Tim Smith

I think the current status is "threatened". There has been a tug of war over that recently...because of course, there's no global warming and the fact that the southern-most populations are falling apart is no indication they're in any danger at all. Al, it looks to me like the current bill is a Trojan horse using sportsmen to get federal lands almost universally open for mineral extraction. Some mining and drilling is necessary. A free for all is not.

http://rivermud.blogspot.com/2012/04/sportsmens-heritage-act-laws-with-cool.html A friend of mine blogged about this recently. He was vastly nicer than I would have been.

They do use the wild fish at the hatchery, but remember the parr are imprinting on the hatchery, not the watershed upstream. Fish in this system are in one tight run and have to pass into fresh water to get to the hatchery. Some of them may be strays but they are there to spawn. I do think I'm going to back off this specific point, though. Thinking about some of these issues, you may be right that there are other issues at play here in this system. I should probably cut these specific guys some slack. However, I do stand behind my general perception that there is a large group in the west and elsewhere who don't really see wild fish as being any different than hatchery fish and who see the efforts to conserve spawning habitat as a bother.

You're correct that these are not a native run of Kings. The ones without the adipose clip are probably returns from the few hatchery fish they allow to pass the wier and spawn in the river. However, there are no reservoirs on the system (I'm not going to name it because it's not fair to put a specific biologist's name in public) and the stated reason to kill off the wild fish is to keep a native run from starting. "Endangered Species Act" issues. A side issue might be that they are afraid the hatchery will get shut down if local interests are forced to reduce their erosion/pollution for the sake of the fish. It's pretty clear they're protecting the hatchery. Fishing out those lake trout sounds like a nice vacation indeed.

I don't know enough about harvest rates or reproduction rates to know if this would work. If it could work, it would be worth a try.

That might be a good idea as long as you're not taking piglets to release at the same time. I'm willing to live with the exotics we have, but I don't see the wisdom in adding more or giving them the same status as native fish.

We both know that depends...or at least that's my opinion. DNRs are a mixed bag and most of them are balancing a wide variety of competing political demands. I know of at least one salmon run in Washington where wild returning kings that still have the adipose fin are intentionally being culled at the hatchery. The biologist at that facility specifically stated they were being removed to keep them from going upstream and establishing a run. That's great for job security at the hatchery and it probably pleases a lot of polluters who would otherwise need to clean up their act, but that shows a complete disregard for sustainability. Missouri's DNR has more political insulation than most, but there are plenty of places where congressman Billy Bob can get his local lake stocked however he likes it, sustainability or no. Beyond that, over the last 30 years there has been a huge debate around the notion of hatcheries and exotics and their role and the "science" and level of caution being used out there varies tremendously depending on how people have positioned themselves politically within their agency (and other factors). There are places like that yes. But a native population in a functioning system doesn't have problems reproducing and they do it far cheaper. If you have a large amount of harvest with a put and take fishery, some stocking might be warranted, but those should be the exceptions rather than the rule. I don't have a problem with urban trout programs that pay their own way through trout stamps. I don't really think those are especially good fisheries, but they're ok for kids and some people really like them. The stock isn't going anywhere and for now I can't see what harm they're doing. I'm not going to try to stop them. It's when stocking programs start cutting into the DNR budget and priorities where the problems start. If you know introducing new species (or genetic strains) could have major effects and you proceed to stock anyway, they are doubly to blame. Blame them first for taking the risk and blame them second for not doing good enough science to know what was coming. Good people take responsibility for their mistakes. I couldn't disagree more with your statement here. We also part ways pretty clearly here. I feel this and the next bit crosses the line into cavalier. You and Wayne (and a pretty big majority of anglers as far as I can tell) want to decide what's good based on short term economic judgments. A native steelhead river is a fisheries wasteland, Wayne. Really?? Why sell out? I've watched good conservation organizations pass up huge opportunities to "go along and get along" and to promote their popularity at the cost of their ethics. You can have it. I'm not going there. Stocking exotics has risks (sometimes BIG risks) and people need to know them. Then that weekend warrior needs to grow up, be a responsible person and take responsibility for the effects of their actions. Molly-coddling that attitude here doesn't do anyone anywhere any good. You're free to support whatever position you like. We probably agree that some principles apply some places that don't apply others. We probably don't agree about how wise it is to promote stocking exotics in general. In general we don't know enough about genetics and diseases and parasites to know when we're doing harm (remember whirling disease?). Every time we figure out what we did wrong last time something new comes along that we didn't anticipate. Why not just do well with what we have? Why not use the voice you have to support a conservative approach that uses stocking less and avoids building state-sponsored fisheries for things with the potential to do harm Alright. So ask yourself...what's the bigger pay off for fisheries in Missouri...a kokanee salmon program in a couple of reservoirs, that a handful of people will manage to catch and will probably fail as a fishery...or 4 additional Conservation Officers?

