fuzzis
09-12-2007, 01:14 PM
California Officials Tackle a Toothy Lake Predator (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/us/12pike.html)
...For the last decade, the state of California has waged a Sisyphean battle against the northern pike, a fish and a voracious eating machine. In the mid-1990s, when pike were first found in Lake Davis, a Sierra Nevada reservoir about four miles north of here, the discovery set off a panic over the potential impact on the local trout-fishing and tourist industries as well as the possibility of the fish migrating to fragile ecosystems downstream. Since then, millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours have been spent trying to spike the pike.
But while the methods, including poison, electro-fishing, explosives and decidedly low-tech nets, have varied, the results have remained the same.
“We’ve taken 65,000 pike out of the lake,” said Steve Martarano, a spokesman for the State Department of Fish and Game. “And we haven’t made a dent.” ...
I remember the controversy the first time they poisoned the lake. It was ugly but apparently in a decade, people have begun to see the impact of the pike on the native fish and see that something has to be done. This time they're poisoning tributaries up to four miles away.
Hope it works.
...For the last decade, the state of California has waged a Sisyphean battle against the northern pike, a fish and a voracious eating machine. In the mid-1990s, when pike were first found in Lake Davis, a Sierra Nevada reservoir about four miles north of here, the discovery set off a panic over the potential impact on the local trout-fishing and tourist industries as well as the possibility of the fish migrating to fragile ecosystems downstream. Since then, millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours have been spent trying to spike the pike.
But while the methods, including poison, electro-fishing, explosives and decidedly low-tech nets, have varied, the results have remained the same.
“We’ve taken 65,000 pike out of the lake,” said Steve Martarano, a spokesman for the State Department of Fish and Game. “And we haven’t made a dent.” ...
I remember the controversy the first time they poisoned the lake. It was ugly but apparently in a decade, people have begun to see the impact of the pike on the native fish and see that something has to be done. This time they're poisoning tributaries up to four miles away.
Hope it works.