By Arnie Hakala - North Bay Nugget
Tuesday, July 02, 2002 - 10:00:00 AM
-NEWS - That awful snap, crackle, pop sound is back on Main Street.
Yes, the first wave of shadflies appeared Sunday night and when merchants opened this morning after the long weekend, they had some cleaning up to do.
Lights attract the winged insects which are as synonymous with North Bay as The Hole and walleye.
Bob Neault of Jocko Point was on Main Street Monday and he remembered more than just the awful fishy smell the shads leave behind.
"About eight years ago, I was coming around the corner of McIntyre and Ferguson on my motorcycle, a 750 cc, four-cylinder Honda, when I hit a pool of them that must have been an inch deep."
Neault said the bike did about three 360-degree turns and he fell off, scraping a leg.
The Nugget library has a thick file of shad stories.
In 1972, a car slid about 27.5 metres on a shadfly-covered road and struck a telephone pole.
There also have been bizarre stories.
In 1980, a Manitoba doctor said the flies were good to eat.
Dr. Reid Taylor told The Nugget he dined on them for breakfast.
"The insects taste like fish and if you munch a handful, they have the texture of breakfast food," said Reid, who had been eating the five-centimetre-long shads for several years.
Despite the nuisance, shadflies are important to their Lake Nipissing home.
Plenty of shadlfies means there is plenty of food for walleye and other smaller fish species.
Biologists say the shadfly passes its early stages of life - from one to three years - as a nymph in Lake Nipissing, breathing through gills and eating vegetable matter such as algae.
During the nymph stage, the shadfly is one of the most important food sources for fish in the lake.
They also are a good measure of water quality because they need an abundance of oxygen in the water to survive.
The adults have such poorly formed mouth parts that they cannot bite. They don't even eat.
The adults emerge from the lake and live about two days.
While alive, they shed their skins in order to lay eggs which are fertilized and then deposited into the lake and the cycle starts again.
The adults starve to death and end up in heaps under windows or in doorways, especially near bright lights.
The shads usually show up during the first week of July.
On July 6, 1988, there was a Gateway Major Fastball League game at Amelia Park between Sturgeon Falls' Nipissing Chrylser and Fraser Tavern.
The shads appeared. At first, they were just a nuisance. The stands emptied. More swarms migrated in from the lake. Outfielders were chasing a different type of fly. Batters started swinging before they got to the plate.
Don "Butch" Turcotte, the infield umpire, said, "You knew there were lights out there, but you couldn't really see them."
With half an inning shy of a complete game, plate umpire Jeff Wonnick called it off.
There was a similar incident about 15 years previous which made the pages of Sports Illustrated.
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