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Paper short abstract:

The introduction of bass to Ontario’s Algonquin Park in 1896 provides a contrast to transcontinental fish movements typical of the late 19th-century. This talk focuses on the local scale of this introduction, the role of railways and anglers, and the gradual awareness of its environmental impacts.

Paper long abstract:

Fish introductions expanded in the mid-nineteenth century thanks to steam-powered transportation and took place on vast scales. In North America, fish culturists traded western and eastern fish species via the transcontinental railways, while English fish culturists shipped European brown trout across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to Tasmania, Australia, and New Zealand. These introductions, which established naturalized populations, met colonial desires to create familiar types of angling for settlers. These acclimatization “successes” are well known, but fish introductions also took place on very local scales with fish moving over shorter distances. A case in point is the introduction of smallmouth bass (Micropterus dolomieu) to Algonquin Park in Ontario. The park, established in 1893 ostensibly to protect headwaters and old-growth forests, led to Indigenous dispossession, increased forest harvesting, tourist exploitation, and the construction of a railway across the park’s headwater area. State and railway officials quickly moved to transport smallmouth bass—a popular gamefish that was native to the lower-elevation waters that surrounded the park—via the railway into the park. Algonquin’s lakes had provided vital habitat to cold-water species such as brook and lake trout, burbot and other species. But hydrological changes wrought by forestry and railway engineering enabled smallmouth bass to establish themselves and slowly spread through the park’s network of lakes and rivers, displacing trout. This presentation maps out this railway-facilitated introduction, highlighting its local scale and the impacts that biologists only began to register later in the twentieth century as they recognized bass as an invasive species.