Tag: black sea

Fish Detectives

  • The fish detectives (a.k.a. scientists who specialize in fishery genetics) survey the scene. (Photo courtesy of the Lake Erie Center)

On television, the CSI detectives make forensic lab work look glamorous. It’s a cinch for them to track a criminal by the DNA left behind at the scene. In real life, DNA is also a powerful tool for solving environmental crimes and mysteries. Rebecca Williams visits the Fish Detectives:

Transcript

On television, the CSI detectives make forensic lab work look glamorous. It’s a cinch for them to track a criminal by the DNA left behind at the scene. In real life, DNA is also a powerful tool for solving environmental crimes and mysteries. Rebecca Williams visits the Fish Detectives:


(Sound of gulls and reel being cast)


It’s midday, and it’s so hot the gulls are just standing around with their beaks open.


But Joe Al-Sorghali is still trying to get himself a fish dinner:


“Hopefully I can get a good amount of perch today… they’re not that fishy so they’re a really good catch.”


It takes a lot of these little fish to fill up a dinner plate. But that doesn’t stop Al-Sorghali from going after perch and walleye any chance he gets. A lot of people call Lake Erie the Walleye Capital of the World.


Fishing is a really big deal here. So it makes sense that Lake Erie’s also home to the Fish Detectives.


(Dragnet theme music)


The fish detective headquarters is tucked away on the edge of a quiet cove. The investigators at the Lake Erie Center are not wearing trench coats. They’re not even wearing lab coats. This crew of laid-back lab techs and grad students comes to work in jeans and T-shirts.


Carol Stepien heads up the fish detective squad. She says they solve lots of cases of mistaken identity.


Take the Case of the Fried Perch.


Last year the detectives got a call from a TV station in Milwaukee. The news crew was suspicious that the fried local perch on restaurant menus wasn’t really local.


Stepien says she asked the news station to send her some frozen filets.


“So instead they sent their news crew out into restaurants and had their news crew eat the fish and put a little bit of the breaded, cooked fish in a plastic bag and froze those and sent them to me. We were pretty shocked to get those in our laboratory. We didn’t know if we could get DNA from breaded, fried material like that.”


But Stepien says they scraped off the breaded coating… and they actually were able to extract DNA from the little bits of cooked fish.


“And we found that about half of those fish were yellow perch from Europe.”


Stepien says it’s gotten more common for fish brokers to import yellow perch from outside the U.S. because it’s cheaper. She says even though the foreign perch might taste the same when they’re deep-fried… a close look at the DNA of the European yellow perch reveals big differences from Great Lakes yellow perch.


“They probably could be called freshly caught lake perch, but they were certainly frozen and didn’t come from any local lakes, they didn’t come from the Great Lakes. Instead they came from overseas.”


Stepien’s team will tackle any sort of mystery, as long as it involves gills and fins.


Lately they’ve solved cases of home invasion. That is, invasions by exotic species that’ve gotten into the Great Lakes. The scientists can track the invaders by their DNA fingerprints, and find out where they’ve been.


Joshua Brown is a Ph.D student at the lab. He’s been tracking the round goby. It’s a fish native to Europe. Scientists say it caught a ride to the Great Lakes in the ballast tanks of ocean going ships. It’s been crowding out native species.


“We’re going to find somebody to point the finger at, as it were. We’ve found evidence they came from the northern portion of the Black Sea, right around one of the major ports.”


That port is in Ukraine. Even though they’ve found the culprit, Brown says there’s not much governments can do, because everyone’s guilty.


“I don’t think you could really sue a nation for you know, not keeping their species under wraps. If so, we’d be open for a lot of lawsuits too – we export almost as many as we import.”


But Brown says knowing exactly where a foreign species comes from might help keep the door closed to future invaders from that same region.


Whether it’s a case of consumer fish fraud or defending the home turf from invaders, there’s one bottom line for these detectives. They want to find out as much as they can about native fish so they can keep them from going belly up.


For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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States Pass Feds on Invasives Law

  • Federal restrictions have not stopped importation of invasive species. Now some states are passing laws that will stop some ocean-going ships from docking in their ports. (Photo by Lester Graham)

US ports receive more than imported cargo.
They often receive fish and other aquatic organisms
from foreign ports. They stow away in the ballast
water of cargo ships. Once in US waters, some of
the foreign species become invaders, damaging the
ecosystem. The federal government has done little
to stop these invasive species. Rick Pluta reports now some states have decided to take
things into their own hands:

Transcript

US ports receive more than imported cargo.
They often receive fish and other aquatic organisms
from foreign ports. They stow away in the ballast
water of cargo ships. Once in US waters, some of
the foreign species become invaders, damaging the
ecosystem. The federal government has done little
to stop these invasive species. Rick Pluta reports now some states have decided to take
things into their own hands:


The damage caused by invasive species carried to the US in
ballast water is not only harmful to the environment, but it
hurts the economy. The federal regulations have not stopped the
problem. So, states such as California and Michigan have passed
laws that require foreign ships to treat ballast water like
pollution. They have to clean it up before they can discharge it
into a port. The problem is, almost no ships have a way to treat
the ballast.


