Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations What makes a fish wild?

as long as we're waxing philosophical, here's my 2c...

from a typical point of view, wild fish are those that have adapted to a particular environment and have a successful self sustaining population, they may have been introduced some time ago or be native. wild vs. native is another interesting question. native probably being defined as that which was here before modern man had the ability to affect his immediate environment (although isnt man wild and native too?). despite the semantics and values such as "is it wrong or bad, or is it good and healthy" that one could "argue" about forever......cj and bruce, i think about it this way.

its a scale problem. of both time and space. on what scale do you perceive yer life and the life of all the critters around you, the trees, the soil, and especially the ROCKS, i.e. our environment.

are bass not native to earth?

and humans?

is not everything we eat, drink, see, view, touch, or manufacture of the earth? ok, maybe not tectites (pieces of meteorite), but as you expand yer scale, everything is native to the solar system, the universe, the cosmos and beyond.

for a time, we humans can surely and dramatically affect things around us here on earth but on what scale?

rather than stumble along as so many of you are used to from me, here is an eloquent piece of prose which illustrates the scale problem (and my points of view as a geologist.....i am suddenly amazed (or i've lost my mind) that such a simple question...."what makes a fish wild" would generate so much philosophical crap):

I wish i could put an audio link here, but i'm not that smart, so you can just imagine the following........A Charlton Heston reading of the Forward from the book Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton:

HESTON: You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

so while we can argue about the significance of man's impact on the planet and whether or not those impacts are good or bad, healty or unhealthy, natural or unnatural, realize that we all live in our little domains as individuals on this planet. we create laws to live and abide by that are based to support our values for those things we deem good or bad. we get attached to things in this domain, in this scale, that which is our environment for the time we are here to witness it.

we as pondbossers try and do our small part, as bob mentioned, being "good stewards" with what we have for the time we have here to do it. hey, it makes us feel good. killing elephants doesnt make most of us feel good, putting up wood duck boxes does.