New Brunswick. Both anadromous and landlocked forms occur. The landlocked form is also called a sawbelly or mooneye (although this latter name is more commonly applied to Hiodon spp.) Adult alewife are caught during their spring spawning migration upstream by being scooped out of shallow, constricted areas using large dip nets. They are the preferred bait for the spring lobster fishery in Maine, and are eaten by humans, usually smoked. In the North American Great Lakes Alewife are known for their invasion of the Great Lakes by using the Welland Canal to bypass Niagara Falls. Alewife colonized the Great Lakes and became abundant mostly in Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. They reached their peak abundance from the 1950s through the 1980s. Alewife grew in number unchecked because the lakes lacked a top predator (lake trout were essentially wiped out around the same time by overfishing and the invasion of the sea lamprey). For a time, alewife, which often exhibit seasonal die-offs, washed up in windrows on the shorelines of the Great Lakes. Various species of Pacific salmon (first coho, and later the Chinook salmon) were introduced as predators. Though marginally successful, this led to the development of a salmon/alewife fishery popular with many sport anglers. In spite of such biological control methods, alewife remain implicated in the decline of many native Great Lakes species. It is also a common predator of numerous native and non-native zooplankton taxa (e.g. Bythotrephes longimanus, Leptodiaptomus ashlandi, Limnocalanus spp., Leptodiaptomus minutus, Leptodiaptomus sicilis, and Leptodora kindtii). Wells (1970) found that increases in population of alewife in the Great Lakes between 1954 and 1966 were associated with population declines in certain larger species of zooplankton, while an alewife die-off in 1967 was temporally related to population rebound in most of those species. Conservation Alewife populations have seen big declines throughout much of their range. Several threats have most likely contributed to their decline, including loss of habitat due to decreased access to spawning areas from the construction of dams and other impediments to migration, habitat degradation, fishing, and increased predation due to recovering striped bass populations. In response to the declining population trend for alewives, the states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Virginia, and North Carolina have instituted moratoria on taking and possession. In eastern Massachusetts, Alewife Brook flows through Arlington, Cambridge, and Somerville to the Mystic River. The brook gives its name to the Alewife