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alewife1

  (āl'wīf') pronunciation
n., pl. -wives (-wīvz').

A fish (Alosa pseudoharengus) closely related to the herrings and native to North American Atlantic waters and some inland lakes.

[Probably alteration (influenced by ALEWIFE2) of obsolete allowes, a type of shad, from French alose, shad, from Old French, from Late Latin alausa.]


ale·wife2 (āl'wīf') pronunciation
n., pl. -wives (-wīvz').

A woman who keeps an alehouse.


 
 

Alosa pseudoharengus

FAMILY

Clupeidae

TAXONOMY

Alosa pseudoharengus Wilson, 1811, Delaware River at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.

OTHER COMMON NAMES

English: Bigeye herring, branch herring, freshwater herring, golden shad, grayback, gray herring, green shad, kyack, mulhaden, sawbelly, spring herring, white herring; French: Alose gaspareau, gaspareau, gasparot, gasperot; German: Maifisch; Spanish: Alosa, pinchagua.

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS

Sea-run alewives reach a maximum length of 15 in (38.1 cm); landlocked alewives are typically around 6 in (15.2 cm). Small bodies. Strongly compressed laterally. Silvery bodies with grayish green backs. A row of scutes runs along the ventral edge of the belly. A single black spot is present behind the head.

DISTRIBUTION

Atlantic coast of North America, from the St. Lawrence River and Nova Scotia, Canada, to North Carolina. Numerous translocations of this species have resulted in the establishment of landlocked populations in many inland water bodies, including all of the Great Lakes.

HABITAT

Spends a large portion of its life at sea and migrates into inland freshwater streams for spawning. Landlocked populations live entirely in inland lakes or river systems.

BEHAVIOR

Forms schools in open water. Sea-run alewives migrate from the sea to freshwater streams to spawn. Populations in lakes migrate on a diel basis, moving inshore at night and retreating to deeper offshore waters during the day.

FEEDING ECOLOGY AND DIET

Feeds on zooplankton, primarily copepods, cladocerans, mysids, and ostracods. Inshore adults eat insect larvae as a large part of their diet.

REPRODUCTIVE BIOLOGY

Moves from the sea to rivers for spawning, with the timing of migration dependent on water temperature. In lakes, alewives move onto shallow beaches and into ponds to spawn. Males and females mature at one and two years of age, respectively. Females usually move to the spawning site before males. Groups of 2–3 fish spawn at night over gravel or rocky substrates. Eggs are broadcast by females and fertilized in the water column by males. Immediately after spawning, the eggs sink and adhere to the substrate. Upon hatching, the young remain at the spawning grounds until the late larval stage and then move slowly into deeper water or the sea.

CONSERVATION STATUS

Not listed by the IUCN, but overfishing, pollution, and impassable dams contribute to stock declines.

SIGNIFICANCE TO HUMANS

Harvested commercially and used as fresh, dried, or salted meat, bait for crab or lobsters, and sometimes as animal feed. Also serves as a forage base for other commercial or recreational fish stocks. In lakes, alewives can be a nuisance to humans. They may become so abundant that they clog industrial water intake pipes, and they often die off in massive events related to fluctuations in water temperature and dissolved oxygen.

 

Important North American food fish (Pomolobus, or Alosa, pseudoharengus) of the herring family. The alewife grows to about 1 ft (30 cm). Most populations spend several years along North America's Atlantic coast before ascending freshwater streams to spawn each spring in ponds or sluggish rivers.

For more information on alewife, visit Britannica.com.

 
WordNet: alewife
Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The noun has 2 meanings:

Meaning #1: flesh of shad-like fish abundant along the Atlantic coast or in coastal streams

Meaning #2: shad-like food fish that runs rivers to spawn; often salted or smoked; sometimes placed in genus Pomolobus
  Synonyms: Alosa pseudoharengus, Pomolobus pseudoharengus


 
Wikipedia: alewife
This article is about the fish. For the MBTA station, see Alewife (MBTA station). For the Massachusetts waterway, see Alewife Brook.
Alewife
Alosa_pseudoharengus.jpg
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Actinopterygii
Order: Clupeiformes
Family: Clupeidae
Genus: Alosa
Subgenus: (Pomolobus)
Species: A. (P.) pseudoharengus
Binomial name
Alosa (Pomolobus) pseudoharengus
(Wilson, 1811)

The alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus) is a species of small shad. There are anadromous and landlocked forms. The landlocked form is also called a sawbelly or mooneye (although this latter name is more commonly applied to Hiodon spp.). The front of the body is deep and larger than other fish found in the same waters, and its common name is said to come from comparison with a corpulent female tavernkeeper ("ale-wife").[1] In Atlantic Canada it is known as the gaspereau. More locally, in southwestern Nova Scotia it is called a kiack (or kyack).[2] This fish has, in the past, been used as a baitfish for the lobster fishing industry. It is also used for human consumption, usually smoked. It is caught (during its migration up stream) using large "dip" nets to scoop the fish out of shallow, constricted areas on its migratory streams and rivers. It is one of the "typical" North American shads of the subgenus Pomolobus.(Faria et al. 2006)



In the North American Great Lakes

Alewives are perhaps best known for their invasion of the Great Lakes by using the Welland Canal to bypass Niagara Falls. Alewives colonized the Great Lakes and became abundant mostly in lakes Erie, Huron and Michigan. They reached their peak abundance by the 1950s and 1960s. Alewives grew in number unchecked because of the lack of a top predator in the lakes (lake trout were essentially wiped out around the same time by overfishing and the invasion of the exotic sea lamprey). For a time, alewives, which often exhibit seasonal die offs, washed up in windrows on the shorelines of the Great Lakes. Their control was the impetus for the introduction of various Pacific Salmon species (first coho, and later the chinook salmon) to act as predators on them. This caused the development of a salmon/alewife fish community, popular with many sport anglers. Alewives, however, have been implicated in the decline of many native Great Lakes species through competition and predation.

References

  • Faria, R.; Weiss, S. & Alexandrino, P. (2006): A molecular phylogenetic perspective on the evolutionary history of Alosa spp. (Clupeidae). Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 40(1): 298–304. doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2006.02.008 (HTML abstract)

Footnotes

  1. ^ Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition
  2. ^ Nova Scotia Fisheries: Alewife

 
 

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Copyrights:

Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Animal Encyclopedia. Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia. Copyright © 2005 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
WordNet. WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Alewife" Read more

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