In Michigan, the Great Lakes shipping industry is trying to delay
the new Michigan rules. Shipping companies, port owners, and
dock workers say Michigan’s new rules are jeopardizing jobs
without actually stopping the introduction of new species into
the Great Lakes.


The damage caused by invasive species carried to the US in
ballast water is not only harmful to the environment, but it
hurts the economy. The federal regulations have not stopped the
problem. So, states such as California and Michigan have passed
laws that require foreign ships to treat ballast water like
pollution. They have to clean it up before they can discharge it
into a port. The problem is, almost no ships have a way to treat
the ballast.


In Michigan, the Great Lakes shipping industry is trying to delay
the new Michigan rules. Shipping companies, port owners, and
dock workers say Michigan’s new rules are jeopardizing jobs
without actually stopping the introduction of new species into
the Great Lakes.


People in the shipping business say the problem is Michigan is
the only state in the Great Lakes region that is requiring ocean-
going freighters to install expensive technology as a condition
of using one of its ports.


John Jamian is the president of the Seaway Great Lakes Trade
Association. He says requiring ocean-going freighters to install
expensive technology before they can dock in Michigan ports won’t
solve the problem. The ships will just go to other Great Lakes
ports.


If a ship goes to Windsor or Toledo that doesn’t have these rules
and regulations, they will discharge their cargo. If there were
any critters on those ships they could still swim or crawl into
Michigan waters, so you still haven’t solved anything.


Jamian represents the owners of ships that travel from the
Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes via the Saint Lawrence Seaway.
He says ship owners will very likely avoid Michigan ports, and
choose to unload at ports in other states and Canada:


“The fact of the matter is that they’re not going to put an
expensive piece of equipment just because Michigan calls for it
on their ship when in fact it may not be acceptable anywhere else
in the world and it might just be easier to take that cargo
across the river and unload it where they don’t have these
regulations.”


And for Michigan ports that are near other competing ports,
that’s a concern. Patrick Sutka is the treasurer for Nicholson
Terminal and Dock Company at the Port of Detroit:


“We fear these ships may be going to other ports, such as Windsor
right across the waterway, or other competitors of ours such as
Toledo or Cleveland.”


At the height of the shipping season, there might be three
freighters at a time moored to the docks, offloading steel and
other cargo. A hundred trucks a day will move in and out of the
docking area to get those commodities to factories.


On the dock right now are dozens of stacks of 20-ton slabs of
steel from France and Russia. That Russian steel was most likely
shipped from a port in the Caspian Sea or the Black Sea. The
freighters take on ballast water from those seas for the voyage
to the Great Lakes. That ballast water helps keep the ships low
and steady in the water.


The ships are required to exchange the water in deep ocean mid-
journey. The salt water is supposed to kill the fresh water
organisms. But, some organisms can survive the trip. That’s how
zebra mussels, quagga mussels and the round goby fish made their
way from the Balkans to the Great Lakes.


Those invasive species and others combine to cost the economy an
estimated 5 billion dollars a year. For example, zebra
mussels cost taxpayers and utility customers. It shows up in
your power bill because the utilities have to pay divers to
scrape the crustaceans off pipes carrying cooling water to power
plants.


Shipping companies, port owners, and dock workers’ unions are all
pressuring Michigan to hold off on enforcing its new law. What
they’d really like is for the federal government to step in,
negotiate with Canada, and create a regional set of rules for
combating aquatic invaders:


“…But the federal government has not had the guts or the
gumption to step up to the plate and get this done.”


Patti Birkholz chairs the Michigan Senate Environmental Affairs
Committee. She sponsored the law:


“So we’re going to do it on a state-by-state basis. Our eco-
system within the Great Lakes is what many scientists have termed
‘on the tipping point.’ We cannot deal with any more invasive
species in this system, and we know the majority of the invasive
species come through the ocean-going vessels. They know they’re
the cause. We know they’re the cause. We’ve got to deal with this
situation.”


Michigan’s new law is as much a political statement as anything
else and other states are starting to follow Michigan’s lead.
Birkholz says Wisconsin and New York could pass ballast standards
this year.


In the mean time, Michigan environmental officials say they
intend to enforce the state’s requirements when the Great Lakes
shipping season resumes in the spring. But, so far, no ocean
freighters have applied for a permit to dock at a Michigan Port.


For the Environment Report, this is Rick Pluta.

