Re: Fishing surprise
The sea lamprey came into the Great Lakes by way of the St. Lawrence Seaway. By the 1950's, the lakes had entirely lost their traditional fisheries. The lake trout were nearly extinct, there were no bass, the perch got smaller, Alewives came in the same way and by the 1960's were stinking up beaches every year. When I was in college in the late fifties, you couldn't have a nice day on a beach on Lake Michigan. Besides dead fish, the sand was littered with oil balls from ballasts and leaky tankers. The scientists first learned to control lampreys by the ancient and grueling technique of testing chemicals one at a time: Hundreds of glass tanks, each containing a bluegill, a small trout, and a young lamprey. They tried something like 10,000 compounds and finally found one that killed the lamprey but not the 'gill and the trout. This they poured into the main spawning streams at lamprey spawning time. Fortunately, the eely critter runs up stream to spawn, and that was their weak point. Of course you can't get 'em all, so you will still see a few. In the early sixties, <br />biologists in Washngton State sent Michigan the first viable coho spawn. It worked. Here are two miracles I never expected to see in my lifetime: A photograph of my younger daughter standing behind the demolished Berlin wall, and steelhead running up the Kalamazoo River. May wonders never cease.
<br /><br />Anyway, PETA, think about this next time you attack fishermen.<br />If not for us and our scientific friends, there'd be nothing to fish for in Michigan or hardly anywhere else. Half your "organic" fabrics come into the country on the boats that bring us foreign aquatic species that kill far more fish than we do.
<br />-----------------<br />Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. I seen it, I seen it.
