It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the Freshwater Fisheries Society of B.C. should yet again propose the stocking of McGuire Lake with game fish.
Curiously, it does so just four years after our community overwhelmingly rejected such a proposal by this self-serving group.
It is unfortunate, too, that council must itself – yet again – re-visit this ecologically-disruptive, science-lacking, proposed impact on McGuire Lake – surely a community gem in its present state, if ever there was one.
In past years, my Okanagan College biology students have investigated the bathymetric (depth)… and thermal (temperature) characteristics of McGuire Lake. They found in their studies that the lake is no more than 12-feet deep at its deepest point, and a good deal less than 12 ft. throughout much of its extent. This shallowness has a direct bearing on the lake’s seasonal temperature regimes, and it is not unusual for the surface and bottom temperatures to be the same during the hot temperatures of spring and summer.
I’m certain, that like my students, Steve Maracle of the Ministry of Environment and, hopefully, the Freshwater Fisheries Society of B.C., understand how physiologically harmful such a warm temperature regime, surface and bottom, can be to fish like trout ?
It shouldn’t be necessary then, to explain again to the Freshwater Fisheries Society of B.C., the City of Salmon Arm – or MOE, that such warm ambient temperatures in such a shallow body of water can be detrimental and even lethal to the fish species proposed for stocking.
Under these circumstances, it would be ill-advised to introduce so-called game fish into what, for them, would be an unnatural, indeed toxic environment, and almost certainly, one in which they would suffer a short-lived, unhealthy existence.
At best, such a stocking would be insensitive and uninformed; at worst it would be ecologically damaging and an exercise in unnecessary animal cruelty – hardly a progressive and green freshwater management model for our community.
I urge the City of Salmon Arm to acknowledge the invaluable community asset that McGuire Lake represents in its present state, and to respect the clearly-stated wishes of the community to protect and sustain it as is for future unimpaired nature study and esthetic enjoyment.
Tom Crowley