How The Natural World Vanishes...

[Gavin]

Norm Crisp sent me this article this week.....shifting baselines...how true! Our time is short so we lack perspective.

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_natural_world_vanishes_how_species_cease_to_matter/2258/

[eric1978]

Moral of the story..."The lesson from this — one which has been learned the hard way across all kinds of fisheries — is to avoid reaching the crisis stage. This philosophy, known as the "precautionary principle," is beginning to take hold with the simple wisdom of erring conservatively in setting fish harvests."

Amen.

This is why my panties get all in a twist when we get into the smallmouth debate. Our expectations of Ozark smallmouth fisheries are extremely low, whether we are aware of it or not. And if our expectations continue to diminish with each passing year, eventually people will think of a smallmouth stream as a good one if it simply has fish in it at all. Imagine what the experience would have been like if you could have fished the White River in the 1500s...that's what our goal for fisheries should be now, not just "sustainable harvest," but to realize maximum potential.

I read somewhere that in 17th and 18th century America, we used to feed lobster to prisoners on the east coast so often that they would throw fits and revolt over it...spoiled brats.

Good article.

[Quillback]

20 years living in the Pacific Northwest I saw the decline in species such as salmon, steelhead, Dungeness crab, smelt, shrimp and rockfish. Usually regulation changes to sport and commercial harvest occur after the species numbers have been so far knocked down that recovery becomes very difficult. Ironically, shad, which were introduced to the Pacific coast, are doing very well.

[Al Agnew]

Excellent article, and as Eric pointed out, it has relevance to our own fisheries. Even the biologists are susceptible to the shifting baselines. For instance, MDC really has very little real data on what stream fisheries were like before various changes both regulatory and ecological. The only really good study of smallmouth bass populations before the advent of the 12 inch length limit was limited to Courtois Creek. There is no baseline data, as far as I know, on what smallmouth populations were really like on river such as the middle and lower Meramec, the Gasconade, the middle and lower Current...in other words, all the streams that had the potential to be our best waters for bigger fish. So nobody can say with certainty what the fisheries were before the advent of jetboats, before the invasion of spotted bass, etc. All we have is anecdotal evidence...the memories and maybe the written fishing diaries of those of us who fished the rivers before those events. With the beginnings of the smallmouth special management system we have, there were a lot of studies done on smallmouth populations for the first time on those particular streams, and those make up the baseline data we have. In other words, that's the only scientific standard we have...how good it was then, and how much it might have improved under special management or not. But we don't have the data to say how good it COULD BE.

But I'm old enough to know that the middle and lower Meramec was a lot better fishing back in the 1970s and early 1980s than it is now. And I also know that the first special management area on Big River, Mammoth Bridge to Browns Ford Bridge, was MUCH better fishing in that same time period than it was when MDC did the studies on it just prior to instituting special management, or than it is right now. But I would also guess that some streams or stream sections are better now than they were then...it's just that we don't KNOW.

And like the article said, very few people realize the immensity of what we lost in many places. If you spend a season in Alaska on one of the great salmon rivers up there, you might get a little bit of an idea what the entire Columbia River system was like before we dammed it into complete submission. Picture the kind of salmon runs you see on the Kenai River in Alaska, and then picture even more numerous salmon of all species in nearly every stream running into the Columbia, covering an area of much of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, western Montana, northwestern Wyoming, and a big chunk of western Canada. Now every one of those runs is either extinct or highly endangered. Every one. The number of salmon left in the whole Columbia river system is a small fraction of one percent of what it once was.

And most people have no idea...they can't even imagine that bounty.

[EddieRay]

Thanks for the article. We all need a wake up call at times. I'm going to post this on the other fishing forums I frequent.

[Justin Spencer]

...that's what our goal for fisheries should be now, not just "sustainable harvest," but to realize maximum potential.

I think MDC manages for what they feel the most people want out of a fisherey in conjunction with it's potential. Not everyone wants fewer/bigger fish. Many people would rather catch 20-10 inch fish than 1-20 inch fish. In fish management many times that is the choice, and that is achieved somewhat through regulations and harvest.

We can change the small rivers and streams through stocking and regulations much easier than the oceans and great lakes can be altered. We also have to realize the world is always evolving, although now it seems to be more due to man made introductions or global warming.

One thing I like to see are the old timers showing pictures of how good the fishing "used to be" while holding up a stringer of 50 bass in the 3 to 5 pound range. Not hard to see why the fishing went down hill.

[eric1978]

One thing I like to see are the old timers showing pictures of how good the fishing "used to be" while holding up a stringer of 50 bass in the 3 to 5 pound range. Not hard to see why the fishing went down hill.

That was my point, essentially.

[fishinwrench]

Justin Spencer, on 22 November 2010 - 02:15 PM, said:

One thing I like to see are the old timers showing pictures of how good the fishing "used to be" while holding up a stringer of 50 bass in the 3 to 5 pound range. Not hard to see why the fishing went down hill.

