Felt Soled Waders To Be Banned SE Alaska

Dogbreath

Well-Known Member
It's happened in New Zealand and now it's happening in SE Alaska.

http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/021810/loc_564577077.shtml

http://www.newzealand.com/travel/tr...08/9/ban-on-felt-soled-waders-for-anglers.cfm

billreidsalmon.jpg
 
If you look at the Simms non felt soles, they could also transfer undesirables. I'm personally not convinced they are that much better than felt. The real action should be to educate anglers how to properly clean thier wading shoes. HOWEVER, we should consider banning traveling anglers from bringing wading shoes into the province. A few other places are already doing this.
 
The invasion of Didymo has had a catastrophic effect on a lot of rivers and lakes in the South Island of NZ. I haven't seen it myself, but apparently it chokes up the waterway - and trout insect life has a hard time surviving, not to mention the negative aesthetics on once beautiful rivers, and dredging up big chunks of "rock snot" if you try fishing.

It was incredible how fast this stuff spread, and fortunately it hasn't reached the North Island yet.

Didymo has been the subject of intense debate, and it is felt by many that the government biosecurity management was slow to react.
The banning of felt soles is also controversial, as it is only a part of the solution and possibly sends out the wrong message.
(as well as intoducing a safety issue)

Fisherman have indirectly been blamed for the introduction of Didymo, and it is highly likely that these microscopic spores arrived in felt soles, however this ignores the multitude of other possibilities.

There are other parts of a fishermans gear that could easily harbour these pests (waders, neoprene, boots, socks, fishing lines/backing, backpacks, clothing etc)
There are also many other users of waterways such as trampers, hunters, jetboaters, kayakers, birds, deer and other wildlife.

Sure - felt soled boots are probably the worst for harbouring invasive species as they are difficult to treat effectively, but by banning felt soles it kind of points the finger at anglers only and takes the heat off other river users?

I reckon the best prevention is hard out education, advertising and checking/monitoring - but that costs more doesn't it!
 
Sounds like another use for the micro-wave. Of couse when the wife is not looking.But then I Googled the problem and found this....This is just one that can be transported.

Whirling disease, trout - USA (Montana) & Canada


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr. Beth MacConnell, a histopathologist, peers into a large tank in her laboratory -- to see whether her trout will whirl. There are a few dozen young rainbows inside.

A trout languishing weakly on the bottom begins to twirl, looking as if it is chasing its tail. Up the tank it goes, possessed, whirling round and round until its dizzy ascent takes it right to the top. Exhausted, it floats listlessly back down to the bottom, near death.

"That," Dr. MacConnell says, "is how it got its name." This is whirling disease, a parasitic scourge that is devastating trout populations throughout the United States.

This disease, which seems harmless to humans, is moving so quickly, so surely through U.S. waters that it could wipe out some wild trout populations in western states.

Whirling disease is now found in at least 22 states, including such pristine waters as Yellowstone Lake in the heart of Yellowstone National Park, where biologists came across it last November while doing a routine count of the native cutthroat trout.

In Montana, the parasite has spread rapidly, and is being blamed for killing off 90 per cent of the Madison River's famous rainbows. (It attacks the fry shortly after they hatch and, in most cases, leaves the young fish so deformed they simply can't eat.)

And it's coming to Canada. Across the border in Alberta and British Columbia, scientists are watching helplessly as the disease comes ever closer.

It has already reached some rivers that connect with the Canadian watershed. As well, migratory birds that feed on diseased trout carcasses are believed to be carrying the sturdy parasitic spores across the border and depositing them in Canadian waters and soil.

The spectre of further damage from the parasite has caused such concern that Alberta has set up a task force on the disease to see whether it can keep the whirling death at bay. Two years ago, the task force resulted in a ban on imports of live trout to Alberta."We're not even trying to prevent it from coming," said Mr. Kerry Brewin, a biologist with Trout Unlimited in Calgary, who sits on the task force's technical committee. "We're just trying to slow down its spread."

