In April, when the walleye run through Mike Johnson’s trap nets off Lorain, Ohio, he lifts them, looks at thousands of dollars of fish rolling in the mesh, and tips them back over the side. The law requires it. The walleye swim north into Canadian water, where Canadian boats out of Wheatley and Port Dover are waiting with legal nets. Weeks later, a portion of those same fish come back across the Ambassador Bridge in refrigerated trucks, filleted and boxed, and are sold in Sandusky and Port Clinton as the local catch.
An Ohio fisherman who netted that same fish in his own water would be committing a crime. Johnson put it about as plainly as it can be put: “The Canadians catch them over there and sell them over here. They’ve got the hammer on us. ”
The lake now holds a record 180 million walleye.
The men who used to make a living on them are almost all gone. To understand how strange that is, it helps to know what this lake once handed out. In 1936, boats working Lake Erie brought in 26,787,000 pounds of a fish called the blue pike. That single species was 67 percent of everything landed on the lake that year, American and Canadian shores combined.
Two out of every three pounds. It was a fish so ordinary in Cleveland that nobody photographed it, so cheap that it fed people who could not afford anything else, and so abundant that the men catching it assumed it always would be. Start with the water itself, because the water explains almost everything that follows. Lake Erie covers 9,900 square miles, which makes it large.
Its average depth is 58 feet, which makes it a puddle. The western end, nearest Toledo, runs closer to 24 feet. Into that shallow pan comes the Detroit River, carrying 90 percent of everything that enters the lake. Four great lakes drain eventually through Detroit, and the drainage basin runs to 29,700 square miles, 70 percent of it American.
It is the smallest glass under the biggest tap on the continent. Shallow water is warm water, and warm water grows fish. Sunlight reaches the bottom across most of Lake Erie, which means plants, which means insects, which means bait, which means predators. Biologists have estimated that this one lake holds roughly half the fish in the entire Great Lakes system.
Commercial netting started here around 1840. The gear the industry ran on was the gill net: a curtain of fine mesh hung in open water, standing in the current like a tennis net a fish cannot see. A fish swims into it, pushes its head through, and cannot back out because its own gill covers catch the twine. One boat could set a mile of it.
Some set several. If your grandparents lived anywhere between Toledo and Buffalo, the fish on the table on a Friday night was probably blue pike, and it probably cost less than hamburger. It was a smaller cousin of the walleye, slate gray and blue-backed with an oversized yellow eye. It went out of Sandusky and Ashtabula in iced freight cars to Pittsburgh, Chicago, and New York.
It was not a delicacy. It was a staple. For 45 consecutive years, from 1915 through 1959, the annual blue pike catch on Lake Erie averaged about 12 million pounds. The men who fished it built their lives on the assumption that this was simply what the lake did.
The first thing to go was not a fish. It was an insect. For as long as anyone had lived on the western basin, the last week of June belonged to the mayflies. Their nymphs spent a year buried in the mud of the lake bottom, then rose all at once in clouds thick enough to blot out the lights at Put-in-Bay.
In 1953, they did not come. In summer, the lake separates into layers: a warm top layer and a cold bottom layer sealed off underneath. In a lake with an average depth of 58 feet, the bottom layer does not hold enough oxygen to last the season, particularly once dead algae start raining down into it and rotting. The mud suffocates.
The nymphs suffocate with it. The International Joint Commission wrote it down without decoration in its 1970 report: the mayfly nymph Hexagenia had become extinct in the western basin since 1950 due to oxygen depletion. Cleveland could taste it. The city’s water intake sat out in the lake, and every summer, when a southerly wind pushed the surface water offshore, the dead water from the bottom rose to replace it and came up the pipe.
Algae counts at Cleveland tell the story in one line. Between 1927 and 1930, the average was 1 to 200 cells per milliliter. By the early 1960s, it ran between 1,300 and 2,400, and the kinds of algae had changed to the kinds that grow in a sewer. Then the blue pike went, and it went faster than anything in the record.
