Remember when Great Lakes herring were so plentiful they arrived in tons at Eaton's and could be mail delivered to your door? Or when sturgeons were caught en masse, left to dry on the docks of Lake Ontario, then heaved into the boilers of steam engines leaving Union Station?
You know, the good old days, before pollution, global warming, overfishing and the barbarous invasions of underwater creatures from as far away as Russia arrived in the Great Lakes and killed such family rituals as the annual smelt run – when people would wade into the lake, buckets in hand, and emerge with three dozen fins flapping frantically beneath their hands.
The recent history of fish in the Great Lakes is laden with tragedies of near genocidal proportions. But the oft-overlooked plight of the finned vertebrates lurking in the shadows, sewage and seaweed from the mouth of the Saint Lawrence to the coast of Thunder Bay is the subject of an exhibit at the Harbourfront Centre running until June 22.
There, some 1,200 handcrafted fish – each artistically put together in the image of 52 of the more than 175 species in the lakes today – have been hung by fishing line, allowing the public to "swim" among the fish without even getting their hair wet.
Conceived by Claire Ironside and Angela Iarocci, two professors at Sheridan College, FishNet: The Great Lakes Craft & Release Project is raising the public's awareness of fish in the lakes, and raising money for two charities: Lake Ontario Waterkeeper and Great Lakes United, both of which aim to revive and protect the lakes' depleted fish stocks.
After walking among the dangling assortment of walleye, bass and everything in between, people are invited to donate $10 to "release" one of the model fish. Two dollars from every released fish helps the project mail a model fish to an elementary school in the Great Lakes region, thus spreading the educational program. The other $8 will go directly to the two charities, helping real fish.
Partnering with the Toronto District School Board, Ironside and Iarocci had students from 25 schools learn all they could about an assigned species then craft a model of that species for the display.
"In doing so, they became the experts," says Ironside.
Those who crafted sturgeon learned how overfishing in the early 20th century made this once plentiful bottom-feeder little more than a rare monster of the deep. Those who studied smelt learned how the little sardine-like fish was intentionally released into the lakes to help restock the trout stocks. But when the trout didn't eat them, people stepped into the drink and fished them out by the bushel.
In teaching the history of the Great Lakes' fish, the exhibit has a fresh view on what must be considered a tragic story.
Wayne Grady, author of The Great Lakes: The Natural History of a Changing Region, explains: "The Great Lakes are like a huge scientific experiment. It's no longer a natural system."
"Pacific salmon, alewife, smelts, carp – they were all introduced either accidentally or deliberately.
"The kind of fish that we see in the lakes today is vastly different from what (Samuel de) Champlain would have seen when he arrived," he says.
Well before the arrival of Europeans in North America, hundreds of aboriginal villages sprouted up along the banks of the Great Lakes to live off the abundant stocks of some 150 fish species.
By 1820, small towns like Chicago, York, Detroit and Kingston had appeared along the lakes and a commercial fishing industry began.
By the 1880s, salmon, whitefish, lake trout and sturgeon were already in decline. But technological improvements to fishnets allowed the Great Lakes fisheries to continue to grow.
So large was the fishing industry, that companies like Eaton's were advertising, in a seemingly apologetic manner, the arrival of only 10 tons of Lake Superior herring in the Star throughout the first half of the century.
Grady says sturgeon, the largest fish to ever inhabit the Great Lakes, were an unlikely casualty of the fishing industry. Prior to being angled for their caviar, these bottom-feeders were used as fuel in steam engines.
"They were so oily they would burn hot and fast like wood thrown into the engines," he says.
By the 1950s overfishing had more or less eradicated all the salmon and trout from the lakes. Whitefish suffered a familiar fate.
"Up around Sault Ste. Marie you used to be able to pull the whitefish out in buckets," says Grady.
The decline of the Great Lakes fishing industry in the 1950s was soon followed by the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959. That allowed for the invasion of other fish that not only messed up the underwater food chain, but changed the entire ecological makeup of the lakes.
"They come (into the lakes) in the ballast tanks of ships from all over the world," says Grady, explaining how a fish like the small, spotted Round Goby, native to the Caspian Sea, mysteriously arrived in Lake Superior in 1990.
There are now more Round Goby than any other fish in the lakes. And more than half the species now in the Great Lakes are considered to have been unnaturally introduced to the lakes.
And though the commercial fishing industry is much smaller and more controlled than it once was, Grady says the Great Lakes fish are still facing a number of threats.
Overfishing, pollution, the accidental and deliberate introduction of non-native invasive species and global warming (which is making the lakes less suitable for salmon and trout) are leaving the fish in "worse shape than ever before," he says.
