Didnt taste bad at all

[Team M&M]

A few years ago, while working in Southern Louisiana, I was stationed at a warehouse where they did large volumes of shipping and recieving. The property of the warehouse took up about a square mile of land. One day on my lunch break I decided to stroll through the woods and find a nice spot to eat my sandwich. the woods are right next to the warehouse. I walked about 50 yards through the trees, and to my suprise I found a pond sitting there that wasnt visible from the parking lot or the building.
A couple days later I brought my fishing pole and some jigs and on my lunch break I began fishing the pond. To my suprise again, I started catching bass around 2-4lbs. I also caught some bream, warmouth, and a catfish or two, over the next several weeks. One day, after work, I went and fished the pond and caught 10-12 which I had dangling from a stringer when I walked out the woods. One of the guys from the night shift that had been working at the warehouse for several years, asked me what I was up to. I told him I found this pond in the woods and I pointed in the direction. I then held up the stringer of fish, and said "can you believe it, that pond is packed with them." He then laughed and said I wouldnt eat those if I were you." To which i replied, "why not?" He then informed me that it was a sewage treatment pond for the warehouse, and that they had quit using it about a 8 months ago, and switched to city sewer, but for many years all their sewage drained into that pond.
Haha, I didnt know what to say, so I told him I was gonna go throw them back, but I sure didnt mention the 3 meals I had eaten out of that pond over the few weeks since I had discovered it. It made me feel funny as I was driving back to my apartment, but I never got sick.

[father of 4]

lol Well that was some crapy meals

[NIMROD]

Probably no worse than some things you've paid for to eat ! :rolleyes:

[FishnLine]

:D

[I gotta bite]

Did they taste ah well you know not fishy but?:D

[mrwillis]

guess a topwater bait wouldn't be the best thing to use...might get "snagged" on something special. Bet no one would ask you to post that picture.

[justme]

Well,IMHO,that guy was messing with you.The dissolved oxigen content in a sewer,lagoon whatever you want to call it,is to low to support the kind of fish that you caughtIf i remember corrctly the lowest that a catfish can survive is 5 ppm(somebody correct me if I'm wrong).Sounds to me like it was his honeyhole and did'nt want you fishing it.

[joewildlife]

I beleive it.
I'm a fisheries biologist. All ponds go through a natural process called eutrophication. they get more and more fertile over time, and slowly progress from pond to marsh to swamp to dry land. Using a hole in the ground as a sewage lagoon really speeds up the process, but it is a natural process however it happens.

my subdivision has a lot of septic tank and leach field issues that are greatly "enriching" the pond with nutrients such as phosphorous and nitrogen. It causes lots of algae and other plant growth. But the pond also grows the biggest bluegils you have ever seen, the fastest that bluegill can grow.

Mother nature is excellent at filtering out what is put into it. the whole concept behind how sewage lagoons operate...they absorb all the "nutrients" put into them. All ponds and lakes do that, to a large extent. the water coming out of a pond, lake, or lagoon is much cleaner than what is going in.

The main hazards of eating fish out of an ex-lagoon are not bacterial in nature...but rather heavy metals and pesticides that are accumulated over time. In a subdivision, the pond may contain a lot of chlorodane, a termite killer used years back that does not degrade, but rather accumulates in the food chain. The fish in some old subdivision ponds might be a lot "hotter" in that respect than most public fishing lakes.

Depending on what was in the sewage, it might be okay but it might not. If the sewage had any heavy metals like mercury or cadmium, or organic chemicals like PCBs, chlorodane, or other pesticides, it might not be good to eat those fish.

I personally would treat an unknown ex-lagoon as a catch and release spot!
I eat the bluegill out of my subdivision pond only a few times a year at most.

Joe

[Glowgood Jigster]

One thing that isn't mentioned much about treated sewage, is that all the medicines taken by people that are in the sewage, doesn't all get filtered out of the water but get put back into the waterways and thus gets into the foodchain. Think about all the birth control hormones, anti-biotics, cholesterol reducers, man what a mess of drugs our population is on, that part of it could be getting back into the water and the food chain?

[cook]

Lucky ya didn't catch any brown trout