In 1957, the lake produced 10,370,000 pounds of them. In 1958, it produced 1,400,000. In 1959, the total catch of blue pike from every American and Canadian port on Lake Erie came to 79,000 pounds. That is one decent day’s work.
The same boats, the same crews, the same nets, the same water, the same time of year. The fish were not there. Then it got worse. 1960: 11,000 pounds.
1961: 2,000. 1962: 1,000, all of it landed in Pennsylvania. 1963: nothing at all. By 1964, the record keeps a figure that reads like a typo: fish dealers are reported to have sold 200 pounds of blue pike that year across the whole of Lake Erie.
Three years later, in the column for Ohio, somebody typed a two-word note beside the empty row: fishery closed. That is the entire obituary of the most productive freshwater fish stock in North America. There is one specimen everybody in Ohio knows about. In 1962, on hook and line off Kelleys Island, a man named Jim Anthony caught a blue pike.
He took it home, put it in his freezer, and left it there for 37 years. In 1999, he handed it over to the University of Toledo. Think about what that requires: moving house with it, replacing the freezer, explaining it to relatives, keeping the power on through three decades of Ohio winters. All because he understood before the scientists did that he was holding the last of something.
So what killed it? Nobody can give a clean answer. One camp blames the nets. Another blames the water and points at the oxygen numbers.
A third points at biological invasion: rainbow smelt and alewives arrived in the same decades and ate the same young fish. A fourth notes that blue pike appear to have been prone to boom-and-bust cycles long before anyone dumped anything in the lake. Most fisheries scientists say the honest answer is all of them at once. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service listed the blue pike as endangered in 1967, six years after the last commercial catch worth the name.
In 1983, the agency declared it extinct. Here is where the story turns on itself, because the blue pike may never have existed as a separate thing at all. Named a distinct species in 1926, then demoted to a subspecies of walleye, it was tested again in 2014. Fish geneticist Carol Stepien and a graduate student ran the DNA of museum specimens against modern walleye and found nothing to separate them.
Her summary was blunt: they were never distinct from walleye. If she is right, what vanished from Lake Erie was not a species but a population, a deep-water form of an ordinary fish that occupied a niche the lake stopped providing. The men who fished it do not accept that. They handled millions of pounds of both fish in the dark, by touch and by eye, and sorted them apart on a moving deck without thinking about it.
Blue pike were smaller, grayer, with a larger eye, and they ran in the cold, deep water where walleye did not. The walleye went next, and it went the same way. 1956 was the biggest walleye year Lake Erie has ever recorded: 15,145,000 pounds. Three years later, the lake produced 3,100,000.
Three years after that, in 1962, the whole lake, five jurisdictions, two countries, every licensed boat on the water landed 717,000 pounds of walleye. That is not a bad year. That is a 95 percent cut in six seasons. Boats came off the water and did not go back on.
Fish houses in Sandusky and Huron shut their doors. Walk upstream and look at what was arriving. The Detroit River is the lake’s front door. In 1970, the International Joint Commission put a number on what was coming through it: an estimated 61,200 million pounds of total solids, 182 million pounds of oxygen-demanding waste, 35 million pounds of phosphorus, and 6,600 million pounds of chlorides every year.
Those numbers had addresses along a 30-mile stretch of riverbank: the Ford Rouge complex, Great Lakes Steel, Wyandotte Chemicals, Allied Chemical, and Zug Island. Everyone was a payroll. Every one of them had an outfall pipe because in 1955 that is simply how a factory on a river was built. The pollutant that actually restructured the lake was phosphorus, the same element in fertilizer and dishwasher powder.
Feed it to a warm, shallow lake, and it does what fertilizer does anywhere: it grows plants. Algae bloomed, died, sank, and rotted. The rotting pulled the oxygen out of the bottom water and suffocated the mayflies. In July of 1965, the Detroit River was reckoned to be carrying something on the order of 70,000 pounds of soluble phosphate into Lake Erie every day.
