Fish Virus
 

http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs....02/1025/NEWS04
Fairly scary story.
Frank Reid

Fish Virus
 

On Fri, 11 May 2007 19:13:37 -0600, "Wolfgang" wrote:
[...]
The encouraging news is [insert encouraging news
here......someone.....anyone].

Wolfgang

Still nobody stupid enough to take Shrub up on his "War Czar" position...

/daytripper (hth ;-)

Fish Virus
 

"Flytyer37" wrote in message
ups.com...
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs....02/1025/NEWS04
Fairly scary story.

I've been hearing a lot of references to this lately. Haven't investigated
it myself, so I don't know many details, but it's got a LOT of people very
nervous here. Interestingly though, they are not as nervous as they might
have been thirty or forty years ago. The never ending and ever accelerating
litany of new invasive exotic species, with its seeming inevitability, has
begun to have an effect exactly the opposite of what is to be
desired......people are becoming numb and indifferent.

Virtually every boat launch in Wisconsin is graced with a kiosk covered
photographs, warnings, and predictions of dire consequences (both
environmental and legal) for failure to adhere to a long list of futile
preventive measures. Last weekend my friend, Jay, and I encountered (much
to my surprise and disgust) just such a billboard in a parking lot at what
our informant assured us was an unknown, secluded and secret spot on a
stream that no one knows about, tucked in to a deep and steep valley in the
coulee country in the southwest corner of the state, a place that any
reasonable person would suppose an invasive alien couldn't find in a million
years.

Well, there are no secrets.....certainly no secret spots.....no Zerzura.
While thrashing through the streamside brush (an activity also known to the
uninitiated as "fishing"), I was bitten repeatedly by what I quite naturally
assumed was black locust scrub and thus didn't even bother to look at
closely. Turns out, on taking another look at the signage, that I had in
fact been molested by European buckthorn which, to the best of my
recollection, I had never even heard of before, let alone been attacked by.

The encouraging news is [insert encouraging news
here......someone.....anyone].

Wolfgang

Fish Virus
 

Wolfgang wrote:

The encouraging news is [insert encouraging news
here......someone.....anyone].

Wolfgang



The encouraging news is that epidemics (epizootics in this case) are
usually self limiting, the media tends to greatly over-exagerate the
effects of such outbreaks, etc.

You're right, one tends to become numb and different, but how many
disasters have been said to be about to befall us, and nothing really,
come of them?

Tim Lysyk

Fish Virus
 

"daytripper" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 11 May 2007 19:13:37 -0600, "Wolfgang" wrote:
[...]
The encouraging news is [insert encouraging news
here......someone.....anyone].

Wolfgang

Still nobody stupid enough to take Shrub up on his "War Czar" position...

/daytripper (hth ;-)

That's actually kind of a pity. I was hoping for LOTS of applicants. Think
about it......"Czar Wars"!

In "Gentlemen's Blood: A History of Dueling from Swords at Dawn to Pistols
at Dusk," Barbara Holland tells of a quaint custom (from down in the Ozarks,
if memory serves) in which the principles each held tightly to one corner of
a bandana with one hand and then wailed upon one another with a Bowie knife
held in the other.

I be go ta hell if I can think of better way to determine the best candidate
warrior. :)

Wolfgang

Fish Virus
 

"Tim Lysyk" wrote in message
news:te91i.7991$g63.2980@edtnps82...
Wolfgang wrote:

The encouraging news is [insert encouraging news
here......someone.....anyone].

Wolfgang

The encouraging news is that epidemics (epizootics in this case) are
usually self limiting, the media tends to greatly over-exagerate the
effects of such outbreaks, etc.

You're right, one tends to become numb and different, but how many
disasters have been said to be about to befall us, and nothing really,
come of them?

True enough, bad news sells and that's reason enough to amplify. And, yes,
many epizootics have established themselves in all corners of the world to
such an extent that most residents don't know that they aren't natives (but
then, they don't know whether or not the natives are natives, either), and
without causing economic or environmental upheavals.....that most people
noticed. But this is by no means always the case.

Precisely what the cost has been (and continues to be) is difficult to
determine in large part because the value of what is lost is not universally
(or even widely) agreed upon even when a figure can be put to it, and
because the changes generally take long enough that most people, who aren't
paying attention anyway, scarcely notice. The current concerns about a
possible collapse of the Great Lakes ecosystem due to the introduction of
VHS is a good example of how these things work, I think. Odds are that it
won't kill every fish in the lakes. Many.....perhaps the vast
majority.....will probably survive. On the other hand, this COULD be the
exception to the rule. There are only so many empty chamber in the gun.
Meanwhile, most people, even including those who cry doom at each new
invasion, are blithely unaware that the Great Lakes ecosystem already HAS
collapsed.

