Canada Now Sells America Its Own Great Lake's Fish

In 1936 the boats on Lake Erie landed 26,787,000 pounds of blue pike — sixty-seven percent of everything caught that year. It left Sandusky and Ashtabula in iced railcars and cost a Cleveland family less than hamburger. Hundreds of outfits worked the Ohio shore, and June mayflies rose over Put-in-Bay thick enough to blot out the lights. In 1953 the mayflies did not come. Phosphorus from sewers and detergent fed algae that rotted and took the oxygen. Blue pike fell from ten million pounds in 1957 to 79,000 in 1959; extinct by 1983, though a 2014 DNA study argues it was never a separate species. Walleye dropped ninety-five percent. Mercury closed the season in 1970. The Cuyahoga River burned in 1969. Ohio made walleye a sport fish in 1972 and banned gill nets in 1983. The lake healed. It now holds a record 180 million walleye, and Ohio's commercial walleye column has read zero every year since 1980 — Canadian crews out of Wheatley and Port Dover net them and truck them back over the border. This is the story of a cleanup paid for on one shore and collected on the other. Sources: Great Lakes Fishery Commission, Commercial Fish Production database, Lake Erie, 1867–2015 (erie.xls) — http://www.glfc.org/commercial/erie.xls International Joint Commission, Pollution of Lake Erie, Lake Ontario and the International Section of the St. Lawrence River (Ottawa, 1971) — https://legacyfiles.ijc.org/publicati... Timothy C. Lloyd and Patrick B. Mullen, Lake Erie Fishermen: Work, Tradition, and Identity (University of Illinois Press, 1990); collection at the Ohio State University Center for Folklore Studies — https://cfs.osu.edu/archives/collecti... C. A. Stepien et al., "A population genetic window into the past and future of the walleye Sander vitreus: relation to historic walleye and the extinct 'blue pike'" (2014) — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti... Jerrod Rosenbaum, "Nostalgia and Resentment on the Inland Seas: The Last Days of Commercial Fishing on Lake Erie," Pacific Standard — https://psmag.com/news/nostalgia-and-... "The Politics of Local Fish: Why Your Walleye Entree Was Shipped In From Canada," Belt Magazine — https://beltmag.com/politics-local-pe...