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Related Articles • The Natural World: Wildlife • NYT: Science Forum
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BISHOP, Calif., Nov. 27 — The crystal mountain lakes of the Sierra Nevada, set among verdant meadows and snowy granite peaks, have become known throughout the world as a paradise for trout fishing.
But this anglers' heaven is man-made. Like most high-elevation lakes in the West, almost all of those in the Sierra were originally fishless. The trout got their start in hatcheries and were placed by the millions in the lakes by the California Department of Fish and Game.
The trout stocking, scientists are... Click HERE for the article.
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Varmint Al's comments:
A better title for the article would be: 'Scientists?' Play God on OUR Land & Using OUR money.
Or how about: Scientists, evolving half-a-brain, attempt to Halt Evolution!
At this point, I would like to say that if the Eco Nuts keep trying to preserve species that are not hearty enough to survive on their own then it will be like a house of cards. Old species die off leaving room for new species to evolve. When we intervene and prop up species that are no longer suited to survive, we are setting the stage for a catastrophic failure of the ecosystem.
I know of the areas where these 'Scientists' are doing their studies. Mary Ann and I have gone Backpacking There almost every year for the last 25 years. Here are the kind of trout they want to eliminate for a bunch of yellow legged frogs.
I wholehardedly agree. And that is what is wrong with the whole environmental movement -- they don't allow for evolution: the weak die off, the strong survive.
I too fish, hike and camp in the Sierras near Bishop and have seen some of these wacky "scientists" doing studies on the taxpayer dime. They are spending millions of taxpayer dollars on "studies" they will chase the "taxpayer" off -- of course they will still be there to "study" the wilderness for us.
-- A Sierra Campground Manager
Let me propose this compromise: quit stocking with tax dollars and let the trout remain if they can.
They already have killed off the trout (now called non-native species) at Mt. Rainier National Park, justifying their actions by saying that amphibians are on the decline worldwide, fish eat amphibians, therefore we will do our part to "think globally, act locally," by voluntarily killing off our trout first.
During the last ice age those mountains where the frogs live had absolutely nothing living on their slopes. Mt. Shasta, for example, actually has great mounds of glacial til at the bottom. This was carried there by the massive glaciers that encompassed the mountain from its top to its base.
So, whatever animals live on top of those mountains are, in geologic or evolutionary terms, newcomers.
We might ask why the frogs got there but the trout didn't, and that would be an easy answer - FROGS CAN HOP. Fish have to swim!
Still, the difference in their arrival times is absolutely meaningless in terms of nativity of the species involved. If the trout can live there, and the frogs have a harder time because of the presence of the trout, all that means is that the trout are better suited to the environment and the frogs should be sent to a more habitable environment.
At some point here we really have to take some of these phony environmentalist anti-game managers and give them the Doge Treatment.
As a `former` CA. resident of Nevada County, I can TRULY appreciate what you are going through
KALIFORNKIA, lost it`s political MIND MANY years ago
The EnviroNAZIS have wrecked that beautiful state
They Deserve the problems that they Now have with energy, etc, they ASKED for it when they went to the POLLS AND VOTED COMMUNISTA.........
The EnviroNAZIS have wrecked that beautiful state
And the EnviroNAZIS think some animals are more equal than others. These EnviroNAZIS are the products of our liberal colleges. I guess a Golden Trout is not a PC animal, but a yellow legged frog is! It really hurts that they are using mine and your tax dollars to do the study and fund the kill-off.
One of my most treasured memories is a 3 day hike my family and I took when I was 16. It was in the desolation wilderness area south of Lake Tahoe. An area so beautiful and pristine it even now takes my breath away just thinking about it 30 years later. At the head of the lake where we made our camp there was a complex series of canals made by beavers, and within those impossibly clear still waters lived some of the most amazing trout I have ever seen, 24 inches at least, so alert and powerful you could only get a glimpse before they would rocket away. To be sure they would be fearsome predators, but that lake was also home to hundreds of little water snakes. Given the tadpoles propensity for the edges and shallows of ponds, these snakes doubtless get far greater access to tadpoles than those majestic giants I remember.
