Now they’re not so sure.

Recent studies suggest the adipose fin is crucial to fish, aiding it in navigating turbulent water.

With the tiny fin removed, he says the fish need to use much more energy to maintain position and speed in the water.

- via CBC News Canada

Given that the practice is especially prevalent with salmonids, which re-enter fresh water when it is most turbulent, it may have been one of many reasons why hatchery fish have never adequately replaced indigenous populations.

Makes you wonder whether we’ve been our own worst enemy, accidentally even. 

The short version is that a panel of 11 scientists from Colorado State University, Trout Unlimited, the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station, the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group, have released a study of four trout species that suggests we’ll be losing half of all trout habitat over the next seventy years.

Most of that loss will be attributed to rising temperatures and global warming, and depending on which warming model is chosen – will dictate how much and how fast – and determines whether we care whether girls use saddle hackles or mule dung in their hair …

Congress is adamant the size of government must be reduced, given we owe most of the GDP to those countries still able to buy our debt, and depending on how much we decide to divest, will be eager to prune wasteful dollars funding watchdog agencies and trout planting – areas that hinder industry from creating  millions of jobs, or serve only the privileged few … us fishermen.

Trout Unlimited and every privately funded conservation group added together couldn’t save  a single river, especially so due to the waves of genetically-superior invasives outcompeting historical residents. Carp might be able to survive a couple of decades longer, but standoffish salmonids have no chance whatsoever.

Mostly because you guys balked when AquaBounty insisted they could insert the gene for sharp teeth and claws – which would’ve allowed them to go toe to toe with all those foreign regiments climbing out of the bilge water.

Instead you left their fate to boards of directors filled with well meaning retirees gashing themselves over “how come they let them trout’s die,” whose wailing lent wings to global warming.

This being the age of Tea Parties, Beauty Queens from Alaska, and indistinguishable political parties, who’ve got no reason to keep industry in check, or slow their exploitation. Well meaning types weakened by foreclosure and the enforced idleness that comes with 24 months of unemployment, are likely to let down their at the lure of lasting and permanent jobs. Most of those will be cleaning the Pristine because BP fracked it, or something equally poisonous.

That’s more than likely the causal agent of most of the habitat loss, only the body scientific is reluctant to confess and endanger additional grants.

Should the globe warm a couple of degrees as science is predicting, that’ll clear both coastline and interior so they can pave and erect great glass edifices proclaiming our victory over Nature; how we booted Bambi from crapping on all that real estate – and gave her a spacious suite at the Zoo as reward …

They’re hurting, these men of a certain age. Losing their livelihood isn’t the only “transition” they’re going through. Dr. Jed Diamond, author of Surviving Male Menopause and The Irritable Male Syndrome, calls it a “double whammy.” The first: “a change of life, hormonally based, affecting our psychology and emotions from 40 to 55.” The second: unemployment. “It’s devastating. The extreme reaction is suicide, but before you get there, there’s irritability and anger, fatigue, loss of energy, withdrawal, drinking, more fights with their wives.”

- from Dead Suit Walking, Newsweek Magazine

Newsweek calls our demographic the “Beached White Male” (BWM), suggesting the real casualties of the recession being middle aged college educated white boys. Add in all them guts spilling over waistlines and the Type II Diabetes epidemic that’s about to leave the streets paved in corpses -  and our generation will have destroyed most of the tillable sections of the globe, as well as eliminated any need for (non televised) sports, the out of doors, and John Wayne …

… then paid the price in one spasmodic orgy of cholesterol.

Which I find strangely appropriate, proof that despite all the advances of science we’ve never listened to anything other than our reproductive organs and our gut – settling the whole issue about whether we read it for the pictures or the articles …

As most of you already know

Now researchers claim they can render us completely invisible to the hosts of blood sucking insects by giving us a repellant that will cause complete sensory overload to all the creepy crawly things that are determined to make the out-of-doors experience miserable and demeaning.

