Of course a wage slave making his morning commute would never suspect the guy standing on the edge of the bridge is just there to enjoy the sunrise, but suicide is never far from his mind... heh. This story would be funny if it wasnt so sick and sad.


-----------------------------


BERLIN (Reuters) - A couple who climbed a suspension bridge in Germany to watch the sunrise sparked a major rescue operation when passers-by mistook their stunt for a suicide bid, police said on Monday.

A driver called police after seeing a man sitting on top of the road bridge on the Main river near Frankfurt, and thought the 25-year-old planned to kill himself.

Squad cars, fire engines and a police speedboat with divers rushed to the scene.

"The man and his girlfriend climbed down from the bridge and said sheepishly they had just wanted to watch the sun come up," police spokesman Franz Winkler said. "It looks like they may have to foot the bill for it."

Firefighters put their "rescue" bill at 1,600 euros (1,095 pounds). Police are still counting, he added. 

They're not homeless or unemployed, yet they scavenge in bins for discarded food. Freegans, shocked at the extent of consumer waste, are changing the way they eat. Liz Scarff joins them for dinner

02.20.2006

Under the cover of night, I stealthily lift the lid of the dustbin and shine in my torch. It's below zero and my hands are shaking as I rummage inside. I'm on the hunt for food. But I'm not homeless and I could certainly afford to go to the shops if I wanted to. So, why am I doing this? Quite simply, I'm living as a freegan.

Dining on food from a dustbin may have once been the preserve of tramps, but for many it is now becoming a lifestyle choice. Freeganism - a combination of the words "free" and "vegan"- is a movement whose devotees take responsibility for the impact of their consumer choices and find alternative ways of meeting their everyday needs. This includes housing, clothing and, most surprisingly, food. Around 17 million tons of food are buried in British landfill sites every year, four million of which are edible. Sometimes, disposal is the cheapest option available to the food industry.

The freegan movement is popular in America, particularly New York, where people regularly meet up and hunt through the bins together on "trash tours". The man who is credited with popularising the US movement is 28-year-old Adam Weissman, an eco-activist, sometime security guard and founder of the website, www.freegan.info. "Freeganism is a reaction to waste," he says, "but also to the injustices like sweatshops and the destruction of the rainforests that go into producing goods in the first place. I realised that, as a purchasing consumer, I was complicit in that exploitation. But by consuming waste, I'm not supporting these practices."

Weissman, who lives in New York, says that he has never gone hungry. "People assume that food is spoiled, but really they are just bags of food. There is so much waste, it's easy to live this way." And it's not just food. "I've found designer clothes, stereos and computers. In our culture, we always need newer, shinier things."

Even so, scavenging in bins for food sounds downright disgusting, not to mention embarrassing. And vanity aside, there's also the possibility of food poisoning. So, just how easy is it to live on discarded food? And will it ever really catch on in Britain? I meet up with two London freegans, Ash Falkingham, 21, and Ross Parry, 46, for a crash course. "We call this 'the express lane'," Ash explains. We are in south London, in a multi-storey car park that accommodates the Iceland and Tesco bins. It's 5pm and dark enough for us to be inconspicuous. Ash and Ross march confidently over to the Iceland wheelie bins, lift the lid and start sorting the contents.

Clear plastic bags contain frozen meals, including chilli con carne and chicken in tarragon sauce. The packaging is still intact and the sell-by date is that day. Underneath are 10 tubs of Häagen-Dazs ice cream, with the same sell-by date. Nestling at the bottom is a tray of eggs. The best-before date is the following week, they're intact, and the only thing wrong is that one is missing. "We get a lot of eggs," says Ross. "Sometimes, if one breaks, they just chuck out the lot."

Although I keep my distance, the bins smell surprisingly neutral. After loading the first haul, we turn to the Tesco bins. They're full to the brim with more frozen foods, poppadams, crisps, and a tray of seven jars of Bonne Maman marmalade. One jar has smashed, making the others slightly sticky. But even though the sell-by date is January 2007, rather than just wipe the jars, the whole lot have been thrown away. "Growing up, we always used to eat things if they were a couple of days past the sell-by date," Ash says.

