Remembering past ecological problems.

Keep Asian carp out of Lake Michigan to protect salmon & other game fish.

Mind you, being 72 isn't really old when you consider my father lived to be 94. He saw so many new and exciting things happen during his lifetime although he seldom appeared terribly excited by any of them.

I've been witness to so many changes in our fisheries. Many years ago, Lake Erie was an open sewer. A dumping ground for every thing from the alphabet soup of DDT, PCB and other chemicals to  fecal matter that flowed into our state waterways.

One of Ohio's rivers was so polluted that it occasionally caught fire. Hardly a laughing matter then but now the river produces good steelhead and walleye catches.

Forty years ago, our waters were terribly polluted but much of that has changed.

Lake Erie has cleaned itself up, thanks to Michigan, Ohio and Ontario cracking down on industrial pollution and sludge. Lake Erie may not be quite the walleye hole it was 20 years ago, but it beats whatever comes in second-place.

Fishing on the Detroit River was banned because of heavy metals, but some of the old river rats who fished it daily and ate walleyes several times a week seemed healthy enough after eating high-level meals of walleyes for many years.

It was about 30 years ago since the Tittabawassee River near the dam below Dow Chemical plant in Midland was shut down because of high levels of contaminants.

And then, as the lakes starting cleaning themselves up, the state began issuing warnings about eating some fish. The state produced inserts for our fishing license regulations telling us where the highest levels of contaminants were found and what amounts of fish could be eaten. It is now presented in booklet form.

They claimed many game fish species were too contaminated to eat. The paper I worked for, after lengthy discussions with the editorial staff, finally agreed to let me conduct specific tests on Lake Erie walleyes caught near the Detroit Edison plant near Lake Erie. The tests would cost over $2,000.

This would be a test of fish that were cleaned as anglers would clean them rather than as the state Health Department conducted their tests: by grinding up the head, skin, fins, entrails, tail and all edible flesh, and use that mush for their tests.

The Detroit News, and I as their staff outdoor writer, conducted tests on walleyes.

Anglers usually fillet their catch, cut off the belly fat and the fat along the spine, and the dark flesh along the lateral line. Our task was to catch 20 walleyes with five fish each in four size categories: 15-17 inches, 18-20 inches, 21 to 24 inches, and fish larger than 24 inches.

They had to be cleaned on a hard, nonporous  surface, and the knife and cleaning area had to be completely disinfected before each fish was cleaned. It was a rather laborious testing regimen.

The late Al Lesh of Warren volunteered for the job of helping me catch these fish, and it took two days to catch our 20 fish (we didn't want to rush this test so caught five fish each of both days). Our problem was finding enough fish in the 15-17-inch range for testing. It turns out we traded eight and nine-pound fish with other anglers to obtain the smaller ones. They thought we were pretty dumb.

Our testing of walleyes was done on cleaned fish, not whole fish.

The cleaning was conducted  under very strict guidelines, and the flesh of boned, filleted and skinned fish were taken to the testing facility in Lansing. The test took nearly two weeks, and the results blew the Health Department's testing report apart.

The four size groups of walleyes we caught all tested so far below the established and acceptance levels that, in some cases, there was no measurable amount on heavy metal or alphabet pollution to be found.

The difference could be attributable to just one thing. We cleaned our fish the way 99.9 percent of the anglers do. We filleted the fish, cut away rib bones, skinned the fish, and removed back and belly fat as well as the dark meat along the lateral line.

The state testings were conducted with whole fish. Admittedly, a few Oriental groups will eat the entire fish, but very few anglers do. I don't know anyone who eats the whole fish.

Numbers, such as those of the alphabet group of chemicals and the heavy metals like lead and mercury, can be interpreted however the test facilities choose to do it. They chose to grind up the entire fish, and we chose to use cleaned and boned fillets.

And now, we are forced to deal with all the invasive species that hitch-hike a ride with freighter from central Europe who  choose to dump their ballast water in our lakes. We cleaned up much of one mess just in time to make way for the zebra mussel invasion and other critters that would soon follow.

I can remember when many lakes and streams were clean. Most of them are clean now, but we've got the zebra mussels to thank for that. No one knows where that will lead in the years to come.

It makes me shudder to think what may need to be done to solve the future issue of gobies, rusty crayfish and zebra mussels, to name a few. We may be in for a bigger fight unless our govenment cracks down with an iron fist on those foreign boats that continue to pollute our state waters.

Asian carp and related species must be kept out of Lake Michigan.

And that means keeping the Asian carp out of Lake Michigan. It continues to astound me when it takes the Federal and State governments years to study a problem, such as the Asian carp in the Chicago sanitary canal, and then we must worry about carp that could prove to be an even greater problem.

Time will tell when it comes to proving the incompetence of some governmental agencies and their willingness to make accurate decisions. I'm not optimistic about the Asian carp in our waters.

Title: Remembering past ecological problems.

Tags: ((Dave, Richey, Michigan, outdoors, heavy, metals, ABC, chemicals, mussels, gobies, rusty, crayfish, Asian,  carp))

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