… to the gals mostly, us real woodsmen delight in bleeding profusely, and show our scars at the least provocation …

The good news is that it’s “1000 times more powerful than DEET.” Which was removed from shelves due to its propensity to lower your kid’s IQ and cause numerous birth defects. A thousand times more powerful suggests that probability may be inching towards certainty, which may make sales to those under 65 illegal.

… not to worry, fly shops will sell little crack vials to them as able to reproduce, for six or seven times the normal markup … Or I will, in the parking lot … for even more.

We’ll have to wait a bit longer to be atomized and reassembled, but the burgeoning field of “3D Printing” should have the capability to crap solid objects out of the ether …

… so long as there’s plenty of “ink” in your printer, maybe even a fly rod or two …

As we’ve already got our expectations for junk food flavor set as low as possible, you can imagine how Madison Ave will insist on your 9 PM telly being dominated by flavorful and steaming, lush rich colors – and while your forebrain will warn you as you swipe the debit card through your computer, it’ll be too late.

… the flaccid, greasy, thing is already winging its way to you, burping itself into your outstretched hand …

It’ll be a bold new world when you press the “Dozen Adam’s” key … and I’ll be glad I’m able to skip the sodden result …

We’ve not heard words like

As has been well documented, science has issue with bovine flatulence and is determined to save the ozone layer at the cost of your filet mignon. Dutch scientists are postulating that insect meat has everything necessary to sustain humans, and what’s better is they lack that big flabby mammalian abdomen to bust musty …

No, they didn’t ask you to vote on flank versus feelers, they just assumed you’d eat what was put in front of you. More “felt sole science” – slap it on a plate – legislate your allegiance, and hope the science eventually lives up to the marketing.

Whether insect meat actually exists is a topic of much debate. Our West Coast insects are comprised of flimsy exoskeleton containing yellow goo – which alternately compresses and fragments when harvested by car windshield. I’ll assume the ersatz-beef made of insects will only be realized when the nutritionists from McDonald’s mix the soft jam-like innards with wood chips – or something similar.

I’m willing to bet that both flavor and texture might well be solved quickly, given our penchant for already-cooked cardboard dinners. “Rare” might be a thing of the past, but only because the scaly wings and most of the eyeballs burn off in the “well done” variant.

For us fishermen it’ll test our resolve. Which of us wouldn’t be tempted to bust a corner off our burger to start the hatch at 2:30 …

… and aren’t we glad that fish have scruples?

Californians are known to house most of the native crazies, much of the lower 48 exports their antisocial types to the coast, where we hose them down and provide a change of wardrobe, before returning them as Presidents or members of Congress…

In other related news, British researchers now have proof that all the gender bending chemicals released into the watershed via sewage treatment – actually bend gender, affecting fish reproduction and inducing as much as a 75% failure rate.

Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) disrupt the ways that hormones work in the bodies of vertebrates (animals with backbones), including humans.

They can be found in everything from female contraceptive drugs and hormone replacement therapy pills, to washing up liquid, with the most well studied EDCs being those that mimic estrogen (female hormone).

EDCs have been seeping into rivers through the sewage system for decades and have an observed effect on fish, altering male biology to make them more female – hence the ‘gender bending’ reputation of these chemicals.

- via PhysOrg.com

All this research puts us anglers in a bit of a quandary. As many of our planted fish have been gargling EDC’s by the bucketful, imported into the watershed from numerous federal “gladiator academies” – which requires us anglers to adhere to the “Don’t ask and don’t tell” statute.

Which explains why the fish are so damn tight-lipped when my fly floats past.

“Extra labeling only confuses the consumer,” said David Edwards, director of animal biotechnology at the Biotechnology Industry Organization. “It differentiates products that are not different. As we stick more labels on products that don’t really tell us anything more, it makes it harder for consumers to make their choices.”

Which is exactly what troubled me about the “Mercury-toxic-no-eat-sign” featured prominently at every junction of the creek nearby, why would you go to all that trouble to label something genetically identical to the healthy specimen?

It must be more of that government waste I hear so much about.

The FDA defends its approach, saying it is simply following the law, which prohibits misleading labels on food. And the fact that a food, in this case salmon, is produced through a different process, is not sufficient to require a label.

