Even before officials of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources could make public its proposal to introduce rainbow smelt into Lake Powell this month, the National Park Service turned them down.
Good.In a 51-page assessment that arrived at the Deseret News this week, the division said it wants to introduce the small, silvery fish as food stock for striped bass.
As the division phrased it, the giant reservoir has "an overpopulation of piscivorous predators" because the striped bass have reproduced so rapidly.
The bass are gobbling up too many of the threadfin shad, their ordinary prey.
Striped bass are natives to salt-water areas. According to the report, they were stocked in Lake Powell in 1974, brought by truck to Wahweap Creek. "The fish were large and easy to catch," it says. "Many people came to the lake just to fish for striped bass."
The average striped bass caught in the lake from 1979 to 1984 was nearly 241/2 inches long, "easily the largest fish that the average Lake Powell angler had caught in a lifetime."
But as the bass depleted the shad, the bass declined. In 1985, the average length of all striped bass had declined to 21 inches, and they weren't in such great physical condition.
"Anglers began to become dissatisfied at this point," it notes. By the spring of 1986, striped bass were down to 15 inches. A die-off in the winter of 1987 wiped out most of the bass between 20 and 31 inches.
Measurements of bass caught in 1988 averaged 13.7 inches. They "rebounded slightly" to 14 inches last year.
Utah proposed introducing "forage fish" as a solution. The division says rainbow smelt should be added to the lake "as an additional forage for striped bass and walleye and other game fish and to buffer the existing threadfin shad population from collapse caused by predation or environmental factors."
The report acknowledges that the smelt are native to the Atlantic coast between Labrador and New Jersey, but that they have been introduced elsewhere.
If they are planted in Lake Powell, it added, "downstream migration of smelt is expected. Smelt colonized the Missouri River System within eight years of introduction. . . . They are not likely to be found in the (Colorado) River below Lake Havasu."
Early this month, officials of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area attacked the plan.
They said that fishery biologists consulted by the Park Service "had major concerns about the potential effects on endangered fish species in Grand Canyon National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and other areas in the Colorado River System."
The Park Service refused to allow any action in Lake Powell that could damage resources there or in other national parks, said John O. Lancaster, superintendent of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.
This all reminds me of a comment I once heard the late Ed Abbey make. He was railing against an introduced species, the tamarisk, which was planted apparently as an erosion-control device and rapidly colonized most of the stream sides throughout the West.
According to the survey "The Atlas of Vascular Plants of Utah," published in 1988 by the Utah Museum of Natural History, salt cedar tamarisk and fourstamen tamarisk were introduced and are now "invading marshes, banks of streams and rivers" and are salt tolerant.
I have an unpleasantly vivid recollection of trying to fight my way through a "tami" thicket beside the Colorado River near Fisher Towers, north of Moab, about 10 years ago. I found myself literally suspended in the midst of a jungle, standing on branches that criss-crossed, dense brush above and all around, itching from the scrap leaves and bark that dribbled down my shirt.
As I shoved and climbed and broke branches, I kept crashing down through layers of branches, finding myself deeper in the junk than ever. It took forever to reach the river, and a lot of bad words left my lips. Certainly many of our indigenous animals are kept away from water sources by this plague.
Anyway, about nine years ago, Abbey was expounding on what to do about tamarisk. He claimed it originated in North Africa and that the solution is to import North African goats to eat it.
"And when the tamarisks are gone, the western river guides can eat the goats. Boatmen will eat anything. Boatwomen are even tougher."
What I'm trying to say is that it's a big mistake to introduce any foreign species, and the mistake is multiplied if another is introduced to help the first. If the striped bass eat themselves out of their unnatural habitat, good riddance.