Ash and Ross live entirely from "urban foraging", and say that it has never made them ill. They visit markets after closing time, and the bins of supermarkets and high-street stores. A trip to India inspired Ross to adopt the freegan lifestyle. "In India, they don't waste anything. People go through the garbage and recycle everything. That's how they live. In the West, everything is going to landfill." They forage about once a week and find enough food to live on. Ross even manages to maintain his gluten-free diet. Any spare food is shared. "Most of my friends will take freegan food, even my parents," adds Ash, who wears perfectly good boots and a jumper liberated from a bin.

Back in their van after sorting the booty, we tuck into some chocolate- mocha slices while Ross and Ash tell stories of legendary hauls. Like the time a group of freegans found a bin full of 200 frozen chickens and another with a flat-screen TV. Or the two wheelie bins full of bananas and Brussels sprouts they found on Christmas Day. Ash e-mails me a few days after we meet to tell me that he has found a damaged, but still usable, MP3 player in a music-shop bin.

Armed with a fistful of freegan tips, my challenge is to live as a freegan for three days in my home town of Brighton. Too embarrassed to go on my own, I've roped in my friend Dave.

MONDAY

As we set off, it's freezing cold and the wind is biting. I've been warned that places such as Marks & Spencer and Morrisons lock their rubbish away, and after an hour and a half of searching, we haven't found one accessible bin. Eventually, we find the Co-op rubbish and... bingo! There's a plastic bag full of vegetables, but it's right at the bottom. So, while Dave holds the lid open, I climb up, balance on the side and reach in. A couple of passers-by throw us pitying looks. I feel mortified. But the sealed bag is full of leeks, potatoes, apples and carrots, and there is nothing wrong with them. As we triumphantly bag our free-food booty, we discuss potential menus and decide on soup. Now, we just need to find some bread. A subversive peek inside a Budgens bin reveals a loaf. But the snag is that we are right outside the station and it's rush hour. Too embarrassed to rummage, we head to the more secluded Iceland nearby, where we find a loaf of Kingsmill bread. The packaging is perfect and the sell-by date is today. The vegetables are firm and, after scrubbing them, we cook up a delicious hearty soup. Dessert is baked freegan apples with cinnamon, almonds and sultanas. Delicious.

TUESDAY

I don't feel ill - a good start - so we tuck into our freegan breakfast of avocados (a gift from Ash and Ross from a bin in Wood Green) and the rest of the bread. We decide to visit a different Co-op and again find lots of vegetables and fruit - potatoes, cauliflower, spring greens, peppers, a melon and some salad. The salad is on the turn, but if it were in your fridge, you'd eat it. Other sell-by dates, like those of the spring greens, are not for another week. I don't understand why they'd be thrown out. Food waste costs Britain around £18bn annually, which is especially disturbing when you consider that four million people in Britain can't afford a healthy diet. After a lunch of leftover soup, subsequent searches at bakeries and patisseries prove fruitless. I even feel cheated when I spot someone else making off with a clear bag of what looks like frozen foods and yoghurts from a Budgens bin, but we have found enough food this morning for dinner and breakfast.

We've decided that using a few store-cupboard ingredients such as noodles is permissible, so on the menu tonight is a spicy noodle soup with green peppers, carrots from yesterday and some tender steamed cabbage on the side. For dessert we plump for another baked apple.

WEDNESDAY

The only downside of being a freegan is that you can't plan what you are going to eat. Today, after a breakfast of melon, we head off to check out the bins in the vegetable market, which are malodorous compared with the supermarket refuse. I procure my first freegan lamp and, inspired by Ash's MP3 discovery, Dave wants to check the back of some electrical shops. Again, we find enough food to dine like kings: sausages, greens, swede, fennel cooked with lemon and roasted onion. Although three days is a short time to live as a freegan, I've already got a much better sense of how much food is unnecessarily condemned to landfill. I'm tempted to continue with my freegan lifestyle. After all, the food we found, after a good wash, was no different to buying it in the shop. Except, of course, it was free.

For more information: www.freegan.info; www.fareshare.org.uk; www.dumpsterdiving.net; www.scavengeuk.mine.nu

How to be a freegan

* Take gloves and a torch * Don't pass a "No Trespassing" sign * Use discretion when choosing what to eat. If in doubt, throw it out * Always leave the bin as clean as you found it * If the bag is ripped or any goods are exposed, just leave them behind * Just because a bin is no good one day, doesn't mean it will be like that every day * In general small to medium shops are probably best. Larger chains have their bins locked away * Wash all the items you find before consuming

Under the cover of night, I stealthily lift the lid of the dustbin and shine in my torch. It's below zero and my hands are shaking as I rummage inside. I'm on the hunt for food. But I'm not homeless and I could certainly afford to go to the shops if I wanted to. So, why am I doing this? Quite simply, I'm living as a freegan.