As well they should, if they can. West coast trout belong in west coast rivers.

It's inevitable. Every Asian carp you ever saw is here because of someone's failed biosecurity policy. Aquaculture has never show any ability to keep their stock out of the waters around them.

Having made my living as a scientist for the last 22 years, I'd have to agree that science is not an evil demon. And there are probably times it makes sense to stock things and we probably do need reservoirs to take care of our needs for water and recreation (although certainly we have more than enough by now). But as you seem to recognize, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. The "best science possible" would avoid the mistakes of the past. I was working at UC Davis one day when I met a geneticist sulking under a tree on the quad (pretty close to the spot where those "Occupy" students were recently maced by the Davis Police Department). He was mad because the bioethics committee didn't let him take a gene for scorpion venom into a commercial plant variety. All I can say is "Way to go bioethics committee!" Letting these gene guys do whatever they want is a recipie for disaster. Stocking (can be but isn't always) as bad. Nature took a long time to build and it's far more complicated than anything man ever did. In general, we don't know the long term implications of what we're doing. We should be more conservative rather than less conservative, especially on recreational issues. I'd like to see the trend to move toward depending less on stocking and trying hard to build sustainable fisheries from natural reproduction. Right now, the knee jerk reaction is exactly the opposite. Not enough fish? Stock more. Bored with what you normally catch? Throw in something new for shucks and giggles. What was one of the major initiatives to recovery from the Gulf oil spill? Throw stocked fish back into the polluted estuaries. Awful. The model of throwing stocked fish from anywhere and everywhere into broken ecosystems and sometimes breaking them even more is the one we inherited but it's one we need to move beyond. There are good, viable smallmouth fisheries nestled into metropolitan Chicago rivers that are rarely stocked. Go to the ISA web page and look at the pigs they catch right out of the shadow of the skyscrapers. Why not market fisheries like that? We can do this.

I think anglers have a heck of a lot of power. Illinois has a no creel spawning season for smallmouth specifically because of the Smallmouth Alliance. There's vastly better EPA protection on bodies of water that support fisheries and that's because of "us"...or "you" or however you want to chose up sides. "Fishable waters" is the standard of the Clean Water Act. Whether we know it or not, we are heart and soul of aquatic conservation in North America. When "we" anglers (and yes, I've been on both sides of the fence but I'm a private consultant now so I'm more in the angler camp than the DNR camp) ask for things, we often get them. I'm just hoping we don't regret it when we get what we ask for.

You're right the brook trout are the same as the John Daly smallies. I'm not saying don't fish for exotics but I am saying don't support that fishery. I'd fish John Daly for smallies and I'd probably enjoy it. But I'd be very sure no one made a buck off me when I did and I'd be much more likely to creel any exotics I caught there.I target exotics a big percentage of the time I fish specifically to keep pressure off the natives. But I don't want more exotics back in those streams. If possible, I want greenback and cutthroat and the natives brook trout replaced. I want native steelhead and salmon in the John Daly. The difference comes (as it has in the John Daly and other systems) when the DNRs and business interests line up behind the exotics and try to spread them around even more. Why not add economic and environmental sustainability to your criteria for size and numbers?

