Aliens in the Backyard: Plant and Animal Imports into America

Gone Fishin’: An Unnatural Pastime

187 Gone Fishin’ An Unnatural Pastime Nothing could be more typical of a lazy summer’s day—An American youth is headed toward his favorite fishing hole armed with a cane pole and a can of worms. Yet few scenes have more nonnative elements in them than this one. The kid, the pole, the fish, the worm, the pond—all are nonindigenous. Not itself plant or animal, the pond is often an artifact of civilization. Although the United States has an estimated 41.6 million acres of ponds, lakes, and reservoirs, these are not dispersed uniformly throughout the nation. Guam, for example, has only one 27-acre reservoir, and Hawaii reports only 2,100 acres of small lakes, while Alaska possesses 12,780,000 acres, California 1,600,000 acres, Florida 2,000,000 acres, Louisiana 1,000,000 acres, Minnesota 3,200,000 acres, Oklahoma 1,000,000 acres, and Texas 3,000,000 acres. Much of this, however, is artificial. Virginia, where I live, for example, has nearly 150,000 acres of lakes, and the land is dotted with farms ponds—all but two of which are man-made. The only lakes in Virginia that predate Europeans are Lake Drummond in the Great Dismal Swamp and Mountain Lake in the Valley and Ridge Province. So it is in many mid-Atlantic states. Farther north the glaciers left behind thousands of lakes and ponds scattered throughout the northern tier of states, as the numbers reveal: Maine reporting 980,000 acres of lakes, Minnesota 3,200,00, New Hampshire 70,000, New York 790,000, North Dakota 660,000, and Wisconsin 982,000. While the “Land of a Thousand Lakes” still merits its name, many smaller wetlands, especially in the Plains states, have disappeared . Farther south the swampy bays of the south Atlantic states have also largely disappeared beneath the plow, while the catfish ponds of the Mississippi watershed are, as often as not, artificial impoundments. Natural bodies of water are scarce in the drier regions of the nation, although man-made lakes may be numerous. Texas, for example, boasts 3,000,000 acres of lakes. The West Coast has plenty of lakes, but these are not uniformly scattered throughout the states and many are artificial. Southern Californians, for example, may be 188 Aliens in the Backyard surprised to learn that their state has 1,672,000 acres of lakes, more than fortysix other states have. Nobody knows how many farm ponds America has. The federal Soil Conservation Service helped build more than 2 million farm ponds from 1945 to 1975, mostly in the South and Midwest. Virginia is estimated to have 50,000 small ponds, while Mississippi claims to have 280,000. Iowa estimates that it gains 1,000 new ponds every year. The old fishing hole, then, may well be as nonnative as our fisherman’s worm.1 The preferred fishing worm is the night crawler, Lumbricus terrestris, an earthworm . And warm, wet weather at night brings them crawling out in droves. I once lived in a damp basement that looked out into an even damper yard. One night after a rain, I looked out my front window and, slightly horrified, saw the ground heaving with earthworms. They were enormous, eight, ten glistening inches long, one end anchored in the ground, the other weaving and snaking and worming through the grass and dirt and air. The next morning, I examined the ground. I easily could see their holes because every one was stuffed with leaves and stem ends they had dragged down with them. The entire side lawn was studded with what looked like miniature withered bouquets. Darwin reports a German study that calculated 53,767 worms per acre. That is a lot of worms. If you thought fishermen simply went out into the backyard and looked under a rock or log for worms, you’re strictly an amateur. Worms are a big business and too important to be left to kids on Saturday morning. Down South in the Florida panhandle, for instance, they scare them up by “worm grunting,” using vibrations to drive worms out of the ground. Nobody’s quite sure why worms dislike vibrations, but they do, popping out by the dozens when grunters pound a stake in the ground and make it sing by rubbing it with metal. You can try the same trick at home with a pitchfork; drive its tines into the ground and play it like...