I remember when they were blaming acid rain for causing deformed frogs. Then, come to find out, it was a tiny parasite that was causing the deformities on the embryos. Could they be blaming the trout for what snakes, insets or possibly parasites are doing? Sometimes a problem can be studied to death! Also if one tries to fix a problem, assuming one exists, without knowing the cause, the fix is almost always the start of a NEW larger problem.
I've had trout taken from high mountain lakes in the Rockies.
Delicious.
The same "wildlife managers" are very precise about you having a fishing license. Strange.
Around here they are rather sneakily cutting down all the "non-native" trees they can get away with cutting down in forest preserves, and have a host of eager idiots tryin' to turn it back to native "prairie".
'Course, tell them that a good deal of the native "prairie", especially in "the Prairie State", was the artificial creation of invading Plains Indians, who burned forest deliberately to expand the range of buffalo, and they look at you cross-eyed.
Guess Injuns, 'specially extinct ones and of all humans—if any, anywhere, and anywhen—still qualify as "natural."
Almost as good as elephants, who, when they have the time, destroy as much forest as they can in East Africa, thus producing their own extended grasslands.
Soybeans, cattle, horses, and most Environmentalist and Wildlife wackos ain't natives here either.
Well, some envisage the possibility that there were a minscule band or two of surviving native horses before the Spanish arrived.
On the other hand, it was idiotic "scientists" who were ultimately responsible for destroying the spreading chestnut trees that once made up a glorious, commercially and personally priceless eastern forest, wasn't it?
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
Ooops—Miniscule.
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
Before the "Native Americans" arrived to kill off the people who lived here, there were millions of scrub oxen and small horses. Once they had eradicated these species along with the wooly mammoth they needed a substitute source of food and skins, so they brought bison over from Asia, and wolves with them. Both are introduced species. The wolves especially made a mess of things.
Tell that to an econut and watch their eyes glaze over.
I like it. Not entirely fantastic in all details either, eh?
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
Beautiful fish. My favorite technique in the High Sierra was to tie a bare fly hook to a tapered leader and the leader to a clear torpedo bob on a spinning reel, then find a grub in a creek. It was the surest way to dinner and really cut back on the amount I had to carry on a two week solo-cross-country.
My faves were Miller Lake, Matterhorn Canyon, Rogers Creek, Shadow and Twin Island Lakes (on the back side of the Ritter Range probably the most amazing place I ever camped), Sadler Lake, once got a beautiful Golden in Devil's Lake... McCabe Lakes were cool, Babcock was fun until it got overrun in the 60s...
Do you get Range Magazine? I can recommend it highly for the occasionally great scientific article from off the PC path. The bit about the scrub ox and the wolf was about nine months ago I think. I could ask CJ for a reference if you need it some time.
Many thanks for the reference, Carry_Okie. I've never seen it, but I'll look into it.
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
Many, many thanks, Carry_Okie.
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
You are quite welcome. Merry Christmas to you and yours.
Here are the kind of trout they want to eliminate for a bunch of yellow legged frogs.
I think they really want to eliminate green legged fishermen. Only those that subscribe to a certain behaviour are welcome up there. Sound familiar?
i'm a life long Bishop native and these enviro nazis have been tring to screw things up for years.
the sierra club has been doing more damage than good eversince i can remember.
Merry Christimas to all of you and yours in return, Carry_Okie, and every success and blessing for the New Year.