Dining on food from a dustbin may have once been the preserve of tramps, but for many it is now becoming a lifestyle choice. Freeganism - a combination of the words "free" and "vegan"- is a movement whose devotees take responsibility for the impact of their consumer choices and find alternative ways of meeting their everyday needs. This includes housing, clothing and, most surprisingly, food. Around 17 million tons of food are buried in British landfill sites every year, four million of which are edible. Sometimes, disposal is the cheapest option available to the food industry.

The freegan movement is popular in America, particularly New York, where people regularly meet up and hunt through the bins together on "trash tours". The man who is credited with popularising the US movement is 28-year-old Adam Weissman, an eco-activist, sometime security guard and founder of the website, www.freegan.info. "Freeganism is a reaction to waste," he says, "but also to the injustices like sweatshops and the destruction of the rainforests that go into producing goods in the first place. I realised that, as a purchasing consumer, I was complicit in that exploitation. But by consuming waste, I'm not supporting these practices."

Weissman, who lives in New York, says that he has never gone hungry. "People assume that food is spoiled, but really they are just bags of food. There is so much waste, it's easy to live this way." And it's not just food. "I've found designer clothes, stereos and computers. In our culture, we always need newer, shinier things."

Even so, scavenging in bins for food sounds downright disgusting, not to mention embarrassing. And vanity aside, there's also the possibility of food poisoning. So, just how easy is it to live on discarded food? And will it ever really catch on in Britain? I meet up with two London freegans, Ash Falkingham, 21, and Ross Parry, 46, for a crash course. "We call this 'the express lane'," Ash explains. We are in south London, in a multi-storey car park that accommodates the Iceland and Tesco bins. It's 5pm and dark enough for us to be inconspicuous. Ash and Ross march confidently over to the Iceland wheelie bins, lift the lid and start sorting the contents.

Clear plastic bags contain frozen meals, including chilli con carne and chicken in tarragon sauce. The packaging is still intact and the sell-by date is that day. Underneath are 10 tubs of Häagen-Dazs ice cream, with the same sell-by date. Nestling at the bottom is a tray of eggs. The best-before date is the following week, they're intact, and the only thing wrong is that one is missing. "We get a lot of eggs," says Ross. "Sometimes, if one breaks, they just chuck out the lot."

Although I keep my distance, the bins smell surprisingly neutral. After loading the first haul, we turn to the Tesco bins. They're full to the brim with more frozen foods, poppadams, crisps, and a tray of seven jars of Bonne Maman marmalade. One jar has smashed, making the others slightly sticky. But even though the sell-by date is January 2007, rather than just wipe the jars, the whole lot have been thrown away. "Growing up, we always used to eat things if they were a couple of days past the sell-by date," Ash says.

Ash and Ross live entirely from "urban foraging", and say that it has never made them ill. They visit markets after closing time, and the bins of supermarkets and high-street stores. A trip to India inspired Ross to adopt the freegan lifestyle. "In India, they don't waste anything. People go through the garbage and recycle everything. That's how they live. In the West, everything is going to landfill." They forage about once a week and find enough food to live on. Ross even manages to maintain his gluten-free diet. Any spare food is shared. "Most of my friends will take freegan food, even my parents," adds Ash, who wears perfectly good boots and a jumper liberated from a bin.

Back in their van after sorting the booty, we tuck into some chocolate- mocha slices while Ross and Ash tell stories of legendary hauls. Like the time a group of freegans found a bin full of 200 frozen chickens and another with a flat-screen TV. Or the two wheelie bins full of bananas and Brussels sprouts they found on Christmas Day. Ash e-mails me a few days after we meet to tell me that he has found a damaged, but still usable, MP3 player in a music-shop bin.

Armed with a fistful of freegan tips, my challenge is to live as a freegan for three days in my home town of Brighton. Too embarrassed to go on my own, I've roped in my friend Dave.

