Go Fish
...ear. To the people in favor of stocking, the definition of “wilderness” is very generalized: they want a “wilderness experience,” which, by their definition, includes fish. While everyone has their own meaning, most people have a certain image of wilderness, a mental picture. Every time a change occurs in a preserved area, it is a product of someone’s thought. The park employees who had a hand in this wanted to integrate different aspects of wilderness into one area that would not naturally; beautiful lakes and bountiful fishing come together in NOCA. The other side of the coin has a powerful environmental and scientific backing. A titanic argument against stocking is the little-known fact that some lower lakes in NOCA have their own naturally occurring fish populations, such as the large Lake Ross, seen on the attached map. This leaves many people puzzled as to why there is a need to stock the fishless lakes. The only reason the agreement to stock passed was because the practice was going on before the park was born–there was no information about why stocking was started in the first place, which only leaves more questions. Another point against trout stocking that relates to this argument is about fishing laws. While the National Park Service encourages catch-and-release fishing, there is no law against keeping the fish, which seems odd when faced with the absolute no-hunting laws enforced in all national parks. This questions the integrity of the fishing guidelines–if there is no consistency between the capture and/or killing of wildlife, is the National Park Service doing their job? If more people keep the fish they catch rather than release, stocking will continue to replenish the trout supply and the controversy will be harder to resolve. Since the agreement was made to allow the continuation of trout stocking, scientists all over the country and different federal agencies have been flocking to NOCA to study the effects of the introduced trout on their surroundings. The first thing researchers discovered was the fact that all of the trout’s natural predator species had been removed from the lakes before stocking ( Liss 1995 ). This has not been further researched to study the impacts of their removal because there is no way to separate them from the effects from the trout’s introduction, but their removal alone would leave significant changes in the lakes. There are two types of organisms that the trout are having a direct effect on: copepods (a type of zooplankton) and amphibians. These may seem like odd things to be affected, but they are both very important to the dynamics of the lake. With no natural predators in the lakes to keep the trout numbers down, these impacts hit its own prey hard. The first of these are copepods. There are many species found in most of these lakes, but the two discussed here are large and small, for simplicity (rather than using scientific names). The trout find the large copepods to be rather delicious, apparently–some lakes are almost completely cleared of them. This is not the only problem though. With the large species decreasing, the small species densities explode and take over the lake with their main predator–the large species–gone or significantly reduced in numbers ( Liss 2003 ). While there was no information on the effects of the higher small-copepod densities, lake ecosystems are very fragile to change and there is still research going on about these species. The second organism is the long-toed salamander. Scientists are worked into a frenzy over this tiny, slimy creature because they are already increasingly rare in the wild, and the trout are not helping the situation. This amphibian fared well in the fishless environments–until the trout were introduced. It turns out trout eat them when they are in a larval stage, ensuring that they do not make it to adulthood to reproduce. Not only are their densities decreasing, but their behavioral habits are changing as well: they are hiding during the day and becoming more nocturnally active, moving to more recessed and inaccessible areas of the lakes, and developing noxious skin excretions ( Tyler 1998 ). There are cases of some amphibian species, along with this salamander, having been completely eliminated from lakes ( Liss 1995 ). Many factors are involved in determining the exact impact of the stocked trout on their environments, such as the densities of non-reproducing trout (lakes periodically stocked with sterile fry), densities of reproducing trout, and the size, depth, and alti...