The Vagaries of Fishing in the Threatened Mekong We carried that fishing rod for 10,000 miles on planes, taxis, buses, minivans and boats. And as my family's trip down the Mekong River progressed, I became ever more determined that it fulfill its basic function of plucking a fish out of the river. The Mekong presents certain challenges for that. It's a big river with a swift current and muddy water that obscures hidden logs and other traps to snag a line. And the turbid water reduces the effectiveness of lures or baits that require attracting the visual attention of a fish. Or, at least that sounded right. The other main challenge was my complete lack of skill or experience as an angler. The pole belongs to my son, Luca, who is walking proof that the impulse to fish springs from someplace deep and durable within humanity's common genetic heritage. He does not come from a long line of fishers. He had never seen me - or anyone else for that matter - fish, or even heard tales of fishing when one day, visiting his grandparents" house as a 4-year old, he saw fish in the backyard pond and simply decided that he needed to catch them. He improvised a rod out of a stick, a string, a cork and a real hook that my stepdad was somehow able to find. With bread for bait, he began yanking bluegills out of the pond, and he has been obsessed ever since. Skill-wise, I muddle along quite some distance behind Luca, but I'm determined to close the gap. I'm a freshwater scientist and my dissertation research overlapped with the world of fish biologists (who also tend to be anglers), so my fishing deficit is also a bit embarrassing professionally. But on those rare occasions that a fish strikes my line and pulls hard, I do tap into that innate thrill that underlies fishing's enduring appeal. Perhaps the tug activates some deep neuronal pathway that signals that food is close at hand. The academic term for knowing that food is close at hand is "food security," and food security is at the heart of the debate over the future of the Mekong. Fish from the Mekong feature prominently in the diets of the 60 million people who live in its basin. Within that population, the 20 million who live in Laos and Cambodia truly depend on river fish as their primary source of protein. As I have related in previous posts, studies project that the planned construction of several hydropower dams on the Mekong's main stem and major tributaries will result in a considerable reduction in the fish harvest, jeopardizing the food source of millions of rural people. In a recent paper, researchers from the W.W.F. and the Australian National University estimated that full construction of planned dams would cut the fish harvest by nearly 40 percent and that replacing that protein would require that the land in the region dedicated to livestock increase by nearly 6 million acres, comparable to the area of Vermont. Compounding the loss of food, the dams" reservoirs would submerge 335,000 acres of riverside cropland. There may be development pathways that can achieve a significant increase in hydropower while maintaining a fairly healthy fishery. I'll have more to say about that in a future post. Finding those solutions is a challenge more sociopolitical than it is technical. The urgent need for solutions to that challenge were obvious nearly every moment we were on the Mekong: all along its length, people were casting nets and tending riverside gardens. But for a few days on that river, I faced a vastly smaller challenge: catching even a single damn fish. On our second day in northern Laos, Luca baited his hook with a grub and launched his first cast into the Mekong. After a few moments the line tugged, Luca's hand sprang to the reel and, as he pulled back on the rod, a fish flashed briefly on the surface. He continued reeling and ... pulled in an empty hook. The thrill of what had seemed such immediate success turned to a slight sense of guilt. Had he lost his first Mekong fish due to one of the few nuggets of fishing advice that I'd offered? A few years ago, Luca caught a smallmouth bass in the river that winds through our town. The bass glistened silvery green, and he beamed at catching such a beautiful fish so close to our house. I tried to remove the hook and realized that it was deep in its mouth. I fumbled clumsily to back the hook out and failed. The fish thrashed, and I felt the blood surge hot in my ears and neck and I cursed my inexperience. I then tried with a pair of needle nose pliers, but it was a small bass and the tool forced its mouth open awkwardly. "Dad, you're hurting him," Luca gasped, his face racked with guilt. I eventually removed the hook, but the fish was clearly stressed and likely injured. "I don't want to fish anymore," he said dejectedly. I tried to offer a solution, "One thing you can do, if you're not gonna keep the fish and eat it, you can take the barb off the hook. I know that some fly fishermen flatten the barb to reduce the risk of hurting the trout when they do catch and release. From then on, Luca religiously crimped the barbs off his hooks. He accepted a somewhat higher rate of fish slipping off the hook for a somewhat lower rate of difficult-to-remove hooks and injury to the fish he loved to catch. But if I'd known how rare strikes would be on the Mekong, I would have advised keeping the barb. The next time we fished was in Luang Prabang, a small and beautiful city perched on a terrace above the Mekong and dotted with Buddhist wats. In the cool mornings, lines of orange-clad monks walk single file through its streets to accept gifts of food from the faithful who "make merit" through their offerings. Luang Prabang is now accessible by jet and has emerged as an extremely upscale tourist destination. Our first night there, Luca, my daughter, Wren, and I slipped through the wall lining one of its streets and clambered down steep steps carved into the sandy bank above the Mekong. Leaving behind the art galleries and boutique hotels, we entered a world straight out of "Huckleberry Finn" or, perhaps more apt, "Suttree," Cormac McCarthy's dark tale populated by outcasts along the Tennessee River in Knoxville. The sun had just set behind the mountains that pin the Mekong to Luang Prabang's flank, and in the fading light we picked our way along the riverbank, contested territory that the river occupies for half the year before relinquishing it back to the land. The bank was strewn with the flotsam left by the retreating river, intermingled with the detritus that tumbles down from the city above. By a flickering campfire, a group of men played cards and drank whiskey. Looking for a spot to cast, we passed a ramshackle lean-to. An old man poked his head out, wearing a hat with ear flaps on what felt a gloriously balmy tropical evening to us Ohioans. He cackled and flashed a minimally toothed smile and shouted questions at me as I put my arms around the kids and eased our way past him. Dad, is he crazy? Luca asked me. "Umm, well, he probably does have some issues," I mumbled in response. The man's hut was planted at the edge of the wet soil next to the river, and in the adjacent shallow water sprang a thicket of slender bamboo poles pushed into the muddy riverbed. When the man wasn't looking, Luca quickly pulled one up and saw that it held a fish trap made from a plastic bottle, nearly identical to a contraption the kids use to catch minnows in our backyard creek. Unfortunately, we had no better luck catching a fish that evening, nor the next few times. Where were the fish? Even an afternoon spent with experienced fishermen using cast nets yielded a very modest catch, adding further weight to my growing perception that, at least in that stretch of river in Laos, fishing required considerable effort for a small return. Why was it so hard to catch a fish in river that ranks second globally in number of fish species and has no real peers for the tonnage of its fish harvest? I got an answer a few weeks later, as I'll describe in my next post.