Whither Maine Char?

Today, Big Reed char may be extinct in the wild, and the pond’s brook-trout population is essentially kaput. To its credit, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife is taking restoration very seriously. It was able to trap nine Arctic char from Big Reed and has contracted with a private hatchery to hold and breed them. At this writing there are only two progeny. In the fall of 2008 one fish produced a lot of eggs, but for some unknown reason they died a few hours after fertilization. It’s not clear that there are enough fish to preserve a genetically viable stock. But, if necessary, char can be brought in from other ponds; and within a few generations the Big Reed strain would likely predominate.

Of course, restoration of Big Reed’s native fish fauna depends on the department’s ability to poison out the smelts. Biologist Frank Frost, the point man for Maine’s char effort, says his agency doesn’t have the funds but that he expects they’ll eventually become available.

Meanwhile, the department has released a “draft plan” that isn’t so much a plan as a list of what it calls “options”: “Option 1—no action; Option 2—use of hatchery fish for supplementation; Option 3—use of hatchery fish (hybrid char [i.e., splake]) as smelt control; Option 4—chemical reclamation with rotenone; Option 5—mechanical control of smelt.”

It’s a list not of “options” but of four wrong-headed non-solutions together with the only existing chance for recovery—Option 4. Frost and his agency know this. But because of the public’s irrational fear of any and all fish poisons, department staff apparently believe they need to tread lightly.

At least the department is fortunate in having to deal with The Nature Conservancy. I confess that I approached my interview with TNC’s Maine conservation planner, Josh Royte, with trepidation. And I came away with some. It was apparent to me that TNC, like most environmental groups, doesn’t understand that the only tools for saving imperiled fish like Big Reed char are safe, short-lived organic piscicides—rotenone and, on the rare occasions it can be obtained, antimycin. But Royte also made it clear that TNC is open-minded and passionately committed to restoring the pond’s native ecosystem.

Still, TNC has embarked on an arduous and utterly redundant study of non-existent alternatives to piscicide.

“We’re very nervous about reclamation,” Royte told me. “So we asked the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to write up a plan, which took a couple years. We reviewed the plan and recommended strongly that they reach out for peer review for finding alternatives and expert opinion. We knew there wasn’t enough time for us to get a good, solid peer review of what the best options are. So we’re looking hard for other ideas of what we can do.” Unlike some environmental organizations, TNC at least is willing to learn about rotenone. It just doesn’t understand that all the information is already out there and that rotenone has been used in fisheries management for 80 years without sickening a single human or permanently affecting a single nontarget population except to release it from competition, predation and genetic swamping by aliens.

All the re-studies and duplicative peer reviews may take more time than Big Reed char have. That’s why, in my opinion, it would have been wiser for the department of inland fisheries to confront TNC and the public with the truth than to offer false hope with what it calls non-chemical “options” but what its own biologists, and for that matter anyone remotely familiar with fisheries management, recognize as quackery.

Even as the tragedy was unfolding on Big Reed, bucket biologists were creating another at Wadleigh Pond, which had been providing the best Arctic char fishing in the state. Alien smelts were discovered there in 2006. Like Big Reed, Wadleigh is on the small and shallow side for char water. Frost reports that its char are already in decline. There is no plan to evacuate survivors or to use rotenone to kill the smelts. The department says it doesn’t have the funds.

Native-fish advocates argue that the department could divert funds from wasteful and misguided programs such as splake production. Maybe so, but these advocates need to redirect some of their bile toward the public and the legislature, both of which appear perfectly content with a funding system that has made effective fish-and-wildlife management impossible in states like Maine (i.e., most states), where virtually all revenue comes from fishing, hunting and trapping licenses and federal excise taxes on guns, ammo, hunting equipment, fishing tackle and motorboat fuel. If all state residents contributed to fish-and-wildlife management in Maine (as they do through sales taxes in Missouri, Arkansas and Minnesota), wild char would now be recovering in Big Reed and Wadleigh, and populations in the other 10 native char ponds would be well-studied and surveyed.