Merrymeeting Bay - Cathance River Education Alliance

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Merrymeeting Bay
Smelt (Genus osmeridae)
Its water is fresh; its tides
“In winter, the ice is as hard and solid underfoot as a
parking lot, but beneath it is a watery world teeming
with voracious life. In January, the line twitches and
you are trapping smelt out onto the floor for all you
are worth. The only fish that could account for the
population of seals living in the bay late in the year,
smelt require a swift current, well oxygenated water,
and an unsilted bottom to do the business of life.”
average from five to six
feet in range. Its human
history is rich but not
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obvious — its setting
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remains primarily pastoral.
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Its natural history, less rich
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than formerly, is still rich
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by comparison to most
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other places. Its future
To most people, snapping turtles are not
beautiful. Biologically they are remarkable,
having evolved to present form 60-100
million years ago. They are predators that
eat a variety of animals and plants, and are
thought to live longer than the average
human. They can grow to be quite large,
averaging somewhere between 8 and 40
pounds. The world record for the largest
wild snapping turtle is for one caught in
Massachusetts that weighed 76 pounds.
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is ours.
Snapping Turtles (Chelydra serpentina)
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American Eels (Anguilla rostrata)
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Rivers do not normally like to
share deltas. The confluence of
the Androscoggin and the
Kennebec in Merrymeeting Bay
is one of four places on earth
where such a thing happens; the
other three are in Iraq,
Bangladesh, and California’s
Central Valley.
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—Franklin Burroughs
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Sponsored by State Farm Insurance and The Merrymeeting Bay Trust All photographs © Heather Perry 2008
Text by Franklin Burroughs Maps by Sheepscot Valley Conservation Association GIS Support Center Design by Jana DeWitt Design
Atlantic Ocean
Produced by Cathance River Education Alliance
Kennebec River
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Its Abenaki name was
Quabcook—Duck watering place.
From late September until
freeze-up, you can still see why.
Six rivers converge to form
Merrymeeting Bay, an
inland body of fresh and
brackish tidal waters.
Together, the Kennebec,
Androscoggin, Cathance,
Abagadasset, Muddy and
Eastern Rivers drain nearly
forty percent of Maine,
contributing an average
of six billion gallons of
water to the Gulf of
Maine each day.
The American eel is a catadramous fish –
it spends most of its life in fresh water but
begins and ends its life in the massive gyre of
the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic. In larval
form (called leptocephalli), eels spin off from
the Sargasso to the Eastern Americas and
Western Europe. Once they arrive at the
mouths of rivers, they begin a metamorphosis
that continues as they head up stream.
Eventually they find a muddy hole to live in
for up to 20 years before returning to sea to
spawn and die.