Tim Smith

Jude was also gracious enough to make the Jude Bug available to new ISA sign ups. That was a generous gesture that was well received. I thought it made a very positive statement about what the ISA is all about.

Sounds like a "cool" trip, Jack. I caught my first smallmouth on the Caddo immediately south of the Ouachita. Terrific streams down there.

What's the nature of the waste being dumped there? Is that technical paper available? It's hard to see something like that and sit idly by.

Jude is going to get a reputation as a fly tier at this rate. The resume is getting longer and more prestigious every year.

I'll be there Sunday, Schad. Hopefully I'll see you there.

Thanks for the posting, Mike. Interesting to see all the exotic plant control measures on the list. This may actually be the year I give in and get my herbicide training...if the Nature Conservancy and every other natural resources group in the state is doing it, I guess I can at least get certified.

Jonn's just a remarkable angler. I'm really looking forward to fishing with him this year.

We can't ban them yet. Ray's coming to the blowout. I owe him his first drink.

HA! Bears win if any two of the following occur: 1. Colts run defense is what we think it is. 2. Good Rex shows up. 3. Peyton starts daydreaming about how to get the remaining 10% of the Colts payroll that isn't his. 4. Bears are +3 in turnovers or more. 5. Hester breaks one (or two). Colts win if: 1. A heavily armed group of Bobby Knight impersonators hijacks the Bear's bus on the way to the stadium. 2. The Bear's pre-game meal has been poisoned. 3. The refs are all from French Lick. 4. High school sweetheart from Bloomington blackmails Rex with paternity suit. 5. There is no God.

If that were a smallmouth, the bat would have been toast. I've seen bass take down snakes and try for ducklings....that's the first attack I've seen by any fish on a BAT! *edit...Although this one does seem to deserve an asterisk because it appears to be staged.

Yes, Paul. On average, if the pike we have don't adapt and temperatures continue to rise, they will be under more temperature stress and they will eventually disappear in Illinois. It's not impossible that the pike won't adapt. Some esocids don't mind heat. I used to catch chain pickrel (jack fish they were called), in my native state of Louisiana. There is a substantial amount of research funding being channeled into "global warming" issues like these. They're virtually frantic in California right now trying to deal with heat issues in their already stressed salmonid populations.

The Page map is similar to the one you cite, Brian, except it extends the range around the western margin of Lake Superior, Brian. I don't know what data Larry uses to justify that map. The analogy to spotted bass/smallmouth bass is a good one. In this case, it's temperature rather than silt that seems to be the critical environmental factor. If you don't want spotted bass in your stream, limit sediment and erosion. It's interesting to note that some web sites will blame spotted bass range expansions on stocking. Stephen Forbes 19th century data from the Middle Fork of the Vermilion, demonstrates that spotted bass have always been around. I do buy into the "native" vs. "exotic" dichotomy. It's true that the details around the edges are sometimes a bit difficult to sort out. But there are strong biological reasons to care about what came from where. Evolutionarily novel species are more likely to strongly affect ecosystems when they enter them. That can lead to extinctions and disrupt ecosystem function.

I suppose I'm going to start looking obstinate here. I might even be wrong. So be it. Much of the land area of BWCA is in the Lake Superior basin. Lake Superior is clearly in the historial range of smallmouth bass. During periods of warmer climate they would have easily entered the drainages adjacent to the lake. During cold periods, they would have winked out again. It would have been harder and less likely for smallmouth to have entered the Hudson Bay drainage, but that's also possible during a warm period. Less than 100 years of anecdotal historical data is barely a tick on the clock for what matters in these systems. Wide-spread stocking of smallmouth bass was not a good idea, but it's just not plausible to me that smallmouth bass were not in that area at some point in the last several hundred years. In the case of what's truly "invasive", hundreds and thousands of years are the appropriate time scale rather than dozens of years. That's because the relevant process that moderate the strength of an invasive event are evolution and natural selection. That's how long it takes evolution to operate. Species that have adapated to each other tend to affect each other less strongly. In this case, these are species that compete along a temperature gradient. Cold favors the lake trout walleye and white fish, warm favors the smallmouth. A natural see-saw of range distributions should have been occurring in the area over thousands of years. Larry Page is no small potatoes when it comes to icthyology ( http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/staff/Page.htm ). I'll trust his range map for now.

