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did anybody ever here of this


HARDWATER

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Hey all,
I have heard of this stuff. Acctually, I am an aquatic Biology student at Bemidji State and we are in the process of doing a study on it for a fisheries management class right now. I cant remember if its Heterosporous or microsporous that we are looking at off the top of my head, but either one is bad news. We took a sample of 200 perch from Leech lake. We are finding something like +90% of the Pearch we sampled (all sizes) were infested. This is some nasty looking stuff. I would not recomend eating fish with this stuff in it. It turns the meat a real cloudy tan color when infested around the belly meat.... however you cant always tell from just looking at the fillet. Sometimes we couldnt tell if it had it until we looked at it under a scope. From my knowledge it is most common in perch but not species specific. We have taken a few samples from lake Bemidji as well and found it in perch there as well. I have seen pictures of infested fillets in bait shops now showing fisherman what to look for so keep and eye out. As far as i know not a lot is known yet about this. I would be happy to post the results of our experiment when it is finished in a month or 2 if anyone is interested?

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We ran into this little critter in a NE South Dakota lake a couple of years ago in walleyes. It makes the flesh look "cooked", we gave it to the cats and they wouldn't touch it, not even the uninfested looking portions. We've caught hundreds upon hundreds of perch from this same lake and never ran into it. We were fishing that day with a HS classmate of mine that was in wildlife & fisheries at SDSU in Brookings. He called his profs about it the next day and they wanted a sample of the flesh immediately, but it was all thrown out in the gut pile, we couldn't find any that wasn't spoiled. This would have been the only case they've found in SD, and we've caught hundreds of fish from the same lake in the last few years and none of them showed the physical signs in the flesh, but I guess that doesn't mean they aren't infected.
Selmer

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Sorry about taking so long to respond. I have been in southern California for Spring Break.... no ice fishing but lots of rock climbing grin.gif Anyway, I was acctually talking to my prof. about this before I left for break and I did ask him how it spreads. He was unsure. There just hasnt been enough research on this stuff yet to give any for sure answers. On thought that we came up with was that since the most 'infected' parts of the fillets seemed to be in the belly meat, it could be because of something that they are eating. We have been looking at samples under the microscope and the fish that have a lot of this stuff in them have next to no muscle tissue left in them.... its just one large mass of heterosporis. Can't see how that would be a good thing for the fish? Unfortunately beause in the begining this was suposed to be a small part of a larger project for the class, we dont have the time, funds, or enough resources to do more research on this particular aspect of it. We sort of stumbled upon this.

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