You do have to think (and assume) realistically though. In those old tyme pics with massive stringers of fat smallies, those fisherman obviously had just enjoyed an exceptional day. I mean otherwise WHY waste money on a picture and keep it around for 100 years ? Pictures weren't just taken haphazardly back then like digital pics are now.

Those days still happen, and probably with just as much frequency as they did back then. Hell,look at the pics and reports previously posted by the Guru, Al, and Bman (just to name a few).

[Chief Grey Bear]

...that's what our goal for fisheries should be now, not just "sustainable harvest," but to realize maximum potential.

Maximum potential of what?

I have looked at hundred's of photo's from early to mid 20th century fishing trips and guided fishing trips. You would be very hard pressed to find a photo of nothing but huge bass. The vast majority of those old photos showed a couple or so really nice, decent bass and a butt load of smaller ones.

And in studying not only the photos but also trip reports from the day, they really don't seem to be any different than what we are enjoying today. Now with that said, I think that with todays technology and soft plastic baits, it has afforded us the privilege to catch a greater number of fish over a greater amount of water.

[Al Agnew]

I agree, Chief.

I think we have to understand the history of these rivers. We have little or no idea of what their fish populations were like prior to European settlement. By the time people started making written records of the fish in them, they were probably already altered by a lot of subsistence fish harvest. And by the time float fishing got popular, a lot of these rivers were very badly damaged by all the erosion from logging, clearing, and burning, and also by the big log rafts that basically scoured out the channel. Imagine thousands of tons of logs moving down the river with the current in a mass from bank to bank and what kind of damage they could do to the banks and bottom. Big rocks in the channel in problem areas were dynamited to make way for the logs, as well. The fishing in the Ozark rivers was good in comparison to that of some other places that had been even more badly abused.

So you can't assume that the heyday of float fishing in the 1920s to WWII was indicative of how good the streams could be. Actually, WWII took a lot of the angling pressure off and probably allowed fisheries to rebound, and the exodus of people out of the Ozarks during the Great Depression (looking for work in the big cities and elsewhere) removed a lot of the worst agricultural practices. The national forests were formed in MO and the forested watersheds of the streams began to improve as the trees grew back and were protected while doing so from fire. It also helped that the modern day MDC was formed during that time and gave the fisheries some protection from people killing fish any way they could in any numbers they could.

By the 1950s much of the commercial guided float fishing was a thing of the past. The big reservoirs definitely were a benefit, too, in that they attracted serious anglers away from the streams. While there were still a lot of people who fished the streams and killed every fish they legally (or illegally) could, the overall pressure wasn't very high. By the 1960s the bass limit was changed from ten to six, which further improved the fishing, and then came the 12 inch length limit as well. By that time, the most popular streams were beginning to be overrun with casual canoe renters who either didn't fish or didn't have a clue how to fish.

In my opinion and my experience, like I said before, the culmination of all this was the period from about 1975 to 1985. Decent regulations, relatively few serious or knowledgeable anglers, better land use practices...all combined to make the streams fairly healthy and the fish populations as healthy as they'd been in the whole 20th century.

But that's the period where we really needed the good baseline data I mentioned before. Black River was studied back in the 1950s. Courtois Creek was studied in the 60s before the 12 inch limit was instituted. And then there weren't any more serious studies of the Ozark stream bass fisheries to my knowledge until the early 1990s. By then it was too late for some of the streams, because by then jetboats were popular and allowed both a lot more fishing pressure from effective anglers who were armed not only with the convenient boats but also with better equipment and knowledge...and even if you didn't use a jetboat you were probably a better angler just because of the equipment and knowledge. By then the jetboats had made illegal gigging easier. By then jetboat wakes had altered the habitat on the bigger rivers. By then spotted bass had a strong foothold in the Meramec and Gasconade systems. By then pure people pressure in the watersheds had resulted in more land cleared and more faulty septic systems draining into the rivers and other ills of civilization. So by then I believe a lot of fisheries had already declined significantly from what they had been just a decade or so earlier.

I know a lot more about catching stream bass than I did back then, but overall I catch fewer big smallmouths now. Sure, I have great days catching fish, as do a lot of guys, but it ain't as easy as it used to be unless you find a piece of water that's little pressured and well protected. Is that because the fish just aren't there in the same numbers and sizes, or is it because the fish are more sophisticated? After all, the catch and release ethic is probably doing a lot to counteract the pressures on fisheries, but it may also be producing a lot of "educated" fish, or even fish that are genetically less susceptible to normal lures and techniques...the fish that don't have to contend with the stresses of being caught multiple times might better be able to pass their genes along. But the problem is, we don't KNOW, because we don't have the baseline data from that 1975-1985 time period to tell us. Could be I'm all wet and the fish populations weren't any better then than now.