Tim Smith

National Wildlife Foundation tallies the cuts here on this site. Too much? Not enough? How did we do?

You may agree with them, but it's pretty likely the law doesn't. I doubt the Texas thing is an issue. Cell phones cross area codes all the time and my own area code doesn't match my phone number. If he is from Texas and he's going to break the law anyway, he's probably better off paying someone in Missouri to do it than bringing shad in from there. God knows what would come in with them. The real problem is PAYING for fish. If someone does you a favor, hand him a beer or a venison steak or whatever, but don't PAY him (although barter is probably technically not legal either but no one is ever going to bother you about that). Unregulated markets are what destroy wildlife. It's been borne out a thousand times over. That's why wild fish markets are regulated. That's why the commercial fishermen report their catch, so the state can keep track of what's being caught and reduce take if necessary. And that's why I posted. Once money is involved, pretty soon it's not a throw net, it's a gill net and it's not shad it's crappie or walleye. Nickle and dime stuff like this doesn't really matter, but it's a bad idea to wink at too much of it. Disrespect for the law has gotten pretty fashionable these days, but you do too much of that in your home waters and you'll see the differences quickly.

I was expecting a post like this to pop up here. Sure, shad don't matter, but obeying the law does matter and there are good reasons the law creates a firewall between the free market and wild fish stocks. More comes up in those nets than shad and more than one person is reading this thread. If you've gotta pay cash for bait, go through the proper channels (and I do think if it's fresh shad you need it's a commercial fisherman you want not a bait shop owner). Commercial fishers do due dilligence to pay for their gear tags and and report their catch and they deserve the business.

Pretty sure you're right. The semantics won't help you much here if MDC decides to follow up. If you've gotta pay, call up a commercial fisherman. It's legal for them.

Quite right. Sorry to pester you. You should check OB's comment about cash payment for wild fish though. He's probably right that it's not legal without a commercial license.

How does one catch "buckets" of shad without a boat shocker or a very large seine net?

Agreed. Maybe the current budget crisis will force congress to get serious. Hopefully CRP won't go under the ax.

I think both topics are worthwhile, Wayne. From a conservation perspective I think the primary value would be in determining how to keep the value of CRP (or CReP) and similar incentives(on their merits) while shedding the less desirable parts of the bill. Clearly you're right that the overall size of the government has to decline. I guess my concern would be that the conservation end of the Farm Bill would have less support in congress because farmers make less money from it than direct subsidies and they won't reward their legislators for keeping CRP and dumping the goofy stuff. Maybe CRP has a chance because it's small compared to the other parts of the bill and if the value of the conservation efforts were better known and more widely supported it might fare well outside the farming districts? I see you added this later, Wayne. It doesn't logically follow. CRP is designed to prevent farmers from bearing conservation costs. Of course I want to help farmers engage in conservation without taking a loss if possible. ...and this part is a brutal reality of farming world-wide. Commodities come with risk, probably more than most businesses, but that is the nature of the market. The US farmer gets quite a bit of value for his effort and has a much higher standard of living compared to most farmers world-wide. If the real market were in play, that would probably not be true. Propping up prices might be good humanism (or Christianity or Socialism or whatever moral code you use), but it's bad capitalism. It would be nice to see a little less schizophrenia over market/moral issues like these. Everyone wants government largess for themselves, but it's just evil soviet-style socialism when anyone else gets it.

You can read the methodology on pages 4 and 5 of the report. They're measuring impairments by matching up known species distributions that reflect many years of data from normal sampling efforts with satellite data for land use types. I'm going to assume you know it's impossible (and unnecessary and unethical) to shock every mile of stream. It's pretty much impossible to do this better with the resources that are available.

So how is it a disaster if each individual part of the Farm Bill is evaluated for it's contribution? How is there a connection between passing good legislation and passing the Farm Bill as a block?

The Farm Bill as a whole is definitely a pork farm. But the parts that promote conservation work are "good" pork. They change the economic landscape to make it easier to contribute to the public good by conserving and protecting habitat. Farmers use it for the same reasons they hypocritically access completely ridiculous economic incentives...it adds to (or at least doesn't badly hurt) their bottom line. These are the kinds of government functions that make sense. It's very difficult for the private sector to do this kind of work (although the WWF ecocertifications accomplish some of the same things). If it doesn't get done here it won't get done. You can bet the budget hawks won't touch the pork in the Farm Bill though, because like that reptile who tried to take down the MDC, the ag industry is their constituency.

They're unable to post about Bull Shoals walleye because there are posts about rhinos on the conservation forum?

Well said as always, Al. I've never been to Africa and probably won't be able to afford to go any time soon. But I am amazed by these people and their commitment. What you don't get in the story above is that these patrols protecting the rhinos are often up against paramilitary poaching groups armed with automatic weapons. They are literally at war to save the last few rhinos in the world.

Thanks, Buzz. I was inspired too.

