This is primarily for those living or fishing in the Great Lakes Basin but it is a growing issue elsewhere in North America as well.

I found this article on the web about VHS (Viral Hemorrhagic Septicemia) in fish, that has now invaded the Great Lakes water shed. It has a lot of photos worth taking a look at. You will have to copy and past the link into your browser. For some reason I can't make it work as a hyper-link.

http://seagrant.psu.edu/news/KarenMartin(PDA)-VHS.pdf


If you are living in the Great Lakes Basin you need to be worried about this.


As upsetting as this article is .... what really struck me was the fact that I had seen this before but just didn't know it yet. I was fishing in December on the Thames River in London, Ontario, just down by my house. There was a big spawning run of Gizzard Shad so I dug out the fly rod to see if I could get a few...just for fun. I caught over 2 dozen in a short while and then quit because it was getting boring and frankly Gizzard Shad STINK bad. What I had noticed was that ALL of the shad I caught that day had strange red marks on them. I didn't know what it was at the time. I KNOW NOW! (thanks to that article).

Here is a photo of a fish I caught that day. I would say ignore the ripped skin (bite mark?) but there are actually lesions in there as well so look at it. The part I really want you to notice is the red marks on the skin.

Remember...ALL of those fish I caught and ALL of the fish I had seen swimming by (thousands) had these markings. Some not as bad as others...some, a lot worse than the one I took the photo of. You may see these lesions in or around the eyes, the ventral fin area seemed to be common in ALL of the fish caught and some were just red all over.



Scared yet?

By the way, in my area...Gizzard Shad is a forage fish for a large number of predatory sports fish. In particular...Small Mouth Bass.

Also consider if you have a fish tank at home or a pond in your yard or you just changed from one watershed to another that day with your fishy hands and waders....you just may have brought this disease from point a to point b. If you bait fish and took some minnows from this river and went down the road to a favorite pond, you just infected that pond.