Bad news from the Great Lakes...

[Woolly Bugger]

In May, scores of dead fish started washing up along the eastern shoreline of Lake Ontario.

James O. LaPlante, 59, first noticed them at a friend's house. By the following week, so many carcasses had come ashore, they littered the beach near his home in Cape Vincent. "There were lots," he said. "When I say lots, I mean hundreds and thousands."

The fish had fallen victim to an unknown disease. At first, residents and fishermen were not alarmed, since the victims were round gobies, a nuisance fish that consumes the eggs of more prize-worthy catches.

But in the weeks since, Mr. LaPlante and others in the region have noticed varied species of fish dying off — not in big numbers as with the round gobies, but far more than usual. "Now we're seeing bass washed up, and carp," he said. "I don't know, but you wonder if the round gobies were the canary in the coal mine."
The disease is viral hemorrhagic septicemia, which destroys tissue of the vital organs, causing lethal internal bleeding. Scientists first reported it in Europe, where it has existed for years and it killed 90 percent of the trout in some areas.

In 1988, a strain of the virus was discovered in the Pacific Northwest. "To say it caused a major concern is a gross understatement," said Paul Bowser, a professor of aquatic animal medicine at Cornell University here. "It was panic."

Because developing a vaccination for the fish population is unfeasible, biologists there were able to slow the spread of the disease by killing four million eggs and young fish in the salmon hatcheries where it was detected. Some experts were contemplating killing all marine life in any river system where the disease was found.

But there was no need. The virus proved to be a less-contagious strain than its European counterpart. Though it still exists, it has not wreaked havoc.

Last year, scientists found a strain of the virus in new bodies of water, including Lake St. Clair, Mich. Then in May, the round goby started dying in Lake Ontario. "I was very, very surprised," said James Winton, director of the Western Fisheries Research Center for the United States Geological Survey in Seattle. "How it got to the Great Lakes, we don't know."


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/nyregion/01fish.html?_r=1&oref=slogin