Commercial fishing on the Great Lakes, as with most work today along or on the water, has become a much less pervasive, visible activity than it once was. Fewer people operating larger, more powerful equipment harvest an increasingly restricted catch. Fishing has become a specialized occupation no longer fully-integrated into the daily lives of the lakeside population. While perpetually threatened with extinction by overfishing, heavy pollution, and the introduction (purposeful and inadvertent) of non-native species, edible fish still survive in the Great Lakes in enough numbers to sustain an average annual U.S. catch of 75-100 million ...