The parasite _Myxobolus cerebralis_ is a fiendish foe. The thing is almost indestructible. The microscopic spores, about the size of a human red blood cell, can freeze and thaw with perfect immunity, and are very difficult to kill.

She had to immerse them in a solution of 1 part bleach to 9 parts water for 10 minutes before they died, she recalled. Five minutes didn't come close to doing the trick.

Some of her colleagues wanted to test the creature's DNA and had to bake the spores in a microwave oven for 10 minutes -- on high -- just to get the shell to pop open.
Before appearing in the wild, the parasite contaminated US fish hatcheries. To get rid of it, hatchery workers tried draining their ponds, destroying the fish and treating the pond bottoms with lime. The spores lived.

In fact, they can act as death-filled time capsules, and lie dormant at the bottom of a stream for up to 30 years.

And each hard spore produces triactinomyxons -- TAMs for short -- the second phase of the parasite's life cycle. They burst forth from the hard shell, ravenous for trout, complete with 3 swimming appendages sprouting from a central stem.

Dr. MacConnell breeds the TAMs for her experiments. She feeds the quasi-inert spores to little tubifex worms nestled in sand in a sweater box. Twelve weeks later, the spores have ripened inside the worms and burst forth with TAMs, which she collects. "Millions -- out of one sweater box," she said, shaking her head again.

Whirling disease is one of those strange ecological phenomena stemming from an unwitting exchange of wildlife between continents.

The best guess is it came to Pennsylvania in some frozen table trout from Denmark about 1955. In Europe, the parasite is relatively innocuous to the native brown trout. There, the parasite has evolved over tens of thousands of years and has figured out how to live companionably -- and not lethally -- inside the trout.

Unleashed in North America, where the native trout were used to different types of parasites, it was a pestilence.

Despite the wide swath of destruction the parasite cuts, it was barely understood until recently. It was the 1980s before scientists realized the spores and the TAMs are different phases of the same parasite and they need the worm to get to the trout. It turns out these worms, which eat the spores, have exactly the right body temperature and chemical makeup to coax the thick-skinned spores to transform into TAMs and pop open.

That breakthrough didn't provide any cures, but at least it allowed scientists to catalogue how the trout get sick. But knowing how the parasite works is not the same thing as understanding how to cure the epidemic. U.S. federal and state governments and private foundations have poured money into solving that mystery.

Scientists hold a whirling-disease symposium each year -- Canadians included -- to exchange findings, sponsored by the Bozeman-based Whirling Disease Foundation.

All that research, though, is framed within some hard truths. The spore is impossible to eradicate. The tubifex is the world's most common worm. Killing it would mean killing off everything the wild trout need to survive.

With those facts, you turn to the fish. Why, for instance, do some fish die from the parasite and not others? Brown trout, long since introduced from Europe to North America, are still largely unaffected.

Duane Radford, the assistant head of the Alberta government's fish and wildlife division and one of the chairmen of the whirling-disease task force, is among the few knowledgeable Canadians who points out the tubifex worm is not as prevalent in Alberta as in Montana's streams. But he acknowledges if the parasite reaches Canada's wild trout, it will be a catastrophe.

Dr. Beth MacConnell and her colleagues have written the definitive paper "Death March" on how whirling disease attacks trout. It was published last year in the Immunological Review.

The attack: Once released from tubifex worms, the triactinomyxons (TAMs) float in the river, waiting for vulnerable, newborn trout to appear. As the fry hatch from their eggs on the bottom, the parasites shoot hooks, attached to coiled filaments, into the trout and latch on, often around the fins and mouth.

Up to 64 infective cells from the TAMs burrow between the cells of the fish's skin. Within 2 hours, they've begun to multiply copiously. Then they march through the skin and into nerve endings.

Day 4: The parasites have begun stealing into the central nervous system, which they use essentially as a system of roads to reach their real objective: the fry's tasty cartilage, especially the large deposits in the spinal column and skull.

Day 20: By now, depending on water temperature, the parasites have reached cartilage and have begun to devour it, destroying the fish's structural framework. The eyes start to bug out. The skull becomes misshapen. The spine looks like a roller coaster.

