Perspectives on an Asian Carp Prevention in Canada: Commercial Fish Harvester

Speaker (Kendall)

We know how important the vegetation is to our native fish because we have fish that use it for spawning they use it for habitat for, you know, most of their adult life.

If the Grass Carp effectively reduced the amount of vegetation currently growing in shallow and impounded areas in the Great Lakes and in the Bay of Quinte and they destroyed that habitat then our native fishes would be in big trouble.

Big, big, big trouble.

It would it would destroy the commercial fishery.

My name is Kendall Dewey, I’m a fourth generation commercial fisherman and I live here in Prince Edward County.

I fished with my father the last year that he fished and the reason he had to quit fishing was because of an invasive species.

I can remember going out with him on weekends and seeing the white fish come up in the nets and around the roller and there would still be Sea Lamprey attached to them and if they didn’t have Sea Lamprey, they’d have scars on them where the Sea Lamprey had been attached.

That was an invasive species, that’s what caused him to quit fishing.

Commercial fishing in Ontario and in this country period, is one of the oldest industries.

It’s important because we are providing food for people.

My wife and I have been partnered for probably more years than she would like to remember and in the last three or four years we have had a new crew member join us at certain times of the year to help us out because we’re getting old.

Steve is great and his brother-in-law and himself asked us about selling one of our fishery.

So they bought that license and this past summer they caught a forty seven and a half pound Grass Carp in one of their trap nets.

Right now they’re rare enough and unusual enough that you make the effort to take it to the Ministry of Natural Resources to properly identify it, let the biologists have a look at it, open it up.