Historical perspective (Continued)

"I know those bonetails (referring to all chubs) aren't edible because I tried to eat one when I was a kid, and they're absolutely sickening," Merchant said. "There's about 2 million bones in each of them."

But Tom Hastings of Green River, Utah, recalled a trapper who regularly ate razorback suckers.

"He'd catch those suckers and eat them. I don't know how they fixed them, but they thought they were better than catfish," Hastings said.

Several seniors compared the taste of Colorado pikeminnow to salmon. Lyndon Granat of Palisade, Colo., said, "Gut them and chunk them and put them in quart jars, pressure cook them. Damn, they made salmon taste bad."

Looking at a razorback sucker photo, Bill Allen of Vernal, Utah, showed how confusing the identification process was back then. "Now that was the humpback," he said. "We'd still call them roundtail, but we called them humpback roundtails ... squawfish ... kind of a humpback squawfish sucker."

Seniors recounted both positive and negative attitudes toward the fish. As Don Hatch of Vernal, Utah, explained, "When you grow up and all your life you've been told they are just trash fish, it's hard to get over that feeling.

"Of course they're valuable, of course they're endangered so that's the reason you should take care of them. We know now." (Continued)