RENO, Nev. — Nevada game wardens who spend most their time hunting down big-game poachers are focusing on a serious threat to nature in a lake: An invasive fish species that eats all the other fish prized by anglers and then turns cannibalistic.
The Nevada Department of Wildlife is offering a $10,000 reward to help nab the culprit who apparently dumped Northern pike in Comins Lake, a popular fishing spot surrounded by mountains near Great Basin National Park.
By all accounts, Comins Lake was well on its way to recovery after the state restocked the fishery with largemouth bass, brown and rainbow trout in 2015.
But the invading Northern pike were discovered again last month by a fisherman who caught one and called state wildlife officials. Five more have been confirmed since then.
“This malicious and illegal act seriously endangers our effort to restore this important fishery,” said Jon Sjoberg, chief of fisheries for the Nevada Department of Wildlife. “The people illegally introducing pike are destroying a fishery, not creating a new one.”
Chief Game Warden Tyler Turnipseed announced the reward last week.
“We intend to find who did it,” he said.
Northern pike may not sound as scary as piranhas or the Asian swamp eel — two of the other half-dozen fish that Nevada law singles out as invasive, injurious aquatic species.
But with its long, needle-sharp teeth, the voracious predator that sometimes grows longer than 4 feet can wipe out an entire fishery.
“They eat all the trout we put in there,” Edwin Lyngar, spokesman for the state wildlife agency, said in an interview Friday. “Then they eat all the other fish they can find, and then they start to eat each other.”
The remote eastern Nevada lake near Utah border covers about two-thirds of a square mile and draws numerous anglers.
“It brings tremendous economic activity to this part of the state,” Lyngar said. “Years ago, people came from all over the world to fish that lake.”
