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Hello to all,

I want to apologize if I offended anyone who read my post about dead alliwives and my reply. I may have miss spoken regarding the Soo locks and I apologize for my mistake.

sincerely Trent Wagner 

No apologies needed. 

For all these years it was my understanding that the alliwives came into lake Michigan because of opening the Soo Locks in 1967 and they were dying because they were salt water fish. It's what I was told when I was 8, 9,10 and never had a reason to think otherwise, not until now.

I truly want to apologize to you and thank you for steering me in the right direction!

Thank you and God Bless

If it makes more sense, think of it this way. It's likely the alewives could have swam up the St. Lawrence River and been in Lake Ontario since shortly after the glaciers melted away. But the Lake was filled with lake trout, walleye, Atlantic salmon, muskies and other predators that kept their numbers at bay.  Probably back in 9000 BC, an alewife to a laker or Atlantic was like the cherry on a Sundae. Snarf, it's gone.  Once the canals and locks allowed access to the upper lakes, same thing. A few made the trip and the native predators snarfed them up as they arrived.  

But when the nylon gill nets hit the lakes after WWII, the commercial fishers soon depleted the predator base - virtually all the lakers, blue pike in Erie and many of the other walleyes and suddenly, the few alewives left hiding under the docks or where ever they were hanging out trying to avoid being gulped, were free to have alewife orgies and with no predators to speak of holding them back, in the decade or so from the 50s to the mid-60s their population overran the lakes with the resulting annual die offs washing ashore on the beaches around Lake Michigan (and I presume on the other lakes to some degree.)  

The end of the story was when Dr. Tanner put salmon in Lake Michigan, not to suppress the alewives, but to take advantage of the food base out there and create one of the greatest fisheries on Earth.  

Makes sense!