Not a year. A day. That is a freight car of fertilizer tipped into the shallow end of the lake each morning before breakfast. Postwar detergents were built on phosphate compounds, and every load of laundry between Chicago and Buffalo sent a measured dose of plant food down the drain into a river into Lake Erie.
At the height of it, the detergent industry told regulators flatly that no substitute existed. They were wrong about that. Then there was Sarnia, on the Canadian side of the St. Clair River upstream of everything.
Dow Chemical of Canada ran a chlor-alkali plant from 1949 to 1970 that used liquid mercury as an electrode. Over 21 years, the plant is estimated to have lost about 100 tons of it into the river. Mercury was considered safe because it was inert. What nobody had accounted for was bacteria.
Microorganisms in river sediment convert metallic mercury into methyl mercury, which is soluble, which enters the food chain, and which concentrates as it moves up. The water samples were clean. Then somebody tested the fish. Walleye out of Lake St.
Clair ran as high as seven parts per million, roughly 14 times the limit then considered safe to eat. The man who found it was a graduate student. Norvald Fimreite, working at the University of Western Ontario, had trained in Sweden, where mercury in fish had already caused a scandal. He tested fish from Lake St.
Clair in the winter of 1969–1970, and the readings came back at multiples of the safe limit. Within weeks, a graduate project had closed an international fishery. In March 1970, Ontario banned commercial fishing on Lake St. Clair and on parts of Lake Erie outright.
Michigan and Ohio followed. For the Ohio fleet, this was the blow that landed on a body already down. They had lost the blue pike in 1959. They had watched the walleye fall by 95 percent by 1962.
Now the state told them the fish they could still catch were poison. The lakewide walleye catch that year came to 99,000 pounds. Nets stayed on the reels. Now go back five years, because while the fish were vanishing, something else was happening on shore, and it started with a car dealer.
David Blaushild sold Chevrolets in Shaker Heights on the east side of Cleveland. He was not a scientist. He was not an activist. He was a businessman who liked the lake, noticed it was turning into something else, and had access to one thing most concerned citizens did not: advertising.
In July 1964, motorists on the inner belt south of the memorial shoreway drove past a sign 80 feet long and 20 feet high. It read: “Let’s stop killing Lake Erie. Have your council vote anti-pollution. ” Blaushild had talked the billboard companies into giving him 15 boards around Cleveland for nothing.
The billboards were the visible part. The petitions were the machine. Blaushild’s Save Lake Erie campaign collected signatures through the summer of 1964 and into 1965. Twenty-six towns along the lake passed his resolution.
In April 1965, he carried the petitions to Columbus and handed them to Governor James A. Rhodes. Rhodes did not file them. He forwarded them to John W.
Gardner, the United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, with a request that Washington convene a federal enforcement conference on the pollution of Lake Erie. A sitting Republican governor asked the federal government to come into his state and hold his own cities to account. The conference sat in Cleveland from the 3rd to the 5th of August 1965 and reconvened in Buffalo, with five states at the table: Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, and Indiana. The man running it was Murray Stein, the federal government’s enforcement chief.
The conference had no power to order anything. It could only publish. And that turned out to be enough, because what it published was a city-by-city accounting of who was discharging what, entered into a public record with names attached. For the first time, the pollution of Lake Erie had a list of authors.
At the far end of the lake there was a second amateur, and he was even less likely than the car dealer. Stanley Spisiak made and sold jewelry in Buffalo. He also ran the Erie County Fisherman’s Association, and he had spent years hauling his own nets out of water that came out black. On the 25th of August 1966, President Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson came to Buffalo and took a boat out into the harbor.