We’re simply reminding everyone that this is the week the FDA rules on genetically engineered fish, our thoughts on the matter being well known, yet it’s still a landmark case with impacts far beyond the current focus.

The company has several safeguards in place to quell concerns. The fish would be bred female and sterile, though a small percentage might be able to breed. They would be bred in confined pools where the potential for escape would be low.

What concerns me outside of the obvious, is where is all that water going to come from? Most of the known world is already using its potable water multiple times between snowpack and faucet. Trucking saltwater in from the ocean would be cost prohibitive, yet terrestrial fish farms located close to market implies yet another water-craving industry determined to siphon those last few droplets from native fish.

Close to market means Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and a host of other desert cities, no?

Nestle and the bottled water crowd may be a blessing compared to the the rich soup we’ll soon see in our spigot. The agricultural industry has locked up the rights for any source of significance, yet the aquaculture crowd will insist on something “clean” to grow salmon in – and that combined payload of antibiotics and fertilizer should follow whatever slope is available to mix with local waters or intermingle with groundwater.

If they mix in salt you can add toxic to that blend.

Yummy.

The upside could be a gene or two added to all them roman nosed fish lying doggo in the salmon wastewater pond. If we get lucky we might wind up with sea-run Carp, or they’ll get white faces like the Joker – sight fishing would be so much easier.

They’re onto me

Seven short miles away an entire UC campus is determined to find out why Yolo County drivers never hit anything while driving. My streets and thoroughfares clean of corpses and the local Interstate a lone buffer of Purity in California’s asphalt archipelago …

They claim they’re compiling more accurate statistics for the occurrence of animal-automobile kinetic couplings, but I think the county commission is thinking national game refuge and the funding that comes with it.

Now that they’re commissioning an iPhone app to ease road kill reporting, it gives me blanket absolution from my necro-scavenger hunt and burgeoning life list, and should the girlfriend complain, I can always blame science.

An old iPhone case tucked into the center console next to the array of Ziploc sarcophagi; a squeal of of rubber smoke, a hurried exit, and should the casual bystander note my interest in the bleeding corpse – I’ll give them a friendly wave and stab a forefinger at the cold glass of my Apple phone.

The site’s founders hope to soon hire a software engineer to design a smartphone app. They think one would attract new and younger volunteers, speed up the process, and, with built-in GPS function, assure more accurate location information.

Call me an ambulance chaser, but a quick scan of the website each morning – a quicker call to the boss to explain my tardy, and every Blue Heron that duels Detroit will be reclassified as “long beaked naked chicken” – just as soon as the clasp on my Buck knife closes …

While initially I was put out at the NY Times for lavishing the  “Doctor Roadkill” moniker on someone with clean conscience hands, I really don’t need the rest of the fly tying world finding out from Perez Hilton where I score all the free goods.

For those of you interested in assisting UC Davis and their scientific research –  road kill reports can be filed at the CROS site. While I don’t expect you’ll understand, it would be a great assistance to science should you standardize your nomenclature:

Don’t merely enter “stray kat”, rather use metadata that is useful to researchers, like; “medium blue dun with bronze highlights and a rich maltese note to the forelegs (or maybe that’s just axel grease). Light bouquet, rated a “double bagger” due to rampant livestock.

That’s the scientific method and befits us amateur entomologists.

Conspicuous is my omission of the route to work. Knowing the playful nature of our readership, I’m sure to discover that both Polar Bear and fur seal have a yen for the center divider.

While the message has been taken to heart, many forums have questions and comments suggesting many anglers have a false sense of complacency regarding their feet once shod in rubber soled wading shoes.

Research documents on Didymo from New Zealand show quite plainly that a leather topped rubber soled wading shoe is only half as bad as a leather-upper felt soled shoe. Conversely, you could also make the claim that a rubber-upper felt soled wading shoe has the identical risk as a rubber soled wading shoe.

… and if you’re a neoprene wearing felt soled wader as I am, you’re a bloody plague on two feet.