Guilty. I do take exotics seriously. Fishing is supposed to be fun. And responsible. Beyond the joking, it's pretty clear a huge number of anglers don't think more about stocking exotics beyond what makes them happy in the short term. Watching this process from the side of a DNR, a lot of the public feedback they get is pressure to stock more and more and more (not to cut the DNR any slack either because they love their bread and circus stocking programs for all the love...and government jobs...it buys them). But the bottom line is that shuffling exotics around is like playing Russian roulette. You never know when one of them is going to go off. I take the northern snakeheads some knucklehead stocked in Arkansas seriously. I take Burmese pythons eating their way through South Florida seriously. Eurasian milfoil. Zebra mussels. Asian carp. Atlantic lamprey. All serious multi-million/billion dollar long term ecological disasters. I take the notion serious that we can slice and dice genes to get whatever frankenfish we want that suits our latest idea of "fun". I take the extinction of native species in the name of " fun", very very seriously... ...because right now the focus on short term gratification is the major barrier between sport fishers their rightful role as effective populist guardians of the rivers and lakes we love. We've done good work with the pollution issues, but we're a part of the problem where exotics are concerned. Sorry.

And that's exactly the problem. You don't have anywhere near the information or insight you need to know the downsides. And almost no one does until you're looking at the thing in hindsight. And oneshot, you might like your carp, but how many quality buffalo, bass and catfish did you lose to scrape in those sewer bass (which, if they are like most carp in the Midwest aren't safe to eat in quantity).

I've worked in some of the labs looking at carp effects and the science is pretty clear that carp are responsible for a huge percentage of the cloudiness in our modern waters (in soft bottomed systems such as in most of Illinois). If you want to defend them ecologically, your best best is to point out that by re-suspending all that muck it screens out the light lowers the amount of algae and the algae blooms. The rest of the story is pretty miserable. In a clean system with low nutrients they probably don't do much damage because their numbers never get that high. But where they do become abundant they reduce plant growth and habitat for juvenile sportfish. When their populations explode in lakes they turn them into mud holes. We can only speculate how much they might have affected native suckers which are generally in decline. From the narrow perspective of having something else to fish for, carp might be excusable. In terms of their impact on the overall fishery (which is what really matters) they were a huge mistake.

It's fine to want numbers and size but a definition of "world class" based only on numbers cuts the heart out of fishing. All fish are not the same and all smallmouth are not the same. Is fishing for a smallmouth out of an aquarium the same as fishing for them from a native population? No. Is fishing for a smallmouth population that is contributing to the decline of a valuable native fishery the same as fishing in a smallmouth populations millions of years old that is stable and coadapted with the organisms around it? No. Regardless of what other problems western salmonids have, smallmouth are definitely one of them. I've combed through the literature and what I see is roughly a 10% hit (just from smallmouth and not including other exotics like walleye). Compare that to the seals (which elicit screams of bloody murder simply because you can see them hunting) which generally take less than 1% of the returning run and you get a feel for how skewed perceptions are. Native Missouri smallmouth were here before we were and if we don't screw everything up, they'll be here after we're gone, along with the other fisheries and species to which they've adapted. Missouri smallmouth are infinitely better than any thing hauled in a bucket and dumped as an exotic invader to pull on somebody's pole.

Here in Colorado they're now saying that the dry March with hard winds have expanded last year's drought. One of my favorite brook trout creeks from last summer is on the edge of a large wildfire and yesterday I could barely see the Front Range from downtown Denver the smoke was so bad. We're below average for snow pack too so if you're headed this way this summer get ready for low water and plan your wildfire escape routes ahead of time.

John Day smallmouth fat on native salmon already struggling to survive? That's a world class prostitute, not a world class fishery. The Missouri smallmouth fishery is infinitely better.

Thanks, Al. Having tried hard to keep peacock bass out of a place that REALLY doesn't need them, I have less of a sense of humor about that than I probably should. I think what a lot of people don't realize is that stocking exotics is often a PERMANENT decision. You often can't undo it and often the results (such as with common carp) hurt the species we already have. Making decisions about what what fish to put where based on what you'd like to catch close to home or how much money you might make off them in the short term is probably the worst way possible to manage a resource.

