Legislators should let pros manage fish, wildlife

How ironic that businesses built around an exotic gamefish oppose a regulation to protect native fish from exotic trash fish.

We’re not supposed to use that kind of judgmental term anymore. “Trash” fish is so pre-Enlightenment. The correct title for silver carp, northern snakeheads and their ilk is “invasive, non-native, non-game species.”

On the other hand, journalists are trained to be terse, and one word is better than five. Silver carp are trash fish.

We don’t want them in the moat. We don’t want them in the boat. Not in Dierks or Hamil-TAN, we don’t want them, Sam I Am.

Here’s the deal. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission introduced striped bass and white bass/striped bass hybrids into several lakes many years ago to create additional fishing opportunities. The experiment was wildly successful. Lakes Beaver, Hamilton and Ouachita are famous for producing big stripers.

Bull Shoals is ascendant thanks to a controversial striper stocking program by the Missouri Department of Conservation. It caused hard feelings between Mike Knoedl and Bob Ziemer, the former directors of the AGFC and MDC, respectively. This breach so offended Knoedl that he threatened to stock stripers in Table Rock Lake.

Bass anglers hate stripers (and hybrids) because they are eating machines that compete for food with largemouth bass, the foundation of the Arkansas sport fishing culture.

Bass anglers are resigned to the fact that stripers and hybrids are here to stay, but they want the AGFC to stock fewer of them. That battle has been ongoing since at least 1990, when my mentor Frank Thorpe routinely ranted about them in the sports pages of The Morning News of Springdale.

Striper fishing guides rely on live gizzard shad as bait to catch fish for their customers in the summertime. To capture enough shad to get them through a week, they must catch them in the tailraces of major rivers like the Arkansas, Grand and Neosho, the latter two being in Oklahoma.

Silver carp, the long-jumping, high-jumping variety, live in those waters. The AGFC’s fisheries management staff believes there is a high threat of introducing juvenile silver carp into new waters in this manner. They have a point. Every exotic wildlife species invasion is the result of people moving animals to places they shouldn’t be.

Last week, against the wishes of certain members of the Arkansas House of Representatives and Senate, the commission passed a regulation to prohibit transporting live bait between different waterbodies.

Bass anglers hate silver carp, too. They compete for food with the baitfish that feed bass, but their vaulting antics also present potentially fatal personal injury hazards for bass anglers that drive fast in their $70,000 bass boats.

State Rep. Carlton Wing (R-North Little Rock) gets this. Wing is an avid angler who also produces Arkansas-based outdoors television programming. His finger is firmly on the pulse of the bass angling public. He counseled his fellow lawmakers against getting tangled up in this mess.

One colleague defended himself, saying he was representing an aggrieved constituent.

Wing reminded him that there are a lot more bass fishermen than striper guides in his district. In fact, there are fewer than 30 licensed striper guides statewide.

“When bass fishermen get wind of this, it won’t be good,” Wing said.

The guides presented the issue to lawmakers as the heavy hand of government trying to crush small-business men. When exposed to the actual science, Wing said many of the legislators changed their minds.

On Thursday, the AGFC met with the Game and Fish Commission/State Police subcommittee at the AGFC’s training center near Mayflower. Brad Carner, chief of the AGFC’s wildlife management division, briefed the legislators about the struggles of wild turkeys in Arkansas. Reproduction has been chronically poor, Carner said, and a dearth of baby turkeys translates to a dearth of adult turkeys the next year.

One legislator asked, “Who’s responsible for raising these turkeys?”

As my daughter would text, “OMG!” The AGFC had better upgrade its poultry houses, or maybe find another supplier for turkey poults.

We decline to name the guy because it’s not our intent to embarrass anyone. The gaffe merely illustrates the fact that the legislature is ill-suited to manage fish and wildlife.