Spisiak was aboard. He had brought with him a bucket of sludge dredged from the bottom of the Buffalo River and a spoon. At the right moment, he held the bucket up to the president of the United States, put the spoon in it, and lifted out a dripping gray mass so the man could see for himself what the bottom of an American harbor was made of. Two weeks later, Johnson issued an order stopping the Army Corps of Engineers from dumping polluted dredge spoil into the open waters of the Great Lakes.
Around Buffalo they started calling him Mr. Lake Erie, and the name stuck for the rest of his life. In November 1967, Cleveland elected Carl B. Stokes, the first Black mayor of a major American city, and handed him a municipal problem that no amount of goodwill could fix.
The city’s sewers dated to the 19th century. In 1969, of the 62 public bathing beaches along Ohio’s stretch of Lake Erie, three were rated safe to swim in. So Stokes did the only thing available to him. He built swimming pools at the beaches: concrete tanks of chlorinated water put up on the sand beside one of the largest bodies of fresh water on Earth, so that children in Cleveland would have somewhere to swim in the summer that would not make them sick.
He also asked the city for money. In 1968, Cleveland voted on a $100 million bond issue to rebuild its sewers and treatment plants. It passed, 66 percent in favor. Two out of every three voters in a shrinking industrial city agreed to pay more so that the lake might come back.
Then, on the morning of the 22nd of June 1969, an oil slick on the Cuyahoga River caught fire under a railroad trestle near Campbell Road. The river, not the lake. It burned for well under half an hour before the fireboats put it out. Damage came to about $50,000 to two trestles.
As catastrophes go, it barely qualified. What made it famous is that the Cuyahoga had burned before at least a dozen times since 1868, and the 1952 fire had been vastly worse. Nobody outside Cleveland had cared. In 1969, the country was ready to care.
When Time magazine ran the story that August, it illustrated it with a photograph of flames on the water. The photograph was from 1952, but the image did its work anyway. Within three years of that photograph, the United States had a federal environmental agency and a Clean Water Act. By the time Washington moved, the nets were already stacked in the sheds at Vermilion and Huron.
The blue pike was long gone. What the new statutes protected was drinking water, swimming water, and the idea of a lake, not the men who had made their living taking fish out of it. In December 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency came into existence. In April 1972, the United States and Canada signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.
In October 1972, over a presidential veto, Congress passed the Clean Water Act. They worked, which is the part of this story that gets left out. Phosphorus loading into Lake Erie fell by roughly 60 percent between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. Sewage plants were rebuilt to strip phosphorus out.
Detergent makers reformulated. The central basin stopped running out of oxygen every August. By the 1990s, the mayflies had come back to the western basin in numbers that once again annoyed everybody in Port Clinton. Now come back to the boats, because 1972 is the year the two halves of this story cross.
The mercury restrictions eased, and Ohio’s commercial fishery was allowed to go back to work. It went back under new rules. The most important of them was a single reclassification: walleye was no longer a commercial species in Ohio waters. It was a sport fish.
Whatever came up in a commercial net had to go back over the side, alive or dead. The reasoning was not corrupt. A walleye caught by a charter customer generates a boat charter, a motel room, a tank of gas, a license fee, a case of beer, and a meal. A walleye caught in a net generates the price of a walleye.
By the mid-1980s, researchers were publishing formal allocation studies on exactly this question, and the sport side won on almost every economic measure anyone chose to run. The state made a choice, and it made it at the worst possible moment for the men on the wrong side of it. They had just lost the blue pike. They had just lost two seasons to mercury.
Now the one species with any real prospect of recovery was removed from their license permanently. The gill net itself survived another 11 years. Ohio permitted gill netting in Lake Erie right through the stock collapse and well past it, and only outlawed it in 1983, the same year the blue pike was formally declared extinct. What remained legal was the trap net: a fixed maze of netting anchored to the bottom that funnels fish into a holding pot and keeps them alive.
It is far more selective, which is the point. A crew can release what it is not allowed to keep. It is also heavier, slower to lift, more expensive to build, and far more vulnerable to a storm. Then came the part that turned a restriction into a sentence.