Mike, I'm buying that the fish were spread further and faster than they would have on their own. It would have been better if that had not happened. In those lakes they are "invasive", and they may well be posing problems in specific oligotrophic lakes where they would not normally have occurred. However, if you look at the range maps in Page and Burr's Freshwater Fishes, BWCA and Quetico represent the northern edge of the smallmouth range. I suppose that range map might be wrong. That would surprise me because Larry Page is an expert in the field and his range maps specifically differentiate between native and introduced range. If this source is correct, then smallmouth bass were native to at least some systems in the Quetico area. It might be reasonable to manage smallmouth as a catch and kill fishery in Quetico, but it doesn't seem that they're invasive there the way they are in Idaho or California where they were stocked with biota that have never before had to co-exist with them. Over the scales of hundreds of years, it seems likely that smallmouth would have passed through Quetico a time or two. Species wink in and out of local systems all the time for lots of different reasons. In the 19th century, Stephen Forbes didn't find smallmouth in the Middle Fork of the Vermilion (even though that's ideal smallmouth habitat). They had been pushed out by possibly by siltation from mining and spotted bass, but have returned in force since then. The process of local species turnover occurs more slowly in lakes, but it still occurs. Again, it also seems likely that smallmouth populations would be expanding into new areas in Quetico even if sportfishers had not put them there. With gradual warming, you can expect the smallmouth (and even largemouth) to do better and better in Quetico over time. Those systems are getting appreciably warmer. One of the best indicators of global warming has been the gradual shift of ice cover in lakes in the upper Midwest. Here's a century and a half of data from Lake Mendota. http://www.aos.wisc.edu/~sco/lakes/mendota-dur.gif Here's an article about a global survey of ice out dates, showing an average decline in annual ice cover of 18 days. http://intranet.lternet.edu/archives/docum...all00_pg06.html Northward expansions of warm water fish and contractions of cool water fish ranges are the rule, not the exception these days. Steelhead populations are under stress and declining from heat well into northern Califorina, yet in the last 100 years, they occurred as far south as Baja. Two hundred years ago, some streams in Chicago would have had more brook trout than smallmouth. As temperatures rose and stream quality declined, so did the brook trout. Smallmouth probably contributed to that decline too. We should keep those streams as clean as we can and if it were possible to re-establish brook trout there we should (don't hold your breath)... ...but I'm not willing to call smallmouth invasives in Chicago. The term seems only slightly less grating in Quetico. *note...I believe I once told Paul T. that smallmouth bass were non-native in Algonquin and not Quetico, but I notice here that Page and Burr also include Algonqin as part of the native range of smallmouth bass. Those systems may be more similar in character than I realized.

Thanks for the link, Brian. Put me down as dubious regarding the "invasive" status of smallmouth bass in Quetico. I agree a "naturalized" invasive should be treated differently from a native species, but Quetico should have had a natural population of smallmouth in the recent past. They're common in the Great Lakes drainage and Minnesota all the way up to the park (although the park is on their northern boundary). Perhaps they are considered invasives only in specific lakes. I wonder too if Quetico is over-extending research done in Algonquin Provencial Park that shows smallmouth bass out-compete and harm lake trout populations in low-nutrient lakes. That research is cited in the management plan. Nobody repeat this, but I hear there is a bias against warm-water fish species in some quarters.

Mike, count me among those shocked. I thought smallmouth's pre-Columbian range extended into that area.

HA! Welcome to the ISA boards, Ray! Imagine me doing my best Lovie Smith (that a skinny white former strong safety/middle linebacker can do) and saying...."We'll jest have t' wayt till Sund'y t' fand owt abowt thayt." Bear down Bears!

Nice! C'mon ISC guys....your Colts are favored by a touchdown! You gotta take this one!