Day 45: As its brain stem and neural system collapse, the trout's tail turns black and the fish begins to whirl. Day 90: The hard-shelled spores have begun to form inside the trout's cartilage, encased in bone.

Death: The trout are often tough enough to withstand the attack itself. However, they eventually starve to death, or are eaten themselves because they can't swim well enough to escape.

Postmortem: A fish that lives for 5 months may carry as many as two million spores. They are released after it dies and begins to decay.

Related Web sites:


The Whirling Disease Foundation

The Montana Task Force

---------------------------
 
As you red'd there playnow I was thinking time for another use of a bleach solution and some responsability from anglers
 
http://asf.ca/scientist-to-study-why-rock-snot-proliferating.html

Scientist to study why rock snot proliferating

WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

The Green Page
Scientist to study why 'rock snot' proliferating and possible effects on salmon

By: Alison Auld, The Canadian Press
Posted: 07/17/2015 3:02 AM |

HALIFAX - It is a goopy, gritty mess that looks more like dirty brown dreadlocks or filthy shag carpet than a marine growth.

Suitably dubbed "rock snot" by scientists who study it, the algae is slowly taking over riverbeds around the world and raising concerns that it could be a new stressor to aquatic life.

Josh Kurek, a biologist at Mount Allison University, has studied Didymosphenia geminata or Didymo for years but is now trying to determine why the unusual algae is accelerating its spread through parts of eastern Canada.

His team will also try to figure out if the thick, gelatinous mats that can blanket a riverway's rocky bottom are taking a toll on already fragile juvenile Atlantic salmon stocks.

"Something in the environment has changed over the past few years and conditions are more favourable to forming these blooms," he said.

"We can really focus on what is the specific mechanism that is promoting blooms in these ecosystems."

The National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada has awarded Kurek $24,000 a year for the next five years to study pristine salmon rivers on Vancouver Island, river systems in the Gaspe region of Quebec, and the tributaries of the Restigouche River in northern New Brunswick.

He plans to collect lake sediment cores from areas where Didymo blooms may have occurred in a bid to reconstruct the ecological conditions present at the time. That may allow scientists to understand the environmental changes in watersheds over the last millennium and help to explain why Didymo is now advancing on certain river systems.

Biologists suspect it may be linked to elevated nitrogen in the environment from fertilizers, the burning of fossil fuels or climate changes that affect the way a river flows.

The project follows on Kurek's research more than a year ago that found Didymo was not an invasive species that was transferred to rivers by anglers on their boats and gear as previously believed.

Rather, he found the offending organisms have been around for thousands of years but were only becoming prolific more recently possibly as a result of ecological changes.

Kurek says the algae was detected in western Canadian sites in the late 1990s and in 2006 in Quebec. In both areas, it was found in pristine rivers with low levels of nutrients and very high water quality.

What's worrisome to scientists is that the pervasive species has ended up in the same rivers as juvenile wild Atlantic salmon, raising the question of whether it is affecting the depleted stock that feeds on invertebrates found in the mats of algae.

"We think Didymo represents a new potential stressor for some of these salmon populations," he said.

"There may be either a negative impact or there could be a positive impact, in that it's providing more food for the fish."

Kurek says the findings may help fisheries and environmental managers control the spread of the algae, and protect valuable wild salmon populations that are threatened by overfishing and warming waters.

Didymo has been found in New Zealand, South America and the United States, but Kurek says there are no reports of it in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland or P.E.I.

"It's proliferating because of changes in the water system," he said, adding that "it's a sentinel species" that may warn of other environmental problems.

Follow @alison_auld on Twitter

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/ar...and-possible-effects-on-salmon-316108461.html

- See more at: http://asf.ca/scientist-to-study-why-rock-snot-proliferating.html#sthash.eSQcIIdJ.dpuf
 
Due to the recent discovery of whirling disease just over the BC border in Alberta, I'm bumping this up.
 