MONDAY

As we set off, it's freezing cold and the wind is biting. I've been warned that places such as Marks & Spencer and Morrisons lock their rubbish away, and after an hour and a half of searching, we haven't found one accessible bin. Eventually, we find the Co-op rubbish and... bingo! There's a plastic bag full of vegetables, but it's right at the bottom. So, while Dave holds the lid open, I climb up, balance on the side and reach in. A couple of passers-by throw us pitying looks. I feel mortified. But the sealed bag is full of leeks, potatoes, apples and carrots, and there is nothing wrong with them. As we triumphantly bag our free-food booty, we discuss potential menus and decide on soup. Now, we just need to find some bread. A subversive peek inside a Budgens bin reveals a loaf. But the snag is that we are right outside the station and it's rush hour. Too embarrassed to rummage, we head to the more secluded Iceland nearby, where we find a loaf of Kingsmill bread. The packaging is perfect and the sell-by date is today. The vegetables are firm and, after scrubbing them, we cook up a delicious hearty soup. Dessert is baked freegan apples with cinnamon, almonds and sultanas. Delicious.

TUESDAY

I don't feel ill - a good start - so we tuck into our freegan breakfast of avocados (a gift from Ash and Ross from a bin in Wood Green) and the rest of the bread. We decide to visit a different Co-op and again find lots of vegetables and fruit - potatoes, cauliflower, spring greens, peppers, a melon and some salad. The salad is on the turn, but if it were in your fridge, you'd eat it. Other sell-by dates, like those of the spring greens, are not for another week. I don't understand why they'd be thrown out. Food waste costs Britain around £18bn annually, which is especially disturbing when you consider that four million people in Britain can't afford a healthy diet. After a lunch of leftover soup, subsequent searches at bakeries and patisseries prove fruitless. I even feel cheated when I spot someone else making off with a clear bag of what looks like frozen foods and yoghurts from a Budgens bin, but we have found enough food this morning for dinner and breakfast.

We've decided that using a few store-cupboard ingredients such as noodles is permissible, so on the menu tonight is a spicy noodle soup with green peppers, carrots from yesterday and some tender steamed cabbage on the side. For dessert we plump for another baked apple.

WEDNESDAY

The only downside of being a freegan is that you can't plan what you are going to eat. Today, after a breakfast of melon, we head off to check out the bins in the vegetable market, which are malodorous compared with the supermarket refuse. I procure my first freegan lamp and, inspired by Ash's MP3 discovery, Dave wants to check the back of some electrical shops. Again, we find enough food to dine like kings: sausages, greens, swede, fennel cooked with lemon and roasted onion. Although three days is a short time to live as a freegan, I've already got a much better sense of how much food is unnecessarily condemned to landfill. I'm tempted to continue with my freegan lifestyle. After all, the food we found, after a good wash, was no different to buying it in the shop. Except, of course, it was free.

For more information: www.freegan.info; www.fareshare.org.uk; www.dumpsterdiving.net; www.scavengeuk.mine.nu

How to be a freegan

* Take gloves and a torch
* Don't pass a "No Trespassing" sign
* Use discretion when choosing what to eat. If in doubt, throw it out
* Always leave the bin as clean as you found it
* If the bag is ripped or any goods are exposed, just leave them behind
* Just because a bin is no good one day, doesn't mean it will be like that every day
* In general small to medium shops are probably best. Larger chains have their bins locked away
* Wash all the items you find before consuming 

by Willie Drye


It's a common precaution among many young adults from the United States' southern Appalachian Mountains to disguise their unique way of speaking when they seek work elsewhere. They fear their distinct twang, nonstandard grammar, and obscure idioms will cause potential employers to conclude they are incapable of holding jobs.

"There can be no doubt that it's the most heavily stigmatized regional speech in the country," said author Michael B. Montgomery of Columbia, South Carolina. "I can't think of any other region where five words out of somebody's mouth will completely affect another person's evaluation of their intelligence, their reliability, their truthfulness, and their ability to handle complex tasks."

Montgomery, a professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina, said this stigma has made many mountain people "schizophrenic" about their speech. "They learn to shift their speech quite dramatically from situation to situation, and they are much more inclined to want their children to speak more mainstream English," he said.