Illinois has two native species of sticklebacks. Nine-spined stickleback http://www.unb.ca/cri/projects/Fish_key/Ga.../9_spine_MG.htm and brook stickleback http://www.iowadnr.com/fish/iafish/bsb-card.html Brian's link is to the 3 spined stickleback which is distributed on both coasts as well as the eastern hemisphere but is an exotic invader in the Great Lakes. I'm not aware of range expansions of 3 spined sticklebacks outside the Great Lakes or its' tributaries, but that may easily have occurred. If this is a stickleback, it's probably a brook stickleback. It may have snuck into the fathead minnow pond where the aquaculturist was raising them and been shipped out with the rest. It's pretty common in aquaculture to have a few oops! species in with the crop. If this were a three-spined stickleback, this bait shop could be expanding the range of an exotic species. Even if this is only a brook stickleback, or a nine-spine, transfering species between systems is always a bad idea. Accidental (or intentional) releases of these fish could unnaturally expand their native range. Disease transfers are a possibility as well. As Brian suggests, this is the very reason you shouldn't dump your minnows out in the lake. If there's a gentle way to discourage the selling of these fish by your bait distributor, that would be an excellent thing to do. Some places have very stringent laws regarding bait-bucket transfers. We may already be headed in that direction, but the last I knew, the bait sellers are still policing themselves.

Just a bit, Gary.

Am I in Illinois? Isn't this the place the college footballl commentators say...."Ohh....you don't want to play football in Champaign in December" Look what was in my yard this morning...on January 15th???? Crocuses too.

As I've already mentioned, this was not a banner smallmouth year for me. However, I did manage to catch some fish... ...THIS one was exactly 4' long. Great Baracuda. Caught it trolling a diving rapala while riding back from helping an EcoWatch project on Frank's Caye in Belize. The guy in the picture is Matthew Garbutt. He was my ride, and a good guy. If you're ever in Punta Gorda, Belize, look him up. That's the biggest fish I've caught since the mid-Eighties.

Welcome John!

Jamie, You could think of those largemouth as an invader, but there have probably always been a few largemouth bass in those watersheds. The problems for the Topeka shiner started when the numbers of bass in those watersheds were cranked up to un-naturally high levels. To me, this kind of study points toward the need to keep ecosystems as natural as possible and keeping our fisheries as natural as possible too. There are places where the local species are adapted to bass and places where the local species can't handle bass. To us, that means when we go fishing, we're not just fishing for smallmouth. We're fishing for smallmouth in a specific ecosystem with a specific history stretching back tens of thousands of years. We want to fit into that history in a way that keeps the pieces of that ecosystem intact as much as we're able.

Yep. The more bass there were in the pools, and the more small impoundments were present in the watersheds, the fewer of the endangered minnow were present. It appears from the text that both species use both natural and artificial pools as habitat...certainly that's true for largemouth bass. I don't think the age of the study is of much concern. Six years is just the blink of an eye in the life of a stream. There may be other studies out there about this now, but even this study is "new" information from an ecological perspective. Nope. They checked and water quality wasn't a factor. As you say, Gary, other things that aren't discussed here may have affected the distribution of the minnow (depth of the pool, oxygen, temperature), but there are no data available to support that view (By the way, if you're looking for bias in ecological data, that's the primary way...perhaps the only significant way...it appears. You can only find what you're looking for. That's not to imply at all that this study is malicious, it just has the limitations of every other study in the world. It doesn't have the resources to look at everything and it doesn't address the role of some other factors.). Still the data do support the hypothesis that the likely cause of the minnow's decline is that bass are eating the minnow. Notice too, the bass appear to be getting into the stream from small impoundments. I would bet those are very small streams where bass would not normally survive for many years at a time. It's probably the constant re-introduction of bass from the ponds that keeps them in place (much like bluegill in small Illinois streams...bluegill are not a small river species). What would be a reasonable management response? Banning largemouth stocking in impoundments where this minnow occurs (it is a Federally endangered minnow, and that's not impossible)? Largemouth bass removal from the streams? How might this kind of problem affect us in Illinois? We don't have Topeka shiner, but we have quite a few other types of endangered prey species.