BENTON – Alewives are on pace for a record run in Benton, whose residents will celebrate their relationship with the migratory fish Saturday during the second Benton Alewife Festival.

Selectman Antoine Morin, the festival's organizer, said this year's run is significant because most of the spawning fish hatched from eggs laid in 2009, when the state restored Benton's traditional harvesting rights.

"It's kind of like Nemo," Morin said, referring to the animated movie in which a fish makes an extended journey to rejoin his father. "They've returned home."

For the first three years of their lives, the fish tend to remain at sea. They return to the place of their birth to spawn when they are four years old.

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