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
The brain surgons we have out here in Idaho aren't any better. The White Pelicans showed up on the Southfork of the Snake River in 1988 during the Yellowstone fires and decided they liked it pretty good here. They are very prolific and have multiplied. they eat surface feeding fish in our case the native cuttroat trout, the rainbow trout mostly feed on nymphs on the bottom of the river. Well our bioligists are killing the rainbow Trout during their Fall electro shock counting as they think they are eating the Cuttroat Trout. The rainbow/cuttroat balance has remained the same for 70 years until the Pelicans showed up. Now they want to eliminate the better fighting sport fish instead having open season on the Pelicans.
About the Frogs, up in Yellowstone a short way from where I live they are blaming the drop of amphibians in the fishless lakes on global climate change. So what we have is California Bioligists coming to a hasty but convient conclusion resulting from the same alleged phenonoma in a different part of the country but drawing a different conslusion. I hope they can put their heads together (f they can find them) before they kill all of your fish also.
more of my fish photos
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Posted on another site by Jordan. I am putting it here for comment. Has Jordan out foxed the Liberals at their own game??.....
If the frog cannot adapt to its new environment [Golden Trout as predator?] then maybe evolution is saying it is time for the frog to go? Either adapt or perish. The environmentalists will say that because the trout was introduced into the frog's environment "unnaturally" [i.e., by man] that the frog is not really "maladapted" [i.e., deserving of extinction, so to speak]. The presence of golden trout in its environment is not a natural occurrence, but an artificial effect [caused by man].
But question: isn't man [and his effect on the frog's environment] the product of evolution too? When man acts to alter his environment, why is the result somehow unnatural [such that we must then take action to remediate or correct its the environmental effects] when in truth, man is only using the abilities evolution endowed him with and thus acting in a way evolution apparently intended him to act? Why isn't man just acting "naturally" [and therefore, in accordance with evolution] when he stocks alpine fisheries with Golden Trout, even if it is to the detriment of the golden legged frog?
Francis Crick, [the discoverer of DNA and an inveterate darwinist] wrote a famous book some years ago whose central thesis was that all of human thought is determined by biological and chemical mechanisms in the brain over which we have absolutely no control. This philosophy, [called "materialism"], is the product of a metaphysical [i.e., religious] assumption. The assumption is that the universe is a permanently closed system of material cause and effect. This is the reigning metaphysical assumption behind darwinian evolution and one in which we were all well indoctrinated throughout our public school tenure. Among other things, materialism implies that freedom of thought and action is entirely illusory. The ideas of freedom of thought or action are ideas which are the product of our prescientific imaginations. We now know better than to think that man has a soul or a "spirit". We now know [or so it is alleged] that our true creator is the blind, material, purposeless, random forces of nature.
Thus, on darwinian premises, the actions of those research biologists [undobtedly all evolutionists and materialists] who are attempting to "save" the frog cannot on the premises of their own religious faith, in any sense, be regarded as doing anything "true" or "virtuous" or "worthwhile". Indeed, "saving" the yellow-legged frog is not an activity which in and of itself can have any particular virtue, anymore than the actions of those original conservationists who stocked the Sierra ponds with trout can be regarded as bad or good. Indeed, since all thought [and thus behavior] is chemically or biologically determined, truth and freedom itself are illusions.
Berkely law professor Phillip Johnson has done a very good job [in several books---"Darwin on Trial, "Reason in the Balance", all available from Intervarsity Press] of of identifying "materialism" as the reigning philosophy in law, science and education and how it influences so much of human thought. Truly, it is the "religion" of the modern intellectual.
I do not believe in neo-darwinian evolution because I think it is a theory which is thoroughly contradicted by the scientific evidence. My only point here is that whenever the environmentalists want to justify a particular result as being a good thing, they use words like "natural" and "evolved" to describe it. When a bad effect occurs, they use words like "unnatural" and "man-made" to descibe [and therefore, condemn] it. The former is good; the latter bad. But they cannot have it both ways: they cannot, on the one hand, describe every desired outcome as "natural" or "evolved" [and therefore "good"] while simultaneously eliminating man and his influence upon the environment from the category of the "good" by obscuring or ignoring the fact that man too is a product of the blind, purposeless, random forces of evolution. On their own premises, man and his effect on the environment are as "good" and "natural" as the conditions in the most pristine alpine lake. Moreover, by obscuring the axiomatic assumption of their materialist religion [to wit: that man's thoughts are completely determined] they ignore and obscure the necessary implication of their metaphysics: that human freedom [even the freedom to save frogs] is an illusion. Indeed, on the premises of modern environmentalism, there is no way to determine whether saving the frog is even a good thing.