I grew up, and have spent most of my life, within a few miles of Lake
Michigan. The changes that have occurred within the last half century are
staggering. Today, there is just a pitiful remnant of a once thriving
commercial fishery. As a boy, I participated in an annual summer-long
slaughter of yellow perch from the lighthouse jetty in the Kenosha harbor
that would have made the proud authors of three hundred dead fish per day
adventures in the trout streams of old New England blanch. In those days,
you could, if you were enterprising and had the rare luxury of a large
freezer, feed a family for the year on the catch in the yearly spring run of
smelt, itself an introduced species. If you could afford a nickel for a
beer you could gorge yourself on free fried fish in any of a hundred local
taverns. Lake trout, perch, whitefish and chubs were sneered at by anyone
with a decent income because they were so cheap that they couldn't possibly
be any good. Granted, the demise of this seemingly inexhaustible larder was
not due entirely to the introduction of exotics. In fact, the smelt alone
is a strong argument to the contrary. Pollution and over-harvesting also
played an obvious and major part. But there is no denying that the sea
lamprey did incalculable damage to the large predatory fishes by the time it
peaked in the 50s and the alewife population exploded as a result. Anyone
who spent time on (or within a mile of) a Lake Michigan beach on a hot
summer day in the 60s should have a keen appreciation the possible
consequences of epizootic invasions.

In the last decade or so, the effects of the zebra mussel have come....or at
least started to come....to fruition. Despite encrusting every solid
surface, including, importantly, such things as water intakes (thereby
reducing their effective diameter....which can be a serious problem in
applications like cooling a power plant) and changing the composition of
beaches and lake bottom, and changing the chemical composition of the water
through uptake of carbonate ions....despite all this, it looked for a while
(at least to the casual observer) like they might actually prove to be
somewhat beneficial in that they were highly efficient at filtering the
water and thereby improving its clarity vastly. Well, that's the trouble
with the casual observer. They increased water clarity by filtering out
(among other things) much of the food that forms the base of the Lake's food
chain. This is a bad thing....very bad. To make matters worse, the
increased light penetration has also triggered algal blooms that currently
leave the beaches piled high with a reeking mass of rotting vegetation that
must strike a nostalgic chord in the heart of anyone who remembers millions
of tons of putrescent alewives and stupendous hordes of flies and maggots
fondly.

There's more......LOTS more.....but, you get the picture. :)

Just this parting thought, though. All of this would have been a lot easier
to deal with if it had just happened a bit sooner. In the 50s, the beach
was a wonderful place to go and play in the water (despite the
crowds.....which no longer exist there), but it wasn't necessary to go there
to beat the summer heat. One could have sat in the cool shade on the front
porch along any of thousands of elm roofed tunnels that used to be the urban
streets in this part of the world and been philosophical about all of it.
Anyone who has seen those streets then and now has a visceral understanding
of what the word "hideous" means.

Wolfgang

Fish Virus
 

This virus is decimating many fish populations. Transporting,transplanting
live fish and baits(minnows) is illegal here in New York.users of live bait
fish Must have a receipt for purchase.Tight Lines Marty Read more at:
http://www.dec.ny.gov/animals/25328.html
"Flytyer37" wrote in message
ups.com...
http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs....02/1025/NEWS04
Fairly scary story.
Frank Reid

Fish Virus
 

Sadly the same consequences in Lake Ontario with the same time
frame,scenarios and species.Thanks for enlightening us Wolfgang.Marty
"Wolfgang" wrote in message
...

"Tim Lysyk" wrote in message
news:te91i.7991$g63.2980@edtnps82...
Wolfgang wrote:

The encouraging news is [insert encouraging news
here......someone.....anyone].

Wolfgang

The encouraging news is that epidemics (epizootics in this case) are
usually self limiting, the media tends to greatly over-exagerate the
effects of such outbreaks, etc.

You're right, one tends to become numb and different, but how many
disasters have been said to be about to befall us, and nothing really,
come of them?

True enough, bad news sells and that's reason enough to amplify. And,
yes, many epizootics have established themselves in all corners of the
world to such an extent that most residents don't know that they aren't
natives (but then, they don't know whether or not the natives are natives,
either), and without causing economic or environmental upheavals.....that
most people noticed. But this is by no means always the case.

Precisely what the cost has been (and continues to be) is difficult to
determine in large part because the value of what is lost is not
universally (or even widely) agreed upon even when a figure can be put to
it, and because the changes generally take long enough that most people,
who aren't paying attention anyway, scarcely notice. The current concerns
about a possible collapse of the Great Lakes ecosystem due to the
introduction of VHS is a good example of how these things work, I think.
Odds are that it won't kill every fish in the lakes. Many.....perhaps the
vast majority.....will probably survive. On the other hand, this COULD be
the exception to the rule. There are only so many empty chamber in the
gun. Meanwhile, most people, even including those who cry doom at each new
invasion, are blithely unaware that the Great Lakes ecosystem already HAS
collapsed.

