Alewife

November 7, 2007

[eyl-wahyf] / n. / 1. The smelly, rotting dead fish that stared up at you at Lake Michigan beaches when you were growing up, but not so much anymore. The not-delicious Atlantic fish sneaked into the Great Lakes via the St. Lawrence Seaway and was first spotted in Lake Michigan in 1951. By the 1960s, spring alewife die-offs sent massive numbers of dead fish ashore, grossing out kids and sometimes requiring front-loaders to clean the beaches. The alewife population -- and the die-offs -- have been drastically reduced in recent years because of state-stocked salmon that eat the oily, bony fish, and the influx of invasive zebra mussels, which eat the algae that are at the base of the alewife food chain.