By Terry Karkos,Staff Writer

ALBANY TOWNSHIP – State fisheries biologist James Pellerin in Gray was both angry and sad Wednesday afternoon.

Apparently, someone wasn’t happy fishing for large brook trout in Broken Bridge and Crocker, two remote White Mountain National Forest ponds in Albany Township.

Instead, they illegally dumped golden shiners into the ponds, negating more than $3,000 worth of trout, materials and work over five years by state fisheries biologists.

“People don’t realize the seriousness of this,” Pellerin said.

“People get upset when someone illegally shoots a deer. That deer can be replaced, but this,” he said of the illegal introduction, “this affects whole ecosystems, potentially, forever.”

Shiners out-compete trout for food, affecting growth rates, Pellerin said.

In October 2000, Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife fisheries biologists reclaimed the ponds, spreading organic pesticide that killed all the fish.

Illegally introduced hornpout, pickerel, golden shiners and sunfish decimated the trout populations in the two ponds from 1958, when the ponds were last chemically reclaimed, to 2000.

Trout were unable to compete for food with the excessive numbers of undesired fish, and were preyed on by the pickerel.

In June 2001 and subsequent years, brook trout of varying sizes and strains were restocked. The intent was to grow big fish for anglers.

“In 2002, we sampled the trout, and we were getting good growth on the fish. We changed the stock, and we had reports of 15-inch to 16-inch brook trout,” Pellerin said.

Catch rates had more than doubled on both ponds since being reclaimed.

Broken Bridge, the deeper of the two ponds, had a history of producing 18-inch brook trout prior to the illegal fish stocking.

Crocker Pond is spread over 13 acres with depths ranging from 3 to 14 feet, while the depth on 18-acre Broken Bridge Pond ranges from 4 to 25 feet.

Biologists returned last week only to find previously stocked fingerling trout.

“At this time, there should have probably been 10-inch fish there, because we put in 6-inch fish last fall,” Pellerin said.

But what they caught in a minnow trap set for two hours in the ponds was 160 golden shiners.

“There were zillions of them in there. The population has just exploded. You could just see them everywhere,” he said.

“The long hours and thousands of dollars in resources that went into reclaiming these ponds in the hope of re-creating a quality brook trout fishery were largely undone by one selfish act,” said fisheries biologist Brian Lewis.

Because shiners are bait fish, Pellerin said he suspects that bait dealers may have illegally stocked the fish to keep a supply nearby.

“But for now, we are going to keep these ponds closed to the taking of bait, and keep tabs on it,” Pellerin said.

The closure would remain regardless of the quality of trout fisheries in the ponds, which “will be better than it was, because we don’t have pickerel, sunfish or bullhead there,” he said.

“But, it will not be nearly as good as it could be,” he added.