Trout dying at Quail Lake today. I saw the dead one when it was beaching itself struggling to survive. I tried to help, throwing it back in deeper water gulls were feasting on another. It had strength to swim away right side up, yet kept returning to shore, flipping itself up out of the water so it lay sideways or upside down, gasping for breath. I had never seen fish exhibit such strange behavior. I wondered if it had to do with Labor Day boats nicking them or poisoning the water somehow. It had a blood-colored swollen nodule on its lower abdomen. After a few futile tries, I noticed a dead baby fish floating on the shores edge and another trout doing the same thing, swimming upside down. I asked the employee at the station why this was happening. He said it was the algae treatment they had done yesterday. This is a water supply for Hurricane and St George. The seeded trout are poisoned when they swallow large copper sulfate granules before they completely dissolve into the water table. He regretted the problem, but said they have considered many options and they have to do it thus way instead of ore-dissolving the granules. I asked if it got into the food supply through the birds, lamenting both the slow seemingly unnecessary deaths and the possible hazard to other animals. He says, Its unfortunate but were dealing with animal-human interface... We are animals too, I reminded him. What happens to them happens to us. He was apologetic and gracious and have me the biologists number who worked for the Water Conservatory District who administered the treatment twice in 5 years, he said. Natures way of balancing our needs with our other animal relations is not tragic and disturbing like this. It may be cruel when one animal eats another to survive but it is not unnecessarily so. I felt that trout in my hands, the power and will it had to fight for its life, and the senselessness and sadness of being helpless as it was to continue. And I learned something from that moment its brief life was in my hands. I see its yellow forever-open eyes not as unfeeling, though they are now drying lifelessly. I saw them shining through wetness that is there to sustain its being, and I bonded with it as I tried to change its fate, as it did, and it saddens me. We are all related. That is what children forget somewhere in this unnatural society where everything is backward and fish throw themselves upon the land to have a chance.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 19:46:12 +0000
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