Sportsman Channel gets Gory... with its eyes closed...
The current ads for “Attack of the Bass” Sunday fishing programs on cable television’s Sportsman Channel are clearly spoofing the current craze for zombie apocalypse media. The promos feature bloody, sore-covered fish thrashing through the water, held aloft by fisherman and swarming toward the viewer with comical red eyes. The climatic shot features a killer bass overturning a boat and sending two anglers to a grisly fate.
image from “Attack of the Bass” promo
Ironically the network’s producers seem oblivious to the fact that their special effects show injuries that look nearly identical to scientific images showing the ravages of invasive species and bacterial infections upon a number of American game fish.
Lake Trout with lamprey lesions
In the Great Lakes, the “zombie fish” are trout, salmon and smallmouth bass that have been devastated by the parasitic sea lamprey, a non-native species that attaches to the sides of the larger fish. The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission describes their real-life flesh eating this way: “Sea lampreys feed by attaching themselves by their concave, round, suctiondisk mouth to the exterior of fish. They rasp a hole in the skin with their rough tongue, and feed on the host fish’s body fluids. They may kill their host directly, or weaken it so much that fungus infections and other ills destroy it.” Now that’s a zombie!
Striped Bass with with Mycobacteriosus
In the Chesapeake Bay, the “undead” species is the Striped Bass, one of America’s most celebrated game fish. For the last twenty years a poorly understood bacterial infection known as Mycobacteriosus has been covering “stripers” with ulcerous lesions. Scientific surveys report more than 50% of the Chesapeake Bay population are now infected with the disease. Unnervingly, this new species of bacterium can also spread to fisherman handling the fish, causing swelling extremities and requiring lengthy treatment with antibiotics. Like the hapless anglers in the network promo, the Bay’s sportsman may discover that there are unpleasant consequences to messing with a “zombie species.”
The mission of the Sportsman Network includes “promoting conservation and the tradition of the Sportsman lifestyle.” Yet when it promotes “Attack of the Bass” Sundays with the Twitter hashtag “swimmingdead”, it is unwittingly celebrating the decline of American fisheries everywhere. Likewise, channel’s producers seem unaware that the fisheries have been largely degraded by human impacts. In fact, sportfishing boats, frequently hauled from one water-body to another are a likely vector for the passage of invasives like the sea lamprey. Despite state and regional efforts to enforce boat inspection and to encourage bilge water cleanout and boat washing, the efforts have been too little and too late for many lakes, rivers and ponds.
Televised bass programs rarely take the opportunity to demonstrate responsible practices and good environmental stewardship. But with a little pivot, the Sportsman Channel could consider modifying its approach in future years. Why not use the zombie theme and clever special effects to draw the public’s attention to the human-caused threats to nation’s fish and other aquatic species? And the professional hosts and anglers could lead the charge to keep the zombies of habitat loss and environmental degradation at bay.
http://www.thesportsmanchannel.com/aob/
http://fishandboat.com/pafish/fishhtms/chap4.htm
http://www.dnr.state.md.us/fisheries/oxford/stripedbass/
http://www.seagrant.umn.edu/ais/sealamprey_battle
http://www.vims.edu/research/departments/eaah/projects/myco/index.php
http://www.vims.edu/people/latour_rj/pubs/rjl_Gauthier_et_al_2008.pdf
http://everything-smallmouth.com/lamprey-effects-on-great-lakes-and-smallmouth-bass/
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