Tag: fisherman

Battle Plans for Asian Carp

Asian carp are the new poster fish in the campaign against invasive species. For years, foreign invaders like the zebra mussel, the round goby, and now the carp have been threatening the ecosystem of the Great Lakes. Like their fellow species of concern, the carp have no natural predators to keep their numbers in check. Ecologists report that they are now closing in on Lake Michigan from the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. This has authorities in the U.S. and Canada stepping up efforts to control them. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Diantha Parker reports:

Transcript

Asian carp are the new poster fish in the campaign against invasive species. For years, foreign invaders like the zebra mussel, the round goby, and now the carp have been threatening the ecosystem of the Great Lakes. Like their fellow species of concern, the carp have no natural predators to keep their numbers in check. Ecologists report that they are now closing in on Lake Michigan from the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. This has authorities in the U.S. and Canada stepping up efforts to control them. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Diantha Parker reports:


The Asian carp now in the spotlight are the silver and bighead varieties, and they share traits that worry environmentalists.


For one thing, they’re large…sometimes reaching up to a hundred pounds in less than three years. They escaped from fish farms in Mississippi about twenty years ago, and have been making their way up the Mississippi River ever since.


The carp voraciously consume the same microscopic organisms that native fish depend on.


They’ll out-eat anything in their midst. That means game fish won’t have as much to eat, and their populations will suffer.


And the carp are invasive in other ways, too. At a recent news conference a few yards from Lake Michigan, journalists and curious passersby inspected three enormous dead carp laid out on a folding table…glistening in the sun next to Pam Theil, a project leader at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.


“It sounds sensational, but they can jump out of the water into your boat. A gentleman who works for the Illinois Natural History Survey has gotten hit four times, the last time he had to file for workman’s compensation with a neck injury. A commercial fisherman on the Caskaskia River got his nose broken. And there are reports of people on the Caskaskia, who are going out fishing, or just recreation in their boat…they’re taking cookie sheets with them to act as a shield, so that they don’t get hit.”


The newest weapon in the Great Lakes Fight against the carp is an electronic barrier.
It was built in April by the Army Corps of Engineers and the International Joint Commission, an organization that oversees the use of waterways between the U.S. and Canada.


The electronic barrier sits in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal about 30 miles downstream from the city. The Canal is a manmade link between Lake Michigan and the Chicago River. This particular spot was chosen for the barrier because it’s a revolving door between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River basin.


The barrier itself consists of about one hundred and sixty wires, spaced a few feet apart, that lie crosswise along the bottom of the canal. The wires emit electrical impulses to deter all fish that approach them.


“There is a charge that is applied to those cables.”


Dennis Schornack is U.S. chairman of the International Joint Commission.


“Not a real strong charge, not one that would be harmful to people, if they fell into the
canal, but strong enough for fish to sense it, and when they sense this charge in the water they turn, and turn back down the river.”


Right now, the electronic barrier is only in an 18 month test phase. The authorities involved say after that time is up, funding from Congress will be needed to keep it in operation.


Some people wonder why we can’t just catch these invasive carp and eat them. But while the carp are a popular food source in Asia, they’ve been slow to catch on here, says Pam Theil.


“I think that there is a mentality that we’d rather be eating walleye or something than carp.”


But a chicken processing plant in southern Illinois has looked into processing the carp…they’ve taste tested it as a product similar to tuna, but are still deciding whether it’s marketable.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Diantha Parker.

Long Road to River Recovery

  • Aerial view of industry along the Fox River. Photo by Great Lakes United.

One of the rivers that flows into Lake Michigan is polluted so badly that it’s being treated much like a Super Fund site…an environmental disaster. It’ll be decades before it’s cleaned up, and some environmentalists think it might never be cleaned up properly. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

One of the rivers that flows into the Great Lakes (Lake Michigan) is
polluted so badly that it’s being treated much like a Super Fund site –an
environmental disaster. It’ll be decades before it’s cleaned up. And some
environmentalists think it might never be cleaned up properly. The Great
Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:


(Sound of fish splash)


It’s late at night. The moon’s out. And the fish are flopping on the Fox
River. In downtown Green Bay, Wisconsin, Robert Hageman and a few of his
friends have been fishing. A couple of the guys are bragging about the big
fish they caught. But they’re not taking any home with them tonight.


LG: “Had any luck?” RH: “Yeah, I caught 23 fish.”
LG: “And wwhat did you do with them? RH: “Let ’em right back.” LG: “why?” RH: “Because it’s dirty. Fox River’s dirty.”
LG: “What have you heard about the Fox River?” RH: “The fish ain’t good for you. They can’t hurt you, but they ain’t good for you.
(friends in background say “PCBs, man.”) “yeah.”
LG: “What do you know about PCBs?
RH: “I don’t know nothing about it. That’s why I ain’t eatin’ them.” (all laugh)


Hageman and his friends are right when they say there are PCBs in the Fox
River. But apparently they haven’t heard that eating fish from the river
probably can hurt you in the long run. There are 60-thousand pounds of
PCBs, or poly chlorinated byphenyls, in the 39 mile run of the Fox
River. Of that, 50-thousand pounds – that’s 25 tons – is in the sediment of
the last seven mile stretch just before the river flows into Green Bay and
on into the rest of Lake Michigan. It’s that final stretch where Hageman
and his friends have been fishing.