But wait, there’s more …

“Because of the rapid spread of invasive species such as garlic mustard, Japanese knotweed and wild parsnip, hikers should include a whisk broom or brush as part of their hiking gear,” said Neil Woodworth, executive director of the Adirondack Mountain Club. “By giving your boots or shoes a good brushing before leaving the area, you can help prevent seeds from spreading to the next trail you hike.”

Hikers should also clean their clothing, backpacks and equipment before going to a new area to hike. Campers should shake out their tents before breaking camp to dislodge invasive seeds.

- via the Press Republican

Using Sherlockian Deduction, a rubber soled angler is likely to hike further than a felt soled fisherman, who is conscious that every terrestrial step is wearing down his beloved felt, and therefore …

While you might have the upper hand in the water, you’re a goddamn ecological nightmare once on dry land.

While us “true conservationists” take the long slow slog back to the parking lot in midcurrent – which we’ve irreparably soiled already.

These are the Good Old Days

It really matters little in the greater picture, the invasive species issue is on land, sea, and air. Plants are becoming a bigger issue than aquatic invasives simply due to the available land mass, versus the relatively miniscule amount of water that traverses all those acres.

We’ve got some really burgeoning issues with Knotweed, Mile a Minute vine, and Hogweed, and unlike contaminated ballast water on ships, many invasive plants are common to your subdivision as they’re sold in nurseries.

Given the felt sole bans and legislation cropping up in Alaska, Maryland, and elsewhere, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that some well meaning hiking organization won’t insist that your footwear be antiseptic for the terrestrial pristine as well.

… and while you’re thinking “that’ll never happen” ask yourself why New Zealand confiscated 80,000 pair of rubber soled shoes at their airports.

The only problem is the damn thing has to be taught how to swim.

You grab a gene from a Pacific Salmon, add a couple more from the Ocean Pout (or Conger Eel, at left) mash the syringe into an Atlantic Salmon egg, and watch the magic happen…

Once you cull the progeny for misshapen ogres and hunchbacks – and fillet what’s left, you’ve doubled your seafood production and the consumer is none the wiser.

As the FDA faces unthinkable hurdles trying to regulate these test-tube fish, producers exploit loopholes in food laws with great glee.

But AquaBounty says FDA cannot legally obligate the fish producer to label the product as anything other than Atlantic salmon. Anything else is voluntary.

-via AOL News

On one hand I’m not so sure anglers will lose out in the mix. At some point a couple of extra genes may produce a scrappy opponent that will provide great sport when planted illegally in a backyard pond, or even the kitchen sink.

As most fishermen rarely eat their catch, we won’t care too much when some lab coat wads a big needle up Mother Nature’s finest, we can no longer afford the outpouring of cash for a weekend-long pilgrimage to the Pristine, or the gear necessary.

AquaBounty says it has launched a “blue revolution,” which brings together biological sciences and molecular technology “to enable an aquaculture industry capable of large-scale, efficient and environmentally sustainable production of high quality seafood. Genetically altered trout and tilapia are the next to be offered up to the nation’s fishmongers.

Once trout hits the aquaculture cross-hairs we’ll see some plaintive bleat from our conservation organizations and the IGFA, but they’ll be steamrollered into quiescence because of the larger issue, world hunger.

If we know we’re headed down this path, the next Theodore Gordon may be the fellow that grows a boutique fish purely for the sporting crowd. Throw a little bluegill genes into some Bluefin tuna, and squeeze the result into something colorful, yielding the Gangsta Trout.

Able to swim at a reel screaming 40MPH, can sheer a seven weight in a single jump, and feeds on Asian Carp, Zebra Mussels, and small children.

In light of what is about to occur, I see the Carp crowd having the last laugh, “sure, the water is tepid and the fish have Roman noses, but at least they don’t share any genetics with a Snickers Bar…”

Genetic salmon, Ocean Pout, Conger Eel, Heath Ledger, gangsta trout, asian carp, IGFA, bold new world, aquaculture, fish genetics, carp, fly fishing