The cultural homogenization caused by such powerful influences as television and the Internet are putting more pressures on residents of Appalachia to speak like everyone else. Despite these pressures, however, Montgomery and other scholars say the mountaineers are refusing to give up their speech—at least when they're home in the hills.

"The way we talk is an expression of ourselves," said Tom McGowan, an English professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. "It's maintaining a sense of local identity, a sense of home. In postmodern American life, personal identity is really important."

Other scholars say the growing national popularity of such southern staples as country-and-western music and stock car racing are fostering a growing sense of pride among residents of Appalachia.

The distinct accents of stars such as singers Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn, who grew up in the southern Appalachians, have become familiar to millions of fans around the world. And that has removed some of the stigma from speaking with a mountain twang.


"Proud of It"

"What we're finding is that people are taking a new pride in their mountain culture," said linguistics professor Walt Wolfram of North Carolina State University. "That includes their language. People are making the comment, 'We're hillbillies, but we're proud of it. That's who we are.'"

That attitude describes Orville Hicks, who lives in the mountain village of Deep Gap, North Carolina, not far from the home of famed bluegrass musician Doc Watson. "I growed up with it, and it's still in me," Hicks said of his accent and dialect. "Am I self-conscious about the way I talk? No. I talk like I do naturally. I don't try to change nothing. A lot of people laugh at me. Kids sometimes laugh at me."

But, in a sense, Hicks gets the last laugh. He's gained some fame and extra income as a storyteller who spreads his mountain culture by retelling the folk tales he heard from his mother.

"We didn't have no electricity till 1964," Hicks recalled. "My daddy was a preacher, and he wouldn't let us have a television. We'd set on the porch and shell beans, and Momma would tell us tales that had been handed down for generations."

Hicks's speech is rich with the heritage of the hills. He says "heared" instead of "heard," for example.

The region known as Appalachia includes parts of 13 states, from western New York to northern Mississippi. But the heart of Appalachia spreads across the mountains of several southern states, including West Virginia, southwestern Virginia, western North Carolina, northwestern South Carolina, northern Georgia and Alabama, and eastern Tennessee and Kentucky.

Dialects from Scotland and Ireland

Many of the first European settlers in this area moved from Scotland to Ireland and then to the United States, and they brought their native pronunciations and dialects with them. But there are smatterings of other influences, and there are variations in dialect in different parts of Appalachia.

Wolfram, the North Carolina State University scholar, said a "constellation of features" makes the mountain speech distinctive. Those features include the way Appalachia residents pronounce certain words, some of their grammar, and lots of unique words and phrases.

For example, words such as "across" and "twice" are pronounced as though they end with the letter t. So, "across" becomes "acrosst" and "twice" becomes "twicet."

This pronunciation, Wolfram noted, was common among English speakers centuries ago, but was lost everywhere in the U.S. except Appalachia.

In certain words, such as "light" and "fire," the pronunciation of the letter i is much different than in other parts of the United States. So, "light" comes out sounding something like "laht," and "fire" becomes "far."

One of the better known examples of an Appalachian pronunciation is the way singer Loretta Lynn says the name of her home town of Butcher's Hollow in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. She calls it "Butcher's Holler."

The use of words such as "growed" and "knowed" dates back to the common speech of 18th-century England. And if no word exists to express a thought or observation, mountain people often coin their own word. That's a possible explanation for the origin of the word "sigogglin," which is used in the hills to describe something that is unusually crooked.

Montgomery, the South Carolina scholar, says the stigma of sounding like a hillbilly began in the late 19th century. After the U.S. Civil War, writers created fictional illiterate characters whose fractured grammar established an enduring negative stereotype of Appalachia residents.

Later, television comedies such as The Beverly Hillbillies presented the stereotype to an even larger audience. And the focus on Appalachia during the U.S. government's War on Poverty in the 1960s portrayed residents of the region as impoverished and illiterate.

Wolfram says there's no danger of the colorful mountain dialect disappearing anytime soon. But he wonders about the more distant future.

"There are 20 million people in the Appalachia region, so it's still a pretty vibrant dialect," he said. "It's not going to disappear in the next generation. But it's changing. It's losing some of its distinctiveness."


This National Geographic News series is underwritten with a grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission.

Willie Drye is the author of Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, published by National Geographic.