The Environmental Protection Agency says seven paper mills along the Fox
River are the likely polluters. The EPA says PCBs were produced as a
by-product of the paper manufacturing process, and from the 1950s to the 1970s
they were dumped into the river. Now, the agency intends to make those
mills pay for cleaning up the contaminants.


Dennis Hultgren works for Appleton Papers, and is a spokesperson for a group
that represents the seven companies. Hultgren says the paper mills want to
clean up the pollution. But they don’t want to pay more than they have to.


“What we want to do is make sure that the money that we do spend
is spent wisely and it does the most environmental good for the region. And
so, we have one chance to do it right and we want to do it right the first
time.”


The paper mills have been working closely with government agencies to try to
determine where the PCBs are concentrated and how best to clean up the
pollution. Some of the companies have spent millions of dollars on tests in
the river. Just recently, Hultgren’s firm offered 40-million dollars… ten-million dollars a year for four years… for data collection and preliminary clean-up tests. The government agencies praised the decision and some environmental groups voiced their approval. But a local grassroots group, the Clean Water Action Council of Northeast Wisconsin, does not approve. Rebecca Katers is with the council and says it’s a delay tactic by the paper mill companies.


“It makes the company look generous. But, in fact, they should be doing this anyway. They should have done this ten years ago.”


Giving the money now, Katers says, only manages to delay legal action
against the company for four more years. Besides, she says, while
40-million dollars might seem like a lot of money, the estimated clean-up
could cost as much as 30 times that amount.


The Clean Water Action Council says this money and the government’s
willingness to accept it are representative of the cozy relationship the
companies seem to have with regulators. But Katers says the state and
federal agencies are forgetting about the people who live here. She
bristles when she hears the government agencies talk about how close they
are to the paper mills.


“They talked at the announcement about ongoing discussions they
have on a daily basis with the paper industries on this issue. But, they
haven’t met once face-to-face with the public. They haven’t held a public
discussion or debate on this issue.”


And it appears there won’t be many opportunities in the future. Although
the Fox River is not a Superfund site, the EPA is generally following the
process used for Superfund sites. The EPA says that means the public can
submit comments in writing. But there won’t be a lot of public discussion
until the EPA actually has a proposed plan. Katers thinks the people
should have a voice a lot earlier in the process.


But, the paper mills’ representative, Dennis Hultgren says it’s better to
let the experts work first.


“It’s complicated. For the normal citizen, it’s going to be very difficult to comment on it because they’re going to be looking at the technical merits
of their comments. And a general citizen, not having been involved, it’s going to be very difficult to have germane comments.”


The companies say they’ve been studying and testing and they’ve found
disturbing the sediment by trying to remove it proves that the PCBs should
be left in the sediment, allowed to slowly break down… a process called
natural recovery. And where there’s risk that sediment laden PCBs might
be disturbed by the river’s currents, engineered caps could be put in place.


The Clean Water Action Council says the paper mills tests were designed to
end up with that conclusion because that would be the cheaper way to deal
with the PCBs. The council wants the PCBs removed from the river and
disposed of safely… a much more expensive job.


The acting regional administrator for the USEPA, David Ullrich, says
there’ll likely be some combination of natural recovery, capping, and
removal. But, Ullrich says none of that will happen anytime soon. It’s a
big job, and it looks as though it will take up to ten years to deal with
the PCBs. And Ullrich says that’s just the beginning.


“The actual recovery of the resource, getting fish contaminant
levels down to acceptable levels and getting the PCB loadings to Green Bay
and out to Lake Michigan down, could take a longer period of time than that,
perhaps up to twenty years.”


And over that 20 year period, experts say that contamination will
naturally spread farther and farther into Green Bay and Lake Michigan.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

LONG ROAD TO RIVER RECOVERY (Short Version)

The Environmental Protection Agency says it could be a decade before a river that feeds Green Bay and Lake Michigan will have tons of PCBs cleaned up. And a lot longer before the river recovers from the effects of the pollution. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Battle Lines Drawn for the Round Goby

  • A plan by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is intended to stop invasive species from traveling between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi river and its tributaries.

The government is trying to stop an invader from expanding from the GreatLakes into the Mississippi River system. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’sLester Graham reports… the field of battle is a small channel nearChicago:

Dead Fish Are No Cause for Alarm

As trout fishing season opens up throughout the country this month
(April), many fisherman will be lining the banks of streams, lakes
and ponds. One thing that may startle these anglers is the large
amount of dead fish washing up on the shore. But as the Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Tom Scheck reports, conservation officials say
pollution and chemical spills may not be to blame:

Worm Dispensing Machines?

When vending machines were first introduced, they mostly dispensed
coffee, soft drinks, and cellophane-wrapped sandwiches. But today, some
vending machines are offering up a very different kind of grub; they
dispense fishing bait. It’s a growing trend in vending. There are now
about two-thousand bait machines across the country, with the largest
concentration in Michigan, Ohio, and New York. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Wendy Nelson reports:

Restocking Program Restores Walleye

At one time, the St. Lawrence River was home to some of the best walleye fishing in the world. But by the mid-1980’s, the spawning runs that once brought thousands of fish to this region had dropped off dramatically. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports, a group of local fisherman decided to tackle the problem themselves:

Spearfishing Season Opens Quietly

In Minnesota, State and Tribal Officials are breathing a cautious sigh of relief as the first season of treaty fishing gets underway. They were concerned that ugly confrontations would erupt as native fisherman began the spearfishing season. But as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports, things are quiet so far: