The Fish Thief: A Great Lakes Mystery

Chicago sits on the shore of Lake Michigan,

one of the five Great Lakes.

A restaurant a short walk from the lakefront

began serving signature seafood dishes in the 1940s.

Shaw's gets a lot of tourist business from around the country.

We've always served lake fish, both whitefish and perch.

There you go.

We have two whitefish here.

These come from Lake Superior.

And then over here

are perch fillets, yellow lake perch out of Lake Erie.

I'd love someday to see lake trout back on our menu,

I don't know if that'll ever happen.

The Great Lakes have a natural organizing force for the people of the region.

They touch on eight states and two Canadian provinces.

The vastness of them is really hard to convey.

When you stand on the shore of one, it certainly doesn't feel like a lake.

They're very, very important to our economy.

The fact that we've got the world's largest source of clean fresh water.

That's why you can have tens of millions of people living around the Great Lakes.

The Great Lakes are really in our DNA.

One out of five jobs is related to water.

Kids grow up and they have that memory.

They associate it with their time and their summers

with their family on the shores of

Lake Michigan or Lake Huron, whatever is their lake.

And fishing is an integral part of that.

The fish that swim in the water

are part of the lifeblood of the Great Lakes region.

The fishery in the Great Lakes is unique.

This is a way of connecting son and daughter to dad, mom.

Great Lakes fishing is first described in documents dating to the 17th century,

when European explorers first saw Indigenous people

catch tremendous quantities of fish.

We have a relationship with fish.

We survive because of these relationships.

And these relationships we can think of them with fish,

but also with the water, with the air, with the medicine plants.

All of creation.

So to us, the importance of fishing

is part of that full relationship with the natural world.

For most of history, people simply assumed that the Great Lakes

were so vast and packed with fish

that there would always be plenty to catch.

But by the 1950s, everything had changed.

The fish most important to people were nearly gone.

The fish disappeared.

No one could explain it, let alone fix it.

Whether you were in Lake Ontario, or Lake Superior,

or everywhere in between, it was dire.

From small towns up to major cities,

it was people's livelihoods.

Short on hope, some remarkable people tackled the mystery.

Their odd discovery still menaces the Great Lakes today.

Their battle against it dramatically changed

how people from all walks of life connect with these freshwater seas.

People fish the Great Lakes for different reasons.

Recreational fishing, commercial fishing, and subsistence fishing

are three very different types of fishing, and all of them are incredibly important

to both the history and current realities

of the Great Lakes.

People began fishing to survive long before the first Europeans arrived.

The Anishinaabe people, or the Chippewa,

bands that are in the area,

were a nomadic people.

For subsistence, they would go out from shore and fish.

Along the shores of Lake Superior,

they would harvest primarily in the fall

when the whitefish or the lake trout would come in to spawn.

The subsistence fishery provides food to the family.

It's very important.

Subsistence fishing is fishing for survival.

Sport fishing is more for personal enjoyment.

From the 16th century on,

European immigrants poured into the Great Lakes region,

and many brought a passion for fishing.

Freshwater fishing had been a recreational pastime

in Europe for centuries,

and a status symbol among elites

who fished for salmon, trout,

whitefish, and other freshwater varieties.

Long before Columbus stumbled upon the New World,

overfishing threatened lakes and rivers across Europe,

and nobles blocked access to prime fishing spots.

Things only worsened.

When the first European military officers

and entrepreneurs arrived in the Great Lakes region,

they found its tremendous abundance

of freshwater brimming with fish species

they favored back home.

One type of fish proved especially enticing.

Each fall, Atlantic salmon leave the open sea

to spawn in rivers from Scandinavia to Spain,

and anglers have stocked them for centuries.

They also move up the St. Lawrence River into Lake Ontario,

crowding into tributary rivers to spawn.

As the European immigrant population on its shores grew,

more and more people targeted them.

By one account, the haul on the North Shore in 1820

was so plentiful that,

The impressive hauls drew other immigrants

to Lake Ontario, who launched a boom in another type of fishing.

