“Its life is dull, its death is tame, a fish as humble as its name. “Yet–take this salmon somewhere else, and bring me half a dozen smelts.”
-Ogden Nash
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Not all invasive species are unwelcome. Rainbow smelt, native to the Northeast but stocked in Midwestern waters, escaped Crystal Lake, Mich., around 1912. Soon after that, Great Lakes anglers discovered the joys of fresh, fried Osemerus mordax. Lake Michigan was teeming with smelt by the 1930s and ’40s, when towns such as Escanaba and Boyne City, Mich., drew thousands to their smelt jamborees and “Smeltania” settlements. Chicagoans, taking their nets and their brats and their surreptitious beer to the lakefront by night every April for the annual smelt run, preferred to keep the pleasure to themselves. After all, you wouldn’t want to threaten the smelt supply with another invasive species: tourists.
– Workable substitute for a smelt net, according to a 1932 Tribune account: a pair of pants and some twine.
– Decline in number of Americans who went fishing in 2006 from 2001: 12 percent. Percentage decline in Great Lakes fishing in the same period: 23 percent.
Sources: Tribune archives, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey’s Great Lakes Science Center.
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nwatkins@tribune.com
