Where Baitfish Don't Belong

Wild trout water more beautiful than northern Maine's Big Reed Pond doesn't exist. It is embraced by one of the few remaining old-growth forests in the East. It is one of about 307 lakes in the nation (305 in Maine) that still sustain native brook trout undefiled by hatchery genes and one of only 14 waters in the nation (all in Maine) known to sustain native populations of blueback trout, a grievously imperiled race of arctic char.

In the early 1990's guide Gary Corson found smelts in Big Reed. Smelts are native to Maine but not to Big Reed. They're legal bait in Maine but not in Big Reed. Someone — apparently in an effort to grow bigger brookies and bluebacks —had illegally introduced them.

It worked spectacularly. In fact, the bluebacks, which had averaged about 10 inches (big for landlocked char) were suddenly attaining lengths of over 20 inches. There was a problem, however: Recruitment all but ceased. The smelts were chowing down on blueback and brookie fry, then competing with surviving bluebacks for zooplankton. Corson, who used to fly his clients into Big Reed at least three times a week, says he wouldn't fish there today. "In the deeper water we'd get the occasional two- or three-pound brookie; and the shoreline was full of smaller fish. Everything disappeared." So it goes when baitfish are unleashed where they don't belong.

Thousands of other native fish populations across America have been undone by baitfish introductions. Anglers have dumped bait pails on purpose and by mistake, and bait dealers have introduced non-native baitfish in order to have additional waters to seine. One thing is certain: If baitfish are used in water where they are not native, they will become naturalized.

While the literature is rife with warnings about the dangers to salmonids from non-native spiny-finned fish like perch and bass, it scarcely mentions baitfish. But the second problem contributes to the first. Few bait dealers know what they're selling, fewer anglers know what they're buying and no one knows what they're seining. Often juvenile spiny-fins (perch, bass, sticklebacks and the like) are mixed in with the soft-fins (shiners, chubs, suckers and the like); and while the targeted soft-fins may be legal, non-target soft-fins in the haul frequently aren't.

An informal survey of bait dealers in Wyoming turned up juvenile trout infected with whirling disease mixed in with legal baitfish. And baitfish shipments, especially in the West, are often contaminated with sticklebacks, which promptly take over new habitat, carpeting the bottom and blowing off primary production. What's more, sticklebacks provide scant forage to game fish (largemouth bass actually lose weight when they eat them). The loudest complainers are the bait dealers themselves, because the sticklebacks they inadvertently spread around wipe out the baitfish they target.

Greg Gerlich, senior aquatic biologist for the Colorado Division of Wildlife, dispatched crews to purchase 60 baitfish from each of a dozen bait shops. "Only two of those shops had mono-specific cultures, like all fathead minnows," he says. "The rest contained everything from goldfish to small carp to suckers to yellow perch to sticklebacks. Minnows are expanding beyond their range. We're seeing new populations of sticklebacks, yellow perch, carp and goldfish."

"I think we're making some headway with baitfish introductions," says Maine's chief fish biologist, John Boland. "Ice fishermen [the primary baitfish users in the East] are much more cognizant about not dumping bait down the hole." Still, the level of ignorance is appalling. Most ice anglers receive their education not from managers like Boland, but from Internet, newspaper and barroom commentary, much of it provided by baitfish dealers. For example, in the February 18, 2007, Kennebec Journal the head of the Maine Bait Dealers Association, Stephen Staples, offered the following about alleged dangers of baitfish becoming naturalized in salmonid habitat: "If that happens, so what? Shiners are much needed forage for our fisheries and not harmful to the watersheds."

Try that out on the people who used to fish Oregon's sprawling Diamond Lake, so high in the headwaters of the Umpqua River that it was fishless until rainbow trout were stocked circa 1912. The rainbows grew an inch a month, commonly reaching 10 pounds. But sometime in the 1940's tui chubs were introduced by bait anglers or perhaps by bucket biologists as "much needed forage" for rainbows. The rainbows ate the chubs, but not enough to make a difference. The chubs cleaned out the zooplankton, slicing off the rainbows' food chain at the base and enabling the proliferation of toxic blue-green algae on which the zooplankton had grazed.

In 1954 the state successfully reclaimed the lake with rotenone, and the trophy fishery recovered, eventually attracting 100,000 anglers a year. But around 1990 someone introduced tui chubs again. Again the chubs took over, dominating the biomass and facilitating poisonous algae blooms that made it unsafe to swim or even fish. Finally — in September 2006 at a cost of $6 million in federal, state, county and private money — the state again reclaimed Diamond Lake, killing an estimated 90 million tui chubs. "In two or three years we hope the nutrients tied up in the chubs that were killed will recycle back into invertebrates and zooplankton," says Rhine Messmer, of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. "We'll then ramp up our stocking, and hopefully we'll have the trophy fishery we had before."