Blue Pike Story Part I
Exclusively on Outdoors Niagara!
The
Blue Pike The Stories Start On This Page.
There is a whole lot of Blue Pike
information in these pages. There is no other website that has the in-depth
coverage as what appears here in these Outdoors Niagara web pages. A lot of what
appears elsewhere was copied from Outdoors Niagara and that is welcomed. The
Blue Pike story is interesting and should be seen and heard by all, young & old.
The Blue Pike were officially declared extinct by the USFWS in 1976
The article directly below is a fair
assessment and with some in-depth research by Mike Gillis.
BLUE
PIKE, A REMNANT FROM
THE PAST, HOPE FOR THE FUTURE?
by Mike
Gillis
PART ONE: THE PAST
T ONE: THE PAST
Blue
Pike were once, during the first half of this century, probably the best
tasting, and definitely most, commercially harvested fish in the lower great
lakes system. Chances were almost certain, that if you went to a local
restaurant for a Friday fish fry, you would be served blue pike, not haddock.
I
had the opportunity to sit down and have an interesting discussion with former
Lake Ontario commercial fisherman Elton Jeffords of Youngstown, NY, and
former game warden Kimpton Vosburg was the head game warden in this area
from 1948 until 1979, and returned during the hunting seasons from ’83 to ’89.
We talked a lot about blue pike, some of which I’ll mention in this article,
and several other subjects of interest in Niagara River fishing history, which
I’ll write about in the future.
According
to Elton, it wasn’t uncommon to buy a thousand pounds of fish from hook and line
fishermen in a day. With his gill nets, it was also not uncommon to catch this
many fish. The size of the holes in the gill nets were carefully regulated and
frequently checked by men, such as Vosburg, so that only a certain size range of
fish could be kept, thus insuring the survival of a good spawning population of
fish for future harvest, and giving the smaller fish a chance to grow bigger.
The
last blue pike that Vosburg can recall being caught out of the Niagara was in
1955 on the day that Marilyn Bell swam from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Toronto for
the Toronto Exposition. Of course, no one blames Marilyn Bell for the
disappearance of the blue pike. However, several other reasons to blame do come
up. Elton Jeffords believes that over-fishing by the hook and line fishermen and
the use of illegal sized gill nets played a large role in finishing off the blue
pike.
Kimpton
Vosburg attributes the demise to pollution, such as the cyanide that was dumped
daily into the water by a prominent North Tonawanda NY company.
Several
years ago, when I took a fishery biology course in SUNY College at Morrisville
PA, our professor attributed the disappearance of the blue pike to phosphate
detergents. Some of you may remember Arthur Godfrey doing the phosphate
commercials on your black and white TV sets. Households around the populated
areas around the great lakes used these detergents widely at the time. The
runoff of these eventually ended up in the water of the great lakes, working its
way down to Lake Erie, the Niagara River and Lake Ontario. The phosphates from
these detergents promoted excessive aquatic plant growth, thus depleting the
deeper water of light and oxygen. This phenomenon had a particularly profound
effect upon the deeper water and high oxygen requiring blue pike. Phosphate
detergents are now banned.
The blue pike was officially declared extinct by the
US Fish & Wildlife Service in 1976.
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