The Santuit River, also known as the Cotuit River, is a 2.3-mile-long (3.7 km) [1] river on the border between Mashpee and Cotuit, Massachusetts on Cape Cod.
Mashpee is a town in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, United States, on Cape Cod. The population was 14,006 as of 2010. It is the site of the headquarters and most members of the federally recognized Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, one of two Wampanoag.
Cotuit is one of the villages of the Town of Barnstable on Cape Cod in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, United States. Located on a peninsula on the south side of Barnstable about midway between Falmouth and Hyannis, Cotuit is bounded by the Santuit River to the west on the Mashpee town line, the villages of Marstons Mills to the north and Osterville to the east, and Nantucket Sound to the south. Cotuit is primarily residential with several small beaches including Ropes Beach, Riley's Beach, The Loop Beach and Oregon Beach.
Cape Cod is a geographic cape extending into the Atlantic Ocean from the southeastern corner of mainland Massachusetts, in the northeastern United States. Its historic, maritime character and ample beaches attract heavy tourism during the summer months.
The river flows southwards from the southern end of Santuit Pond into Popponesset Bay (also known as Shoestring Bay) on the south shore of Cape Cod.
The river was a vigorous herring/alewife run and has been reputed to hold sea-run brown trout. It was alleged that overpumping by an adjacent golf course caused the river to run dry in the early 1990s but that charge was denied.[ citation needed ]
Herring are forage fish, mostly belonging to the family Clupeidae.
The alewife is an anadromous species of herring found in North America. It is one of the "typical" North American shads, attributed to the subgenus Pomolobus of the genus Alosa. As an adult it is a marine species found in the northern West Atlantic Ocean, moving into estuaries before swimming upstream to breed in freshwater habitats, but some populations live entirely in fresh water. It is best known for its invasion of the Great Lakes by using the Welland Canal to bypass Niagara Falls. Here, its population surged, peaking between the 1950s and 1980s to the detriment of many native species of fish. In an effort to control them biologically, Pacific salmon were introduced, only partially successfully. As a marine fish, the alewife is a US National Marine Fisheries Service "Species of Concern".
The brown trout is a European species of salmonid fish that has been widely introduced into suitable environments globally. It includes both purely freshwater populations, referred to as the riverine ecotype, Salmo trutta morpha fario, and a lacustrine ecotype, S. trutta morpha lacustris, also called the lake trout, as well as anadromous forms known as the sea trout, S. trutta morpha trutta. The latter migrates to the oceans for much of its life and returns to fresh water only to spawn. Sea trout in the Ireland and Britain have many regional names: sewin in Wales, finnock in Scotland, peal in the West Country, mort in North West England, and white trout in Ireland.