Just rambling...
Jordan
Humans today are the winners in Darwins race of survival of the fittest. So far we are more fit than the rest. The Question is if our supurb fittness, overwelming the fittness of the rest washes or not?
Just rambeling
Daryl
The bison reached the east coast for the first time around 1500 due to the Indians burning the forests and expanding the grasslands. Then the Europeans arrived gave them rifles and drove the bison and elk right back to the plains. There aren't a lot of people that know that Indian and fire history you mentioned------ Daryl
Gymers gets it exactly right. This was so well said, I am posting it here from the Go Go Varmint Go Political Message board. If you want to read the rest of the posts there, here is the URL: http://www.varminthunters.com/cgi-bin/polyboard.pl
I'll take those frog legs sautéed, please
Posted By: Gmyers In Response To: Re:
Time to go frog gigging (Aaron) Look, this isn't about saving one species over another or keeping species
around until a medical need can be found for them. This isn't even about
democracy, because we don't live in one. And this isn't about how an obsolete
group of people called the American Indians were "right" and how
landowning Americans are wrong. However, in our country we DO own the land and
the creatures on it. We may not take it to heaven with us, but as long as we
possess title, it's ours.
Private land ownership is not a BAD thing, it is the BEST thing, because no
one takes better care of land than an owner. The Indians simply had that wrong
-- in the end their society lacked the financial incentive to populate this
country to the point where they could protect it from outsiders. You can dream
about a society "sharing" everything, like the land and animals, but
in the end that's communism and it simply does not work. It is therefore not
good.
At the risk of over generalizing, America is about the greatest good for the
greatest many, and the damned spotted owls and striped frogs do not count for
much on that scale. Without trout in those high mountain streams there won't be
much reason to save them, and not many people are going to follow some eco-nut's
imperative to hike high into the mountains just to view the comely frog.
It is also clear to anyone who is watching that species are only endangered
so that government researchers and their institutions can justify increasing
revenues for growing environmental activities, because most of their work helps
few if any people other than themselves. And virtually no one would miss these
species were they to disappear.
The sappy talk about species becoming valuable medical discoveries at some
undetermined future time is just that -- sappy talk. Little of our
pharmaceutical discoveries are made in the high Sierras, certainly not enough to
risk people's fishing trips.
In reality, the species labeled endangered act is all about proliferation of
an elite group of scientists who would have to find real work without the
regulation. Approximately 80% of life scientists in this country are employed by
the government, and the number of taxes, fees, and regulations put in place over
the past 30 years to feed, house, and clothe them is a pathetic illustration of
our government run amok on our tax dollars.
Don't get me wrong. I like wildlife and wild lands. In fact, I worked hard
for 10 years to help save a river from damaging development. And my heritage is
more than just hunt, kill, eat. But it is VERY MUCH inclusive of hunt, kill,
eat, and the species labeled endangered act is government overreaching at its
worse.
To hell with the frogs.
Date: 20:09:26 12/25/2000
There are already plenty of places for the yellow-legged frogs without killing trout.
For the frogs, there are many High Sierra lakes that are troutless. The wife and I have gone on numerous backpacking trips and have seen such lakes. To me, they are DEAD lakes. I don’t want to see once beautiful lakes full of trout turned into DEAD lakes for the sake of a few frogs that already have lakes to live in. When I see the trout rise in a lake it has the breath of life. The tiny frogs don’t count. What the Eco-Freaks don’t tell you is that the frog populations are dwindling even in these troutless lakes. They don’t know why and if the try to FIX a problem without knowing the cause, it will only be the start of a much larger problem. Killing the trout will kill everything in the lakes. That is not good. Too much education is sometimes a bad thing when one loses common sense. Cmyer has stated it very well in his post and I completely agree with him.