Ohio stopped issuing commercial fishing licenses. The ones in existence were capped, and the state will not create new ones. The only way into the business is to acquire somebody else’s operation, and there are almost none to acquire. A recent count found 18 commercial fishing licenses in Ohio held between 10 businesses.
Within living memory, the number of outfits on this shore ran into the hundreds. Now look north. On the Canadian side of the same lake, working the same water, roughly 175 licensed commercial companies operate. Ontario’s fleet keeps its walleye, which Canadians call pickerel, and sells it.
A great deal of it crosses back into the United States, because the market for Lake Erie walleye is on the American shore, where the people are. The fish never changed. Only the side of the line it was caught on. The Ohio survivors got a quota system in 1996, allocating pounds of yellow perch among the remaining licenses.
Perch became the business. It is a smaller fish, a slower fish, a fish with a thinner margin, but it is the one a trapnetter in Ohio is still permitted to sell. Then, in 2005, a poaching investigation broke open a long-running scheme in which Ohio commercial fishermen had been landing far more than their quota and falsifying the paperwork, something on the order of 40 tons of illegally taken fish. By the time the prosecutions were finished, roughly a third of the commercial fishermen working the central and western basins had been implicated.
Whatever political room existed for loosening the rules closed. It has not opened since. The ones still working are not quiet about it. Holly Such fishes with her husband Mike out of a port east of Toledo.
“The state is always saying we have a crisis in our fish numbers,” she has said, “even when we show them their own numbers say there isn’t a problem. ” Her sharper line is the one that gets quoted, because it explains the whole century in a sentence: “Ohio favors catching fish that you can hang on a wall more than catching fish that you can put on a plate. ” That is the decision the state made in 1972 and has renewed every year since. It is not hidden.
It is not even especially controversial. It is simply not a decision anyone ever explained to the men it ended. There is one place the state did spend money on them, and the timing is almost unbelievable. Between 1983 and 1985, the years the gill nets were outlawed and the blue pike was declared extinct, two folklorists from the Ohio State University Center for Folklore Studies, Timothy C.
Lloyd and Patrick B. Mullen, went up and down the Ohio shore with tape recorders to document commercial fishing as a living tradition. They collected roughly 45 hours of recorded tape and 746 pages of transcription. It became a book: Lake Erie Fishermen: Work, Tradition, and Identity, published in 1990.
In the same span of years, one arm of the state of Ohio outlawed the gear these men worked with, and another arm sent scholars to record how they worked with it. The men describing all this were in their 50s and 60s, which means they had learned it in the 1930s and 1940s from men who had learned it in the 1880s, and it had come down the line effectively unbroken for a hundred years. Walk the waterfronts now at Vermilion, Huron, and Conneaut, and there are restaurants, condominiums, and a museum or two where the fish houses stood. Port Clinton calls itself the walleye capital of the world, and on New Year’s Eve it lowers a 20-foot fiberglass walleye over Madison Street at midnight while a crowd counts down.
That is what the fishery turned into: a mascot, a marina economy. Because the walleye came back. Not slowly and not partially. Phosphorus controls cleaned the spawning reefs.
The 1983 gear rules took pressure off. An enormous natural hatch arrived in the 1980s, and the stock climbed. In 1980, the entire Lake Erie commercial walleye catch was 1,858,000 pounds. By 1988, it was 7,589,000.
In 1996, it hit 10,937,000 pounds, two-thirds of the way back to the legendary season of 1956. The lake had healed. Now look at how that harvest was divided, because this is the sentence the whole story has been walking toward. In the Great Lakes Fishery Commission’s ledger, the column headed Ohio for the species walleye reads zero.
It reads zero in 1980. It reads zero in 1988. It reads zero in 1996, when the lake gave up nearly 11 million pounds of walleye, and essentially every pound of it was landed by a Canadian boat. It has read zero every single year for more than four decades.