Love the topic. To me a big part of enjoying fishing is taking what nature gives and taking that opportunity to deepen my knowledge about nature. Chief's comments about learning the system resonate with me. I spent years catching lots of small smallmouth in Illinois until I spent some time talking to anglers in the Illinois Smallmouth Alliance and started finding bigger fish (in the same systems I had been fishing). Other times I've shown up to the river into an unexpected white bass run or cluster of walleyes and had a blast catching those... ...or the day I found those luminescent bugs along the bank on the paddle home at dusk... ....or the day I found the bobcat skull...or the cool fossil..or the arrowhead....or the mudpuppy. What fishing gives beyond all that is that moment when everything clicks and when you make that perfect cast into the dead water behind the current seam and the boulder or snag and you KNOW the strike is coming and you're right. To me that's the affirmation that you have the keys to the place...that you are at home. That you belong.

You seem to be dead on with your conservation positions, all, but that peacock bass comment is pretty disappointing, Al. Large engulfing predators tend to have big impacts on native fauna. It's bad enough Peakcock bass are in Florida and people trying to stuff them into Belize...where hopefully the groundwater-fed rivers will make it too cold for them to do well. What fish would I like to see stocked? Ideally, none. The best fisheries run without stocking, although I realize it's probably not possible to do this in most cases that is the best economic and ecological ideal. If you want to catch lake trout, go north where they're native.

Exactly. I've watched the bounty/snakehead issue for a while and have had concerns and hopes on either side. It's not clear that there will be enough harvest to keep the biomass of snakeheads or other problem species down or if those will just be replaced with more, smaller fish. Bounties could work, but will they? Robert Rice at Carb Busters has been pushing for bounties for carp and has some results to show for it here and there. Some of the bounty programs for lionfish in the Caribbean don't seem to have done any harm (although there's little evidence they've helped much either). I don't think the (misguided) pikeminnow bounty in the Pacific Northwest ever showed any useful results. Maybe it's worth a try. I doubt many people in Maryland have their hopes very high. And as OB mentions, you have to worry that as people begin to enjoy taking out snakeheads there will be attempts to restock the population. Unfortunately, there seems to be an unlimited number of sportsmen (and women) willing to foster a fishery that damages other fisheries and the environment around it. I've found at least one group online so enthusiastic about snakeheads that they're calling for their management and stocking. They seem to have money and membes...certainly enough members to keep snakeheads in the water on the sly if that's what they want. What do you do with people like that? There is a lot of noise (some of it mine) about how important and helpful sportsman-driven conservation can be. On finer points like this, I'm back to reassessing if this is actually true. For too many people, it's all about having something (anything) pulling on their pole without much thought for anything else. The level of selfishness and ignorance out there is pretty high.

In the case of loons the answer is definitely "yes" it will make a difference (although can see Ham's point that there might be reason to believe the improvement will be less from lead reduction in the Ozarks than for instance in Minnesota where they are resident). In soft bottomed systems, things on the bottom are gradually covered over time. Smaller, heavier items will gradually sort themselves toward the bottom. Over a period of years and decades the amount of lead exposed on the substrate will decrease. A sizeable percentage of mortalities in loons in those areas comes from lead (check the data in the link).

Loons pass through Arkansas/Missouri and feed in the reservoirs. So any time they're in the lakes taking hooked fish they're being exposed. You're probably right that the effect is less likely/common since they aren't resident in the Ozarks they way they are in Washington. Cormorants and grebes are other fish-eating bird species this might affect as well. I've been buying lead-less split shot and skinkers for a while. Since loons are pretty common here in Colorado pretty often I'll extend that to other baits as well...although of late that has been mostly flies.

http://www.tufts.edu/vet/loons/ I hadn't noticed this research until now. Up to this point I had taken the rhetoric that there was "no proof" of any negative effects of lead fishing tackle at face value. Apparently that was a mistake. This looks pretty conclusive that lead tackle is a serious problem for loons.