Where Baitfish Don't Belong

But such happy endings, if this turns out to be one, are rare. Most bait-infected salmonid waters are too big or have too many inlets, springs or marshes to be reclaimed. We lose them forever. Consider the fate of native brook trout in New York State's Adirondack Park as reflected in the microcosm of the Saranac Lake Wild Forest management unit. An estimated 94 percent of the unit's 19,010 acres of ponded surface water historically supported brook trout. Today three percent supports brook trout, and the figure would be only .5 percent had the state not done reclamations. Furthermore, only one of the 156 ponds and lakes in this unit is thought to have been affected by acid rain; the rest have been rendered troutless by alien fish.

Golden shiners, white suckers and yellow perch are among the worst invasives, and all appear to have been moved around in bait buckets. Of the thousands of Adirondack ponds that have been lost to soft-fins and spiny-fins, only a few are suitable for rotenone treatment. But there's another problem-key people within the Adirondack Park Agency choose not to learn about rotenone and therefore fear it. And, largely because an ecologically illiterate NGO called the Adirondack Council keeps hissing in the agency's ear, it forbids helicopters in state-designated wilderness during summer (the only practical way of transporting equipment and the only time surveys and reclamations are possible). "We have people in the Park Agency telling us our data is too old to justify management," says Bill Schoch, the Department of Environmental Conservation's regional fish manager. "And, at the same time, the agency tells us we can't fly into these ponds to get new data. It's incredibly frustrating."

The ongoing game of musical chairs we play with baitfish endangers more species than those that titillate us by bending our rods. For instance, non-native baitfish-especially red shiners-are impeding restoration of federally threatened spikedace and loach minnows (which occur only in the Gila River basin of Arizona and New Mexico) and threatened pike minnows and endangered razorback chubs in the Colorado River system.

Although golden shiners can be a major threat to wild salmonids when humans fling them around the waterscape, they're every bit as important to their native ecosystems as brook trout are to theirs. The European rudd-with which bait dealers and bait anglers have polluted the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence River system and now Maine-threatens to hybridize our native golden shiners out of existence.

Not all tui chubs are prolific. Two races — the Mohave tui chub of California's Mojave River and the Owens tui chub of California's Owens Valley — are now federally endangered largely because non-native chubs, unleashed in their habitat by bait anglers or bait dealers or both, are crossbreeding with them. The California Department of Fish and Game would like to keep these endangered fish on the planet by reclaiming a little of their lost habitat, but antimycin is illegal in California, and the department's senior fish biologist, Steve Parmenter, correctly notes that use of rotenone isn't "politically feasible." In other words, public ignorance, which got these fish into trouble in the first place, is now preventing their recovery.

Damage to native-fish habitat in the West, grievous as it is, palls beside damage in the East. One reason is that many Western states have decent regulations (if not enforcement), while regulations in the East are hopelessly inadequate. Montana and Wyoming have banned live baitfish west of the continental divide-their best trout water. Colorado has banned live baitfish in water above 7,000 feet-its best trout water. Washington and Oregon prohibit all live baitfish in freshwater. California has a virtual ban. West of the divide New Mexico permits only fathead minnows.

New York, on the other hand, hopes to narrow down legal baitfish species to 15 including the golden shiner and white sucker with which it has had so much trouble. But at this writing, just about any soft-fin goes (though all baitfish have been banned and will continue to be banned in important native brook trout water). In Pennsylvania it is actually legal to seine baitfish from water where they are native or naturalized and release them in water where they are neither. Maine, which has lost about 90 percent of its wild brook trout habitat but nonetheless retains an estimated 97 percent of all ponded native brook trout water in the nation, has also banned live baitfish in much of its remote trout water. But major brook trout strongholds-including the 92-mile-long ribbon of lakes, ponds, rivers and streams known as the Allagash Wilderness Waterway-are still open.

Among the 23 species of baitfish Maine still permits are the golden shiner, lake chub, fathead minnow and common shiner (which it has determined pose a "moderate" threat to brook trout), smelt, longnose sucker, creek chub (a "high" threat), and white sucker (a "severe" threat-more severe even than yellow perch, brown bullheads and largemouth bass, which it bans).

Only in Maine has the threat of baitfish attracted major media attention. The flap started with two proposed pieces of long overdue and desperately needed legislation almost pathetically modest in their goals-akin to Oliver Twist asking for seconds on gruel.

One was introduced on behalf of the Sportsman's Alliance of Maine (SAM). The bill would ban live baitfish from a few of the "B List" ponds-where brookies are self-sustaining and haven't been stocked in at least 25 years. "This is nothing but a continuation of the bill passed in 2005 that protects 'heritage trout' in 305 unstocked ponds-the 'A List,'" declares Gary Corson, the Maine guide who discovered smelt in Big Reed Pond and who serves on SAM's Fishing Initiative Committee. "The state recognizes 284 B List ponds, but at least 36 of these have been stocked with species other than brook trout. SAM wants them off the list; it's unreasonable to ask the department to stop stocking landlocked salmon, for instance. And some of the waters don't qualify as principal brook trout waters; we want those off the list, too. We're not looking for big numbers." As Corson notes, ice fishing isn't allowed on most B List Ponds anyway. After all the subtraction, ice anglers would be prevented from using live bait on only 14 ponds out of over 1,100 available to them. And even on these 14 they would be able to use jigs, worms and dead baitfish (very effective for brook trout and lake trout when fished on the bottom).