I grew up, and have spent most of my life, within a few miles of Lake
Michigan. The changes that have occurred within the last half century are
staggering. Today, there is just a pitiful remnant of a once thriving
commercial fishery. As a boy, I participated in an annual summer-long
slaughter of yellow perch from the lighthouse jetty in the Kenosha harbor
that would have made the proud authors of three hundred dead fish per day
adventures in the trout streams of old New England blanch. In those days,
you could, if you were enterprising and had the rare luxury of a large
freezer, feed a family for the year on the catch in the yearly spring run
of smelt, itself an introduced species. If you could afford a nickel for
a beer you could gorge yourself on free fried fish in any of a hundred
local taverns. Lake trout, perch, whitefish and chubs were sneered at by
anyone with a decent income because they were so cheap that they couldn't
possibly be any good. Granted, the demise of this seemingly inexhaustible
larder was not due entirely to the introduction of exotics. In fact, the
smelt alone is a strong argument to the contrary. Pollution and
over-harvesting also played an obvious and major part. But there is no
denying that the sea lamprey did incalculable damage to the large
predatory fishes by the time it peaked in the 50s and the alewife
population exploded as a result. Anyone who spent time on (or within a
mile of) a Lake Michigan beach on a hot summer day in the 60s should have
a keen appreciation the possible consequences of epizootic invasions.

In the last decade or so, the effects of the zebra mussel have come....or
at least started to come....to fruition. Despite encrusting every solid
surface, including, importantly, such things as water intakes (thereby
reducing their effective diameter....which can be a serious problem in
applications like cooling a power plant) and changing the composition of
beaches and lake bottom, and changing the chemical composition of the
water through uptake of carbonate ions....despite all this, it looked for
a while (at least to the casual observer) like they might actually prove
to be somewhat beneficial in that they were highly efficient at filtering
the water and thereby improving its clarity vastly. Well, that's the
trouble with the casual observer. They increased water clarity by
filtering out (among other things) much of the food that forms the base of
the Lake's food chain. This is a bad thing....very bad. To make matters
worse, the increased light penetration has also triggered algal blooms
that currently leave the beaches piled high with a reeking mass of rotting
vegetation that must strike a nostalgic chord in the heart of anyone who
remembers millions of tons of putrescent alewives and stupendous hordes of
flies and maggots fondly.

There's more......LOTS more.....but, you get the picture. :)

Just this parting thought, though. All of this would have been a lot
easier to deal with if it had just happened a bit sooner. In the 50s, the
beach was a wonderful place to go and play in the water (despite the
crowds.....which no longer exist there), but it wasn't necessary to go
there to beat the summer heat. One could have sat in the cool shade on
the front porch along any of thousands of elm roofed tunnels that used to
be the urban streets in this part of the world and been philosophical
about all of it. Anyone who has seen those streets then and now has a
visceral understanding of what the word "hideous" means.

Wolfgang

Fish Virus
 

"Diamondcutter" wrote in message
...

Sadly the same consequences in Lake Ontario with the same time
frame,scenarios and species.

And the rest of the Great Lakes and their tributary waters as well. The
details may be different elsewhere, but the story is the same.

Thanks for enlightening us Wolfgang.Marty

You're welcome. But, I have to note here that the thought of anyone being
enlightened by any of this at this late date is ineffably sad and
discouraging. The Greeks named her Cassandra, but she is at least as old as
the written word, and her testimony runs to billions of pages in every
language and spans all of history.

Wolfgang

Fish Virus
 

"Wolfgang" wrote in message
...
snip
The encouraging news is [insert encouraging news
here......someone.....anyone].

Wolfgang
Insertion [No $700 or even $400 Simms waders were destroyed by the European
buckthorn in making this fishing report.]

Bob Weinberger

Fish Virus
 

"Bob Weinberger" wrote in message
news:Pq32i.1685$CQ4.841@trndny06...

"Wolfgang" wrote in message
...
snip
The encouraging news is [insert encouraging news
here......someone.....anyone].

Wolfgang
Insertion [No $700 or even $400 Simms waders were destroyed by the
European buckthorn in making this fishing report.]

True.

In fact, no waders of any kind were injured at all. The buckthorn was
content with tearing small chunks of flesh from my arm. It was a small
price to pay.