Lavery JM*, Kurek J, Rühland KM, Gillis CA, Pisaric MFJ, Smol JP. 2014. Rock snot and lake mud: Exploring recent blooms of Didymosphenia geminata using information contained in lake sediments. Canadian Young Scientist Journal 3: 32-41.
DOI # 10.13034/CYSJ-2014-019
J.M. Lavery1
J. Kurek1
K.M. Rühland1
1 Paleoecological Environmental Assessment and Research Lab (PEARL), Department of Biology, Queen’s University
2 Centre Eau Terre Environnement, Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS)
3 Department of Geography, Brock University
ABSTRACT
Ecosystem managers have often considered the nuisance diatom species, Didymosphenia geminata (didymo) as being introduced to the natural environment through human activities; however, observations from early 20th-century surveys challenge this characterization. We use diatoms preserved in lake sediment cores to investigate the history of didymo blooms from Gaspésie, Quebec. Relative abundances of diatoms were examined from the dated sediments of Lac Humqui and Lac au Saumon (a lake with an inflowing river currently supporting blooms). Didymo was observed throughout the Lac au Saumon core, demonstrating that it has been present in the region well before the first reports of blooms in 2006. Lac Humqui diatom assemblages experienced a shift in composition with declines in benthic taxa (attached to substrates) and increases in planktonic (free floating) diatoms that began ~1970. Strong relationships between this diatom shift, and increases in regional air temperatures and earlier river ice-out dates were consistent with the expected effects of climate warming on aquatic systems. Our paleolimnological evidence shows that climate warming, rather than human introduction, likely plays an important role in triggering didymo blooms.
http://www.livescience.com/43859-rock-snot-climate-warming.html
 
Human introduction likely plays an important role in whirling disease introductions. Clean your gear, especially when moving to different water bodies (even weeks or months later).
 
Now who is going to bleach the feet and feathers of all the migratory waterfoul?? Like banning felt soled shoes will make a difference. LOL

Bacterial changes in the soils caused from the ever changing rain chemistry are my assumption. Didymo did recently retreat from the coastal streams. Big opportunity here to examine past and present water quality samples and "science the **** out of this". Anyone know someone who is a water quality guy for a municipal water supplier or testing lab?
 
Banning felt soles would be a repeat of the long gun registry. Feel good legislation that gives the appearance of doing something but does little or nothing to change the situation.

Given our propensity for that sort of legislation, I'd better start racking up the miles on my new felt soled Simms.
 
It's now all of Alaska that has banned felt soles and it's freaking dangerous trying to wade on algae covered rocks with rubber soles. I fully support the idea of restricting the wading gear to a region and with Korkers removable soles it would seem to me that if they had a certain colour sole for certain areas, you could let responsible people use felts for safety and still ticket people that don't respect the water by spreading biologically active gear all over the world.
 
You got to add cleats to the rubber soles. Either Simms hard bite or ice racing screws is what I have gone to now.
 
You got to add cleats to the rubber soles. Either Simms hard bite or ice racing screws is what I have gone to now.
Agree for traction in the river but then the cleats are tearing up the wood floors in the boat or the cleats are like ice on an aluminum floor..
 
Not sure if you guys are aware but rock snot has been around north America for a very long time. Lake sediment studies indicate thousands of years. It flourishes every so often when the water chemistry is favorable for that species. I am sure after acidification events. It is on its way out from this area at the present time. The Stamp river which was full of it a few years ago now has none noticeable.
Funny why they would ban felt wadding shoes and think that will help. Who now is going to bleach the feet of all the migratory bird?
 
Whirling Disease can also be transferred via gear like waders (and bilge water, fish carcasses, etc...) and taking the steps available to us to reduce the spread is our responsibility as anglers. Yes, it may spread through other more natural avenues, but that doesn't excuse us from doing our part.
 
Whirling disease has been detected in Alberta last year, the first detection in Canada, and this puts BC at a much higher risk. Whirling disease can cause large longterm mortality events in trout and potentially in salmon. Forget about didymo, take precautions to not spread whirling disease.
 
I have no problem with reasonable precautions but banning felt soles entirely seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water to me..
 
Bathwater should be disposed of properly also.

I bumped this post up simply for awareness. Maybe a dedicated whirling disease thread is in order...
 
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