Not one pound. The fish that came back went to the fleet that was still legally allowed to catch them, which was the fleet on the other side of an invisible line in the middle of the water. Ontario’s fishery is routinely described as the largest freshwater commercial fishery in the world, run out of ports like Wheatley and Port Dover with big steel boats and a processing industry behind them. Its customers are largely American.
The fish is filleted in Ontario, boxed, trucked south over the bridge at Detroit, and sold into the exact towns whose own boats are forbidden to catch it. The walleye on your plate at a lakefront restaurant in Port Clinton, in sight of the water it came out of, was quite possibly netted by a Canadian crew, processed in Canada, and imported. It is genuinely a local fish. It is also legally a foreign product.
Nothing about that is fraud, and nothing about it is hidden. It is simply the shape the rules made. The lake did not stay fixed either, and the second failure rhymes unpleasantly with the first. Starting in the mid-1990s, the algae came back to the western basin, green water in August all the same.
The phosphorus was arriving from somewhere: farmland. The Clean Water Act was written to regulate pipes, and it is very good at pipes. What it barely touches is what runs off a field after a spring storm: dissolved phosphorus from fertilizer and manure carried by the Maumee out of a watershed of several million acres of corn and soybeans, arriving in exactly the shallow, warm corner of the lake where it does the most damage. There is no outfall to inspect and no single company to name.
That is precisely why it has proved so much harder than the first fight. On the 2nd of August 2014, the city of Toledo told roughly 400,000 people not to drink their tap water. Not to boil it: boiling concentrates the toxin. Not to bathe small children in it.
The Collins Park treatment plant had detected microcystin produced by a cyanobacteria bloom sitting over the water intake in the western basin at levels above the guideline. The order stood for three days. Toledo is the same city that sat at the enforcement conference table in 1965 and was named for what it was discharging. Forty-nine years later, it could not supply its own residents with drinking water out of a Great Lake, and the cause was not a factory anyone could shut.
Bottled water sold out across northwest Ohio within hours. The National Guard trucked supplies in. The blooms have not stopped. Under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, the United States and Canada jointly committed to cutting phosphorus loading into the western basin by 40 percent by 2025.
That target was not met. Neither country pretends otherwise. The rest of the ledger genuinely is good news. The mayflies are back.
The central basin’s dead zone still forms most summers, but no longer smothers the whole floor. The walleye population has been estimated in recent years at around 180 million fish, the highest figure ever put on it, a stock in better shape than it was in 1956, when the whole lake gave up 15 million pounds of them. Here is the accounting plainly. The water came back.
The insects came back. The walleye came back so hard the biologists have had to keep revising the estimate upward. Two things did not come back, and neither of them ever will. The first is the blue pike: gone since 1959 in any commercial sense, listed as endangered in 1967, declared extinct in 1983.
There is no stocking program, no captive population, no plan. The lake that produced more of them than anywhere on Earth cannot produce one. The second is the fishery on the American shore, and this is the one that is worth being precise about, because it did not die of pollution. It died of law.
The water it needed was cleaned up at enormous public expense. The fish it wanted is at a record high. What stands between an Ohioan and a commercial walleye is the 1972 reclassification, the 1983 gear ban, and a license system that issues nothing new. Eighteen licenses.
Ten businesses. Hundreds of outfits within living memory reduced to that. In April, when the run comes through, Mike Johnson still lifts his trap nets off Lorain. The pot comes up heavy with walleye, thousands of dollars of fish rolling in the mesh.
And he tips them back over the side, because that is what the law requires. Every fish, every spring. The nets go down again for perch. The walleye swim north.
Some weeks later, those same fish come back over the Ambassador Bridge in a refrigerated trailer, filleted and boxed. And the waitress in a restaurant on the Ohio shore sets one of them down in front of somebody who has driven from Columbus for a taste of Lake Erie. It is the right fish out of the right water, an hour from where it was born.
It just is not theirs anymore.