[National Geographic News - 05.2005] 

A Chinese archeologist engaged in studying the origin of the Chinese dragon has a new theory, saying the concept of dragon was formed as human beings began to develop primitive agriculture.

Zhou Chongfa, a renowned archeologist in central China's Hubei Province, said that the initial inspiration of the prototype of dragon was lightening, and the Chinese pronunciation of dragon -- "long" resembles the natural sound of thunder.

"As farming and animal husbandry began to take the place of hunting and fishing to be the main source of food, human beings prayed for good weather for crops, and the imaginative figure of dragon has been gradually created as an agriculture numen," said Zhou, who is also the vice-director of the Provincial Cultural Heritage Bureau of Hubei.

His explanation counters the first widely shared argument of the dragon's origin, which says the dragon was made up as a combination of a number of animal totems of different primitive clans, when they were merged.

Zhou said his research of the primitive culture suggested that totem was the mark and sometimes the name of a clan, and it was unacceptable for tribal men to mix up their sacred totems, even when they were defeated.

Moreover, the totem theory cannot fully explain the origin of the image and sound of dragon, said Zhou.

He went on to elaborate that primitive agriculture was largely dependent on rain for irrigation. The need for rain had also led to primitive worship of other animals that live in the water, such as carp and crocodiles, whose features were added into the incarnation of dragon.

Through centuries, Chinese ancestors living in different regions continued to enrich the dragon image with features of their familiar animals. For example, human society flourished along the Liaohe River in northeast China and added characteristics of their familiar animal -- hog -- into the dragon image. People in central China created cow-dragon, and people in north China region, which is in the present-day Shanxi Province, produced snake-dragon.

Despite minor variations, the holistic image of dragon has come down from generation to generation, which has come to be the common identity of all the Chinese.

China is known as the "land of the dragon" and the Chinese people regard themselves as "children of the dragon." For thousands of years in Chinese history, each emperor of ancient China deified the dragon, and proclaimed himself the "son of the dragon" to consolidate his supreme authority.


[People's Daily 02.05.2001]

 

Lake Michigan invaders now viewed as essential to ecosystem
BY JAMES JANEGA


CHICAGO - With a series of new studies confirming the worst, Lake Michigan fishery managers have begun a drastic plan to save the fish species whose absence they believe would crash the lake's ecosystem.

The alewife.

There was a time when Lake Michigan was stuffed to the gills with the Atlantic invader, which washed up on beaches by the smelly ton. As strange as it may sound, fishery managers now fear a downturn last year has left the lake with too few.

Biologists blame the change on the Chinook salmon of the Pacific Northwest. The most voracious fish in the lake. The fish that feeds in the same water level as alewives. The very fish they've stocked since 1967 to hold the alewives in check.

Alarmed their decades-long plan may suddenly be working too well and believing the Chinook have taken to breeding on their own, fishery managers said they'll stock 1 million fewer in their annual release this spring.

"The system is compensating at such a quick rate," said research biologist Randy Claramunt of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, "and not in a way that we particularly want it to."

Much about life in the lakes is a mystery, fishery experts said. And though neither the alewife nor Chinook is native to Lake Michigan, their presence represents its new reality, in which stocked fish are pitted against invasive species to battle in the fish tank that was once a vibrant Great Lake.

At the heart of this new ecosystem is the Chinook salmon.

A $4 billion commercial and sport fishery has grown up around the Chinook and other big fish that eat alewives.

So the alewife must be saved.

Lake Michigan once had a food chain so simple a 5th-grader might draw it. (Lake trout eat forage fish that eat tiny things that eat plankton.)

Ecologists said the lake's ecosystem has morphed into a complex web involving a dizzying cast of scaly immigrants, natives of waters from Latvia to Afghanistan, plus a smattering of game fish from elsewhere brought in for good measure.

Among the relative newcomers are Chinook and Coho salmon and brown and rainbow trout.

The trout were introduced first for sport fishing in the late-1800s. The Coho and Chinook were bred with hopes of curbing alewives, and the Chinook at least fulfilled fish managers' wildest dreams.

Local fish - trout, chubs, whitefish and the like - have been reduced to despairing lives in far-flung pockets of the lake, perhaps to be rehabilitated later, maybe.

But the alewives and Chinook are fighting terrifically to stay.

