4 History of Fish Management 



biologists were employed by State Conservation Departments; most of 

 the limnologists and ichthyologists were attached to universities and were 

 given little or nothing to say in formulating the programs of Conservation 

 Departments. The scientists and fish culturists came together at the 

 annual meetings of the American Fisheries Society. The latter probably 

 looked upon the scientists as men having little practical use for anything 

 except for the identification of some strange fish or aquatic bug; during 

 this period, the university biologists were primarily engaged in taxonomy 

 and distributional studies. Undoubtedly, some of the things the "practical 

 men" said at the American Fisheries Society meetings mildly irritated the 

 biologists, but not sufficiently to cause them to become crusaders. After 

 all, at that time, they had little real information on the ecology of fishes, 

 except in a broad, general way. 



This divergence of beliefs was perhaps nowhere more clearly illustrated 

 than in Illinois in the 1880's and '90's when Professor Stephen A. Forbes 

 and his group of scientists were studying the biology of the Illinois River. 

 Concurrently, the Illinois Fish Commission was working in this area, but 

 with the primary objective of rescuing the fish stranded by the receding 

 waters of early summer along the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. 



Forbes' emphasis is clear: he recognized the loss of fish as a natural 

 phenomenon: ^^ "As the waters retire, the lakes [of the Illinois River 

 bottoms] are again defined; the teeming life which they contain is re- 

 stricted within daily narrower bounds, and a fearful slaughter follows; 

 the lower and more defenseless animals are penned up more and more 

 closely with their predaceous enemies, and these thrive for a time to an 

 extraordinary degree.' Fish stranded in land-locked pools were either 

 preyed upon by other, larger fish or by amphibians, reptiles, fish-eating 

 birds or mammals; or if the pools dried completely, the fish died and 

 decayed where they lay exposed. Since these victimized fish were mostly 

 small ones, the products of the current reproductive season, Forbes and 

 his colleagues recognized them as being in excess of the small number 

 required to maintain the population at a constant level. They realized 

 that this apparent waste was normal and had been occurring on the over- 

 flow lands of large rivers for many thousands of years. 



The Illinois State Fish Commission, on the other hand, engaged crews 

 of men with seines and wagons to rescue these fish for stocking in other 

 lakes or for release in open water. These crews usually operated each 

 year from the time the first fish became stranded in the spring, until 

 the waters had receded to their usual summer low-water levels.^ 



Professor Forbes must have recognized that this program was entirely 

 useless, not only because the fish were "expendable," but also because 

 their survival was in doubt when they were seined up and transported 



