UNHAPPY TROUT.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVII, Issue 13, 16 January 1909, Page 2

UNHAPPY TROUT.

NOT ENOUGH ENEMIES. AT ROTORUA. "They are called razors, because it is said that a man can shave with them," remarked Mr. T. M. Wilford, M.P., to a Post reporter, referring to the trout of Rotoiua. In all the smoke-rooms, he says, one can hear anglers complaining about the wretched condition of the fish. The trouble is that the trout are too plentiful, their food is too meagre, and their enemies are too scarce. Therefore, they wear a lean and hungry look. Some of them "havo fair backs, but they "fall away to nothing," and they show no fight. They go on increasing and multiplying, and their food supplies go on decreasing. No eels delete thenhuge families, no shags harry them. During three weeks' stay Mr. Wilford noticed only three shags at Rotorua, and he states that eels have vanished from the lake and its tributary rivers. And the Maoris have been forbidden to net the teeming fish. An angler goes out in high hopes, which are raised still highei when he gets a bite a moment after a cast, but he becomes as limp as the trout when the fisherman discovers that he has hooked a creature almost too tired to wapgle its tail. He makes other casts, and pulls up other skeletons, plenty of them. Then he goes back to the smoke-room at the Spa, and brethren of many lands — Great Britain, Aigei.tine, .United States, Australia — condole with him, and, reversing the usual proced are oE anglers, they vie with one anothei in recounting memories of weedy catches. A Britishjpcolonel, who say lovely pictures of Rotorua trout in Encland. came out with his wife and a maid and a valet. He intended to stay a month, but the "razors" cut away his resolution in a few days, and he departed — and so the launches, and the guideb, and tho hotel waiters, and others gathered only a tithe of the prospective large harvest of fees and tips. The feed of the trout at Rotorua is piincipally kura (a small crayfish) and toi-toi (a small ordinary fish). The kura is vanishing under the onslaughts of the famished legions, and Mr. Wilford does not think that the introduction of shrimps from tho Waikato River will help to alter the narrow waists of tho starving trout. He recommends that the Government should have the lake traversed with a net of small mesh and draft out to other waters some of the enormous Rotorua sumlus. He also urges that Maoris should bo allowed to use nets for a couple of years till the liouty population of the lake is reduced io reasonable figures. Mr. 1 Wilford maintains that the over-population problem of Rotoru£. is also noticeable in some riveis, and at the risk of being dubbed a heretic by acclimatisation societies he suggests that the shooting of shags in fomc districts should be prohibited.