Huber, the link isn't working. If it's about the managed elephant hunts, that would be a pretty good topic.

It's hard to imagine the level of risk these people have faced to do what they've done to save rhinos. Kind of puts things into perspective. From the AFS message board...

You might be surprised how rare the ethic of catch and release is world-wide. We're barely even a majority in the US. Many foreign cultures look at it as something weird and unnatural. I watched the video a couple of times and thought I might have seen a bit of ich/fungus on one of the bass fins. If they have that, they have probably been in culture. Not sure that's what I saw though.

These markets are a major vector for snakehead introductions too. How much were they charging? Oh. There it is. 8.00. That's about the price they would cost from a fish farmer so they're not retailing them. And judging by the density in the tank and the one rolling on its side they don't have restocking in mind.

There's probably not a huge advantage of stripers over wipers to control shad, but the wipers have known limitations. Wipers don't live very long and they can't take adult fish. They even pass up larger juvenile shad and it's not clear they're up to the job in most places (although striped bass might not be adequate either since they don't grow rapidly). If you can stock either of them at higher densities, they'll make a bigger dent. If you want the science here's an evaluation of wipers from Ohio. Potential regulation of age-0 gizzard shad by hybrid striped bass in Ohio reservoirs Author(s): Dettmers JM, Stein RA, Lewis EM Source: TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN FISHERIES SOCIETY Volume: 127 Issue: 1 Pages: 84-94 Published: JAN 1998 Times Cited: 10 References: 53 Citation Map Abstract: Piscivores can control prey populations in north temperate lakes, leading to increased zooplankton and reduced phytoplankton. In reservoirs with gizzard shad Dorosoma cepedianum, an omnivorous planktivore, this cascade occurs with lower probability because while this fish is shorter than 60 mm in total length (TL) it readily consumes zooplankton but also switches to phytoplankton and detritus. Prospects for gizzard shad control probably hinge on piscivore consumption of age-0 individuals. Hence, we quantified capture efficiency of hybrids of striped bass Morone saxatilis X white bass M. chrysops (small: 190-250 mm, TL; large: 310-360 mm, TL) 500-L aquarium. Small hybrid striped bass selected 40-mm gizzard shad but preferred neither 60-mm nor 80-mm prey. Large hybrid striped bass demonstrated no selection for 40-120-mm gizzard shad. We incorporated these data into a bioenergetics model to evaluate whether hybrid striped bass could sufficiently reduce abundance of age-0 gizzard shad in Ohio reservoirs to permit increased zooplankton, thereby improving the potential for resident sport fish recruitment in reservoirs. Hybrid striped bass potentially increased larval sport fish occurrence only when they were stocked at high densities (greater than or equal to 350 fish/ha or greater than or equal to 22 kg/ha) coupled with age-0 gizzard shad suffering low natural mortality and occurring at an intermediate peak density of 25 fish/m(3) or less. We believe gizzard shad are largely immune to control by hybrid striped bass in Ohio reservoirs. Hence, managers must consider combining watershed management with predator stocking to regulate gizzard shad.

Slightly. There is an outside chance stripers could manage to reproduce (as they do in Texhoma). Stripers also live longer and grow bigger and more slowly. That puts more large predator biomass in the pelagic zone for a longer period of time (assuming they're not fished out). That's important because... ....a secondary (or sometimes primary) reason for stocking temperate bass is to get a predator into the open water habitat that gizzard shad use. Gizzard shad compete heavily with the larvae of sport fish for zooplankton, and quickly grow to sizes that even the largest Centrarchids simply can't consume. That means there's a lot of unusable forage fish biomass competing with and repressing the sportfishery during juvenile stages unless you have a dense population of extra large predators capable of reducing their numbers. If Bull Shoals is like most other Middle American reservoirs, this may be part of the rationale. Stocking stripers doesn't always work to regulate gizzard shad, but it usually doesn't hurt either.

Churchill said it. But clearly I'm wrong because I'm over 30 and liberal.

It's wise to treat the forum with the same decorum you would use in a face to face interaction. You may think you're posting here anonymously but you probably aren't and employers often check your online activity before they hire.

It's a hard question. The outdoors as a "growth" industry is sort of scary to think about. Where do you put all these people when they decide it's a great thing to be in "nature" without having them trample it into the ground. If solitude (or at least having some peace and quiet) is one of the things we value about being outdoors, you can't get that on a river stuffed full of people. Yet that's where you get a constituency for outdoor concerns. Nobody is going to care about rivers and fishing or anything else outdoors if they don't even know what's there. Whether or not the government does this, I agree it needs to be done.

The farm bill is one of the most important conservation instruments involving the federal government. Private lands conservation initiatives such as set-asides, CREP and buffer zones are probably the single most critical mechanism in the US for protecting inland fisheries from non-point source pollution and keep riparian zones and wildlife corridors intact in agricultural landscapes. We'd do well to keep an eye on this process and find more ways to cooperate with farmers to keep our rivers clean.