The wife and I witnessed first hand the tampering with the South Fork of the Kern River. We had backpacked into Ramshaw Meadow for years. One year, there were no trout. They had completely killed off all of the fish to rid the stream of brown trout. They took 100 Golden trout over to (Golden Trout Creek) and impounded them while they did the killing. Heaven only knows what happened down stream where the rotenone went. Before the action, there were a few brown trout that ate some of the small Golden trout, but the stream was full of large Golden trout. Every pool had 4 or 5 really beautiful healthy Golden trout. Once in a while I would catch a brown trout but it was rare. Two years after the killing process, each pool had about a hundred Golden trout about 3 inches long. At 4 inches, they are mature breeding fish and now that is all that is in the stream from the upper reaches of Tunnel Meadow all the way down to Monache Meadow. A once productive fishery has been destroyed. Also the genetic diversity that was in the original population of Golden trout has been drastically narrowed from using only 100 fish. Dr. Phister (sp) who did the deed thought he was doing the right thing and he was wrong. Now he is long gone and his failure still survives.
Another thought. It might just be that the trout are eating insects that, left uncontrolled, could be harmful to the existing frogs. These so called scientists don’t really know all of the ramifications that they would be causing. One hundred years of co-existence between trout and frogs speaks loudly if one will only listen.
Good Golden Trout from Varmint Al
A Bump to promote Equal Rights for Golden Trout!
I have read that those same damn frogs are disappearing in fishless lakes as well. Hmmmmm..... I also believe species have been going extinct since long before man arrived on the scene....hmmmmm... Where does it all end?
Some people cannot face the harsh realities of life. Among other things, we call those people "liberals."
This is a crime...
V. good post and thanks
Early morning bump!
I know this sounds wacky but I just read an article in the Smithsonian Magazine (don't know the month but within the last two or three) that said that night crawlers are significantly changing the econsystem because they are chewing up the leaf litter where some insects and amphibians live. Makes sense to me and could explane the frog die off. and the great thing about it - the wackos can't stop it. How would they be able to kill all the nightcrawlers?
Yeah. We stock the trout in areas they are not native to. We pass laws which prohibit over-fishing trout and oother laws which prohibit fishing trout out of season. We displace the native wildlife for purposes of sport. And then, when we finally realize that native species are becoming rare due to the imposition of non-native species, we leap forward and call this Darwinism!
I wonder how the enviromentalists plan to get rid of the trout. Perhaps we should quit restocking the lakes and see what happens.
If we quit restocking, there wouldn't be a trout left in America a decade from now.
I love fly fishing rivers and streams. I even fly fish in Salt Water. But if our stocking efforts are disrupting the natural balance, then they are defeating the purpose many "sportsmen" have in mind.
Can you believe this?
Frogs take over Big Island in Hawaii
Funny! Better transport them to those trout lakes.
More examples of Eco-Freaks gone mad. I just got this email:
The Olympic National Park is eliminating mountain goats because they were planted in the Olympic Mountains by sportsmen many years before the park was created. They have killed a bunch, exported a few, but public outcry has silenced them on the subject. There are still a few goats left. We are not sure whether or not they are still killing them. However, they want to import Canadian wolves into the park. We residents of the Olympic Peninsula don't believe those wolves can read park boundary signs.
There are so many frogs and salamanders here that all you have to do is dig a hole and:
1- It will fill with water.
2- It will fill with frogs and salamanders.
Getting fish in a pond is a lot more complicated.
Try fighting the Canadian wolves as an introduced species. They were brought here during the migration of Clovis man. I wish I had the references on this one or I would give them to you.
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