Experts focus on fisheries problems

MADISON, Wis. – About 1,800 scientists and aquatic experts from 30 countries are gathering this week for the 134th annual American Fisheries Society, where everything from catch-and-release practices for black bass on Lake Michigan to the biodiversity crisis on Africa’s Lake Victoria is getting attention.

Much of the talk at the conference at the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center is about studies or management practices that protect species from an array of threats. And, indeed, there is a strong current of unease here about the state of the world’s fisheries.

Some of the concern: Declining numbers of Pacific salmon, the growing size of the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, global warming, overfishing by commercial fishermen, and the rising threat of invasive species.

Ira Adelman, professor of fisheries, wildlife and conservation biology at the University of Minnesota and president of the society, told members that everyday management issues – building stocks of trophy bass and requiring trout anglers to use barb-less hooks, for example – are important because sport fishing is the bread and butter of their business.

In Wisconsin alone, more people fish than play golf (by a more than 2-to-1 margin), and anglers each year catch an average of 49 million fish, according to the Department of Natural Resources.

But it’s “trivial, relative to the kinds of problems facing aquatic resources,” Adelman said.

With this year’s meeting in Wisconsin, homage is being paid to the legacy of Aldo Leopold. Adelman exhorted the fish scientists to warn the public as troubles loom, invoking the environmental pioneer in an essay from “The Round River,” which was published after Leopold’s death in 1953.

“Much of the damage inflicted on the land is quite invisible to laymen,” Leopold wrote.