Reply #10: Noooo! My beloved smallies! [View All]

[sofa king]

I've been wading the Potomac River for smallmouth bass for twenty years, now. They're my favorite fish. When I had the time and the wheels to do it, I fished the same spots for years, getting to know them so well I could often spot particular individuals and watch them grow from year to year. No, I don't eat them--you wouldn't eat your cats, would you? I throw them back. The point is to prove my intellectual dominance over a creature with a brain the size of a pinky-nail, and I succeed brilliantly.

That article offers clues, but seems to fail to put the pieces together. Maybe the Washington Post is being responsible, but I don't have to be.

The culprit is likely to be chicken shit.

The entire Shennandoah Valley is fertilized with chicken shit, and last spring, torrential rains happened to fall the very week that most farmers laid down fertilizer. The resulting fish-kill managed to wipe out 80% of the smallmouth in the river, including virtually all of the large adults. The Virginia DEQ airily and euphemistically refers to "nutrient overload" as a possible factor, but everyone in the Valley knows that it's chicken shit.

If that chicken shit also happens to contain chicken estrogen, then I think we have a primary suspect for our hermaphrodite smallies.

It might not be all bad, though. Now that the smallies are into transgenderism, maybe they'll come back to Georgetown.