Atlantic salmon off Greenland’s west coast.

The report triggered a boom in commercial gill-net fishing during the mid-to-late 60s, seriously depleting the salmon who could return at a time when the federal government and states were struggling to reunite the fish with their preferred habitat. 

Finally, in Canada in the 1990s, commercial fishing of Atlantic salmon was fully phased out, followed by a concerted effort by a consortium of fishing industry organizations, non-profits and various interested governments to purchase all salmon fishing permits not held by Greenland’s and Canada’s Indigenous populations. Greenland’s west coast was effectively closed to commercial fishing in 2002.

In 2024, thanks to hatchery fish, the estimated run for Canada and the United States was 434,700 fish total. That was down a bit from 2023 but something of a success story so far. That number includes significant wild fish returning, which further highlights the struggle to keep native runs in Maine. There is still work to be done, but curtailment of industrial and agricultural concentrated runoffs are slowly helping rebuild the salmon stock. Maine’s fish hatcheries are winning small victories in the runs remaining viable and we ought to take a moment to acknowledge their valiant efforts.

Given the tenuous existence of the Atlantic salmon, the plot point in A Groom in the Grave which turns on finding a smolt in a river not previously known to host them would create quite a stir. It would disrupt plans for development adjacent to the river mouth, while triggering all manner of activity upstream to make sure the fictional river is suitable for the fictional fish. The scrutiny would involve anything that could be a factor, including a close look at the town’s main employer, the lumber mill. Any runoff that might make its way to the watershed of the river would be carefully examined. This attracted the attention of the series villain because of the threat to his interest in the mill and is just the sort of chaos the Admiral Inn characters would wander into. 

But that’s enough of a spoiler and I have no wish to come between you and your enjoyment of the mystery. Those are the Facts of Fiction.