invasive species,    lake davis,    News,    non-native species,    northern pike eradication

After Poisoning to Remove Northern Pike, Lake Davis Opens to Trout Fishing

By Tom Chandler 2/5/2008

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Fish & Game wanted non-native, highly predatory pike out of Lake Davis

If you've ever experienced an insatiable urge to freeze your ass off ice fishing for stocked trout, then this story will make you very, very happy. From the Redding Record Searchlight:


Even though frozen over, fishing has resumed on Lake Davis, fisheries biologists with the Department of Fish and Game said.

...

Last month, DFG planted more than 31,000 Eagle Lake trout from its American River Hatchery, ranging in size from one-half pound to more than three pounds, into Lake Davis. Additional plantings of nearly 1 million trout are planned later this year.

Lake Davis was closed and poisoned to remove illegally introduced Nothern Pike (biologists didn't want them spreading downstream to the California Delta).

Let's hope they got all the pike this time; I doubt the political will exists to close and poison the lake a third time.

See you at Lake Davis, Iceholes...

AuthorPicture

Tom Chandler

As the author of the decade leading fly fishing blog Trout Underground, Tom believes that fishing is not about measuring the experience but instead of about having fun. As a staunch environmentalist, he brings to the Yobi Community thought leadership on environmental and access issues facing us today.

9 comments
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@Bruce: So far, so good. I believe they took the stream issues into account, and in fact, may have poisoned those first. What's interesting is how community support swung so completely in the other direction compared to the first poisoning. I'm hoping for a big success story.
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I wasn't aware they had gone ahead with the 2nd poisoning of the lake... which frankly surprises me, as I don't know how they can expect to remove a fish (pike)population from a drainage lake without killing the source stream and the output stream, because fish in those streams will find their way back into the lake. Results should be similar to the previous attempt.
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I volunteer with DFG on a variety of projects. This past year DFG spent millions of dollars and thousands upon thousands of ours of staff time to deal with those Pike that some selfish people introduced into Lake Davis. That money and time could have been better spent doing the science necessary to maintain populations of native fish in their native waters. Or perhaps catching abalone poachers. This ... more is not a silly thing that only affects the people of Portola and other local areas. Because people want to catch all sorts of fish in all sorts of places does not make it a good idea to introduce non-native species. You want to catch Pike? Go to where those fish are native. Don't destroy a fishery and waste tax-payer and license fees.
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Tom, Surprised you didn't know about pikealicious. Tastes great to everyone, only it kills pike. We can thank the pharmaceutical companies for coming up with this one. Oh wait, they never actually invent anything which isn't highly profitable ... and what's the gdp of Portola? - yeah, that's what I thought. So they said, "Let's just kill everything." Now that I think about it, whomever is selling ... more the poison to kill all the fish - That's the likely pike-planting-culprit. Bastards. They make Nestle look like heroes. - Dave (Homeland Security is Watching Me)
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You don't. They killed everything. The final count made it clear that pike had wholly taken over...
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How do you poison a lake to kill one sort of fish and no others?
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One wonders if the same idiots who planted them in the first place won't see this as some kind of challenge. At this point, I'd hate to do it and get caught by some of the local residents, who have lived with better than ten years of this crap. And frankly, if I'd poisoned it out, I'd wait a while before providing a possible food source to any of the pike that may have survived...
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Impressive. I'll bet it's at least a year before they find pike again.
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