W.Va. DNR warns anglers not to move fish around
If you’ve fished a lot, chances are you’ve seen it:
A fisherman decides to call it a day, and he opens his bait bucket and sets free all the minnows remaining in it.
In so doing, he might have broken the law.
If the minnows in his bucket came from the same waters he fished, no problem. If they came from somewhere else, it could be a big problem.
West Virginia law prohibits transferring fish of any kind from one body of water to another. Violators could be fined up to $300 and/or serve up to 100 days in jail. Jeff Hansbarger, a fisheries biologist for the Division of Natural Resources, said anglers moving fish has caused problems in every major watershed of the state.
“It has the potential to spread fish diseases, to introduce unwanted predators, and to bring in non-native species that out-compete native fish,” he explained.
Fisheries officials suspect unauthorized transfers for a sharp decline in the New River’s native walleye population, for the spread of largemouth bass virus and viral hemorrhagic septicemia into state waters, and for the introduction of undesirable non-native species.
“When I worked in [the DNR’s Beckley-based district], I really got my eyes opened,” Hansbarger said. “I couldn’t believe how many non-native fish had been introduced. A lot of them came from the Tennessee River watershed, and a lot of those were introduced by out-of-state fishermen bringing their own bait to fish the New.”
The New’s non-native bait species include alewives, Roanoke darters, whitetail shiners and swallowtail shiners. Of those, alewives arguably have had the greatest impact.
“Alewives are known to prey on the eggs of other fish species,” Hansbarger said. “After alewives were introduced into the New, the walleye fishery went into decline. The belief is that egg predation by alewives was responsible for that decline.”
Non-native species have been in the news lately, mainly due to problems created in parts of the country outside the Mountain State.
The voracious northern snakehead, an Asian species, has become established in the Potomac River tributaries of Maryland and Virginia. Efforts to eradicate it have failed.
And in states that border the lower Ohio and central Mississippi rivers, biologists are pulling their collective hair out in an attempt to control Asian carp. Used by fish farmers to keep catfish ponds clean, two species of carp escaped into the Mississippi and have come to dominate ecosystems in the Illinois, Wabash and lower Ohio rivers.
Isolated specimens of one species, the bighead carp, have been found in the portion of the Ohio that borders West Virginia. Sampling of DNA in the Ohio’s water has detected genetic material from the other species, silver carp, even farther upstream than the bigheads were confirmed.
To address the threat posed by such species, the West Virginia Legislature has amended the state’s law governing the importation of non-native species. It is now illegal to possess live bighead carp, silver carp, black carp, grass carp or northern snakeheads.
“The law doesn’t apply to dead fish, only to live ones,” explained Bret Preston, the DNR’s head of warm-water fisheries. “The idea is to discourage people from attempting to get those species established here in West Virginia.”
The law also prohibits people from moving native fish from one body of water to another within the state. Hansbarger said it not only keeps certain species from invading others’ habitat, it also helps prevent diseases from spreading.
“I know it’s tempting to catch a few bass, put them in your boat’s live well, take them back home and stock them in the local creek, but when you do that, you could be spreading largemouth bass virus to your neck of the woods,” he added.
Such transfers are considered to be unauthorized stockings. The law says angler-caught fish must be released into the same waters from which they were caught. The lone exception is for fishermen who take fish home to stock their own private ponds.
DNR officials acknowledge that such “ad hoc” stockings have, on oc