Our informants, a recently retired dairy farmer and his nearly deaf (totally
in one ear and 80% in the other.....sudden onset a couple of years
ago.....we talked about cochlear implants) but still employed wife, told us
that their son and a friend of his had each pulled 25 inch browns out of
this exquisitely tiny stream within the last year. Tiny means eight feet or
less across for most of its length......and anyone familiar with trout
streams in the comparatively low gradient waters between the eastern and
western mountains will have a pretty good idea of what this implies in terms
of volume. Many fly fishers will find the idea of fish that size coming out
of a stream that size implausible......to say the least. That's good.
They're right.

Not surprisingly, we didn't see anything near that size. I caught the
biggest fish of the weekend there.....a ten inch brown. At one point,
though, Jay and I were about thirty feet apart on a stretch of the stream in
which he had seen, and failed to hook, several rising fish. When he figured
he had put them all down (an observation with which I agreed long before he
stumbled upon it). I walked up along the bank and sent a hundred or more
fishing, including one of at least 14 inches, scooting back toward him.
They didn't like him any more than they did me, so they turned around and
came back up....and then turned around and went back down....and
then......well, this went on for quite a while.

This was on Sunday, around noon. It was time to saddle up and head back
toward home, a four hour drive. That was o.k. We had fished for the better
part of two days, caught fish, saw more fish, saw an enormous flood control
dam (60 feet high and 700 long) on a stream that could, under ordinary
circumstances, be turned back uphill with a fire hose, saw a bald eagle
presumably feeding on the carcass of a fish that someone had inadvertently
killed, saw more fishermen (and coolers full of dead fish) than I hope to
see the rest of this year, saw plenty of beaver sign, deer tracks, live
deer, turkeys, vultures, skunk cabbage, marsh marigolds, watercress,
warblers of several species, woodpeckers of several species, sandhill
cranes, wood ducks, golden eyes, teal, geese, mallards, trout lilies, blood
root, spring beauties, and more shades of green in spring leaves than an
Irishman would believe possible.

Stupendous scenery in this part of Curdistan. Good company. Good weather.
And the meds were starting to kick in. :)

Wolfgang
well, o.k., there was....and still IS the remnants of.....a truly impressive
blister on the left heal, but what doesn't kill us makes us
older......ainna?

Fish Virus
 

"Wolfgang" wrote in message
...
Our informants, a recently retired dairy farmer and his nearly deaf
(totally in one ear and 80% in the other.....sudden onset a couple of
years ago.....we talked about cochlear implants) but still employed wife,
told us that their son and a friend of his had each pulled 25 inch browns
out of this exquisitely tiny stream within the last year. Tiny means
eight feet or less across for most of its length......and anyone familiar
with trout streams in the comparatively low gradient waters between the
eastern and western mountains will have a pretty good idea of what this
implies in terms of volume. Many fly fishers will find the idea of fish
that size coming out of a stream that size implausible......to say the
least. That's good. They're right.

Wolfgang

You might wish to question your informants more closely re the time of year
that these large Browns were alledgedly caught. The stream as you describe
it could easily be one that is utilized for spawning by fish from larger
downstream waters (late Oct - early Dec.) or as a cool water refuge during
the dog days of summer. If you find out this info and wouldn't mind
divulging it,as well as the stream location, it would have a strong
influence on how I time a visit to my daughter and granddaughters in the
Twin Cities. Of course its also possible that they were simply brood stock
spawners that were surplus to the hatchery's needs.

Bob Weinberger

Fish Virus
 

"Bob Weinberger" wrote in message
news:d092i.9156$yy6.156@trnddc05...
snip
Of course its also possible that they were simply brood stock spawners that
were surplus to the hatchery's needs.


Sorry to reply to my own post, but I want it to be clear that the above
refers to the two large browns that were reported to have been caught - not
to my daughter and granddaughters 8).

Bob Weinberger

Fish Virus
 

"Bob Weinberger" wrote in message
news:d092i.9156$yy6.156@trnddc05...
You might wish to question your informants more closely re the time of
year that these large Browns were alledgedly caught. The stream as you
describe it could easily be one that is utilized for spawning by fish from
larger downstream waters (late Oct - early Dec.) or as a cool water refuge
during the dog days of summer. If you find out this info and wouldn't mind
divulging it,as well as the stream location, it would have a strong
influence on how I time a visit to my daughter and granddaughters in the
Twin Cities. Of course its also possible that they were simply brood stock
spawners that were surplus to the hatchery's needs.

Spawners are, of course, a strong possibility on most streams. However, the
area these fish were allegedly caught in is upstream from the dam. As this
is strictly a flood control structure, the flow is controlled be a gate that
discharges through a three or four foot diameter pipe near the base. On the
downstream side of the dam, this pipe is roughly five or six feet above the
stilling basin.

I'll send you directions and a picture of the dam.

I'm guessing not many fish make it past this. :)

In any case, there are many streams in the area that hold phenomenal numbers
of fish, many of which are scary big.

Let me know about your plans. I can steer you toward some very good water.

Wolfgang