The alewives came first, blundering up the St. Lawrence River in the 1940s. Their only plausible native threat on arrival were lake trout, big, ancient, deepwater fish, which by then were dying off thanks to invading lampreys and a thiamin deficiency.

Natives of Newfoundland, the alewives since their arrival have wandered the lake in great shimmering assemblies, looking for a smidgen to eat and settling in comfortably. Grasping opportunity in their troutless new world, they multiplied, overate and then themselves died - in shocking abundance and all over pricey lakefront real estate.

Keen to control this, fish managers started pouring in Chinook, reasoning they might provide a few nice days of fishing in a lake that only years earlier had been a wasteland of lampreys.

It was learned at once that the big fish were hungry. More recently they've given hints at being amorous as well, the dim beasts mistaking a few chilly Michigan streams for rivers in British Columbia where they've begun to spawn, it is believed.

Prior to the introduction of salmon in the 1960s, alewives made up 90 percent of Lake Michigan's biomass, scientists estimated.

If the system was out of balance before, it is little better now.

After a favorable season in 1998, the amount of alewives in Lake Michigan weighed 132 million pounds - this for a fish weighing four ounces. In 2005, their cumulative bulk was more than halved to 55 million pounds, while the number of Lake Michigan Chinook marched ever higher.

A decade before this reversal, in the early-1990s, alewives had measured in the 220-million-pound range.

"These are wild fluctuations," Claramunt pointed out.

During measurements in the lake last summer, scientists found reduced numbers of alewives, and those they caught were scrawny. Even the populous Chinooks have been trimming down by eating them, ecologists said.

And it's not as though the lake would return to its earlier balance if the alewives and Chinook died off, Claramunt said, conceding that this was a point of some disagreement before delving into highly technical reasoning that included the phrases "social constructions," "assumptions" and "never return."

"Can we ever get rid of alewives in the Great Lakes?" he asked rhetorically. "Probably not."

Ecologists suspect there are a host of other fish on the sidelines, scoping for an advantage in the outcome of the salmon-alewife duel.

"I can't say what would happen, but I am confident that outcome would be undesirable," Claramunt said.

The management goal is to prevent any new dominance from developing.

No one is sure why the alewives are disappearing. It may be a lakewide drop further down the food chain of a shrimp-like critter called Diporeia. It could be that the alewives fared poorly last winter. Despite their North Atlantic heritage, alewives are fussy about temperature fluctuations. But lake scientists do know that fewer predators in the lake would make their lives simpler.

"Easiest to fix is reducing the predators," said Tom Trudeau, Lake Michigan program coordinator for the Illinois DNR. "Chinook is the target species because Chinook is the one species most dependent on alewives."

So until a resurgence of forage fish materializes, the greedy Chinook will be pared back, solving the problem for now but prolonging the lake's enduring love-hate relationship with the alewife.

Under a cooperative plan among Lake Michigan states, Illinois will stock 250,000 Chinook this year instead of the 300,000 last year. Wisconsin will reduce its annual restocking of 1.4 million by 300,000, and Indiana its annual 250,000 by 30,000, state managers said.

Michigan will cut deepest, from 2.3 million in 2005 to 1.6 million this year, both because it stocks the most salmon and because spawning now occurs there naturally, managers said.

And while the alewives declined in 2005, it's not as if the Chinook, or king salmon, are yet following suit, even if they are a bit trimmer, fishery managers and Lake Michigan anglers said.

"They were more bountiful. Probably last year was the most bountiful king fishery in recent years," said Les Wood, captain of the D-BAIT-OR II in Waukegan harbor. "In the later part of the year, I noticed they were slimmed down a bit, but nothing to write home to mom about."

This year's fingerlings, still small enough that several would fit in a sardine tin, will be released in May, to wriggle off from rivers, harbors and shores into deeper waters and gluttonous prosperity.

They've already hatched in places like the Jake Wolf Memorial Fish Hatchery in Manito, Ill., where they swarm and fidget in a dozen fish tanks the size of canoes.

When large enough in early spring, they'll be transferred to larger pens outside (where local birds will marvel at their good fortune) and then be hauled to their ultimate freedom.

After that, Lake Michigan's stewards said, the future of the lake depends on how the Chinook interact with other lake life. But that's later.

"Everything looks real good right now," said Tom Hays, the assistant hatchery manager in Manito.