Great Lakes commercial fishing, I would say it's always been here.

We'd always been getting fish that we traded with each other,

that we traded with other people.

Fishing was part of our economy.

Not a cash economy, necessarily,

but certainly an economy of barter and trade.

Non-native people came into the area.

They decided to figure out how they could capitalize on it.

From the time of European settlement in the region,

the commercial fishery was also a major component of the economy.

It's one reason why people came to the region.

Salmon was fished heavily in Lake Ontario.

They would use seine nets along the shoreline,

across shore and bay areas of the lakes.

As cities expanded,

spawning streams were dammed to power gristmills and sawmills.

And commercial fishing boomed with the swelling population.

So people used bigger and bigger nets,

capable of snaring scores of fish at a time.

So these were fishing operations that reached back deeply,

deeply into the colonial period.

And the colonial period is ripe with stories of dam building

and water diversions and innumerable environmental changes

that absolutely devastated fish populations.

By 1860, Lake Ontario's Atlantic salmon were gone.

Commercial fishermen at the time,

simply looked at the lake as a bounty.

They had never seen freshwater resources

of the size and breadth of the Great Lakes,

and they were viewed as an inexhaustible resource.

By the time Lake Ontario's Atlantic salmon fishery collapsed,

European immigrants fished every Great Lake.

The commercial fishing industry, during the 19th and 20th century,

was significant and embedded throughout the Great Lakes.

Commercial fishing was intricately tied

to the development of the entire Great Lakes region as we know it today.

Nowhere compared to Lake Erie.

It sat at the heart of America's industrial boom.

Smelters, refineries, and factories packed the waterfronts

of its lake-shore cities,

transforming raw materials into products

bound for East Coast cities and Europe.

Workers from around the world flooded into the region.

And commercial fishing boomed to help feed the exploding population.

At the dawn of the 20th century,

more than 100 million pounds of fish were hauled from

Lake Erie's shallow depths each year.

The commercial fishery of Lake Erie targeted a variety of fish species,

but most important to that commercial fishery was lake herring.

They were actually ciscoes, or chorogonus artidae.

The reason why they got the name herring is because

in the Atlantic Ocean there's a native herring species that's marine,

or salt water, and they have a similar role that they play

as the herring in the Great Lakes,

even though they're entirely different species.

The fishing industries around Lake Erie were built on lake herring.

The shipping of fish, the processing of fish...

It allowed cities to be built near the water, both in Ontario and the U.S.

When the Lake Erie cisco fishery is at its height,

the commercial fishing industry is experiencing

a lot of the same developments

that are taking place in manufacturing.

Schooners are becoming fish tugs.

Nets aren't being pulled out of the water by hand anymore.

There are steam lifters.

You have these technologies emerging,

and you have people learning to use these technologies

in a very heavily extractive way.

Lake Erie is much more industrialized, much more capitalized,

and much more resource-intensive

than the commercial fishery was in Lake Ontario.

It's the same industry with nicer mechanics.

In 1924, more than 32 million pounds of herring

were hauled from Lake Erie.

A year later, the catch crashed

to little more than 5 million pounds and kept falling.

Everyone blamed everyone else.

No one had any idea what happened to these fish.

All of a sudden, there were no fish for those fishermen to catch.

And this had huge ramifications, well, for the economy.

It was really an impetus for full-scale Great Lakes science to begin.

Science into those fisheries and what was going on.

We see a real investment, particularly on the U.S. side,

from the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries,

clearly driven by the economic importance and value of the fishery.

Otherwise, this investment would not have been made.

The Bureau of Fisheries opened a research laboratory

in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Its first director was the fisheries biologist,

John Van Oosten.

He started out more or less as a troubleshooter

for complaints that fishermen had about particular stocks.

He really tried to find out what was causing grief to the fishermen

and to correct it.

Lab scientists began to investigate a range of potential causes,

from toxic dumping by the region's factories and chemical plants

to whether fishing nets killed too many small fish

before they reached reproductive age.