The story was definitely fishy. You didn't have to be an angler to sense that the paper was feeding you a line.
The words we published beneath this picture seemed to directly contradict the hard facts.
This fish picture ran as part of a news package on the Region page of The Press a couple of weeks ago. It carried an explanatory caption which said that a state Department of Natural Resources biologist hit the walleye "so it will submit to having either eggs or sperm extracted."
Personally, I didn't need to be smacked "upside the head" with a baseball bat to understand why we received numerous calls and questions from confused readers. The bat technique was quite familiar to me. I've been on several charter fishing excursions on Lake Michigan when a frisky lake trout or coho salmon is "extracted" from the water. One swift swat with a bat tends to subdue him. Forever and for dinner.
So the picture information was wrong. Dead wrong. The walleye was killed. In an act rife with ecological irony, that fish died in an effort aimed at preserving many, many more.
But to readers like Jim Perrin, a self-described sport fisherman, the decision to use this photograph was wading in where we did not belong. "What a disgusting picture," he said. Would the paper do the same if we had a picture of a farmer "hitting a cow with a bat" to make her give milk or "slapping a chicken" to get her eggs?
Perrin, 64, is a retired tool and die maker. He lives on the Muskegon River a mile upstream from the Croton Dam. Jim, who fishes "every chance I get" said he will be "in my glory this weekend. It's the opener for walleye."
For some reason that scientists are trying to unravel, walleye born in this state's streams do not survive to adulthood. The problem is not specific to the Muskegon River, but the stakes are higher there because the Muskegon is one of the state's most productive walleye streams.
Our story on walleye world was written by Jeff Alexander. He covers outdoor and environmental issues for our sister paper, the Muskegon Chronicle. "The walleye fishery in the Muskegon would be a shadow of its current self or might disappear completely if the DNR did not take eggs from the fish each year and raise the fish in a state hatchery," Alexander said.
This year's river trip and egg collection carried added significance, Jeff Alexander wrote. Scientists from Grand Valley State University's Water Resources Institute and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration jumped into the water, trying to solve the fish problem.
It is possible to harvest eggs without dealing lethal blows. The DNR has a process where they capture fish and sedate them in a tub of water laced with anesthetic and extract the eggs. After the fish recover, they are let go, explained Howard Meyerson, Press outdoor writer.
But at the same time it's trying to preserve the walleye population, the DNR is concerned about a far more virulent fish killer than a baseball bat -- that's VHS or viral hemmoraghic septemia.
As the huge name says -- sort of -- it's a contagious virus and usually fatal to any freshwater fish infected. It causes them, basically, to bleed to death.
"We are not happy about killing fish. We are the DNR," said biologist Rich O'Neil, the fisheries manager for the Muskegon River basin. "But to protect the fish in the hatcheries and the stocking program, we have to be sure they are not at risk of VHS. So, we have to have tissue samples, internal and external, of any fish that we take eggs from.
"Unfortunately the reporter did not make that point clearly in the article and the picture prompted many people to call and criticize what we're doing."
What was not clear to the biologist was that the story and the picture captions were not written by the same person. The editor selecting which picture or pictures to use in a page layout may be doing so long after the writer is on to another assignment.
This time the caption was written by a non-fishing copy editor, apparently lured to an incorrect assumption. "It's quite possible that the editor remembered stories I've written about harvesting eggs where the fish are not harmed," Meyerson said.
"I suspect the DNR would have preferred that picture not be run, regardless," he said. "It's not great for their image to be seen taking a baseball bat to fish. We needed to better explain why an official, considered to be a friend of the environment, would be killing fish."
"I think it's important to keep this incident in perspective," Alexander said. "The DNR kills about 200 walleye in the Muskegon each year to get about 4 million eggs to harvest and the sperm necessary to fertilize those eggs. Those 200 fish represent less than half of one percent of the 50,000 walleye that migrate up the Muskegon every year."
The DNR had put out a press release that they would be catching fish and collecting eggs. "I've written about it before," Meyerson said. "But we didn't use a picture like that!"