Related Links

Ten Threats: Predicting New Invaders

  • Some say it's only a matter of time before the Asian Carp enters the Great Lakes. (Photo courtesy of the USFWS)

More than 160 kinds of foreign creatures are in the Great Lakes right now, and every few months, a new one finds its way into the Lakes. Those invasive species are considered the number one problem by the experts we surveyed. The outsiders crowd out native species and disrupt the natural food chain, and it’s likely more will be coming. Zach Peterson reports scientists are putting a lot of time and effort into figuring out which new foreign creatures might next invade the Great Lakes:

Transcript

There are new problems for the Great Lakes on the horizon. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham is our guide in a series that explains that new invasive species are one of the Ten
Threats to the Great Lakes:


More than 160 kinds of foreign creatures are in the Great Lakes right now, and every few months, a new one finds its way into the Lakes. Those invasive species are considered the number one problem by the experts we surveyed. The outsiders crowd out native species and disrupt the natural food chain, and it’s likely more will be coming. Zach Peterson reports scientists are putting a lot of time and effort into figuring out which new foreign creatures might next invade the Great Lakes:


(Sound of boat motor)


Jim Barta is a charter boat captain just above Lake Erie on the Detroit River. He says over the last decade, zebra mussels and other foreign species have altered the habitat of the walleye he fishes for.


Water that once had a brownish hue is now clear. That’s because Zebra mussels have eaten the algae and plankton that used to cloud the water, and that means Barta’s boat is no longer invisible to the fish he aims to hook.


“You could catch the fish a little closer to the boat because they weren’t as spooked by the boat. They weren’t as afraid of what was taking place.”


So Barta had to rethink his tactics. He now casts his lines out further, and he’s changed lures to continue catching walleye.


But there are other problems the zebra mussel is causing. Eating all the plankton means it’s stealing food at the bottom of the food chain. And, that affects how many fish survive and how much the surviving fish are able to grow.


Anthony Ricciardi is trying to help Barta, and other people who rely on a stable Great Lakes ecosystem. He’s an “invasion biologist” at McGill University in Montreal.


Ricciardi looks for evidence that can predict the next non-native species that might make it’s way into the Great Lakes. He says species that have spread throughout waterways in Europe and Asia are prime candidates to become Great Lakes invaders.


“If the organism has shown itself to be invasive elsewhere, it has the ability to adapt to new habitats, to rapidly increase in small numbers, to dominate ecosystems, or to change them in certain ways that change the rules of exsistence for everything else, and thus can cause a disruption.”


Ricciardi says most aquatic invasive species are transported to North America in the ballast tanks of ocean freighters. Freighters use ballast water to help balance their loads. Some of the foreign species hitchhike in the ballast water or in the sediment in the bottom of the ballasts.


Ships coming from overseas release those foreign species unintentionally when they pump out ballast water in Great Lakes ports. Ricciardi says one of the potential invaders that might pose the next big threat to the Great Lakes is the “killer shrimp.” Like the Zebra Mussel, it’s a native of the Black Sea.


“And it’s earned the name killer shrimp because it attacks invertebrates, all kinds of invertebrates, including some that are bigger than it is. And it takes bites out of them and kills them, but doesn’t necessarily eat them. So, it’s not immediately satiated. It actually feeds in a buffet style: it’ll sample invertebrates, and so it can leave a lot of carcasses around it.”


Ballasts on cargo ships aren’t the only way foreign species can get into the Lakes. Right now, scientists are watching as a giant Asian Carp makes its way toward Lake Michigan. It’s a voracious eater and it grows to a hundred pounds or more.


This non-native fish was introduced into the Mississippi River, when flooding allowed the carp to escape from fish farms in the South. A manmade canal near Chicago connects the Mississippi River system to the Great Lakes.


If it gets past an electric barrier in the canal, it could invade. Many scientists believe it’s just a matter of time. Another invasive, the sea lamprey, also got into the Great Lakes through a manmade canal.


But, researchers don’t usually know when or where an invader will show up. David Reid is a researcher for the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor. He says they can’t predict the effect an invader will have when it arrives in its new ecosystem.


“That’s the problem. We don’t know when the next zebra mussel’s going to come in. We don’t know when the next sea lamprey type of organism is going to come in. Generally, if you look at the invasion history of the Great Lakes, you’re seeing about one new organism being reported probably about once every eight months.”


Knowing what the next invader might be could help biologists, fisheries experts, and fishermen know what to do to limit its spread. Invasional biologists hope that their work will help develop the most effective measures to limit harm to the Great Lakes.


For the GLRC, I’m Zach Peterson.

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Action Plan Not Enough to Shrink Gulf ‘Dead Zone’

  • Small shrimp fishers are concerned about the Gulf of Mexico 'dead zone' because shrimp can't survive in the oxygen depleted water. (Photo by Lester Graham)

The government has been working with agriculture, environmentalists and scientists to come up with a way to reduce the size of a ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico. The dead zone causes problems for the fisheries in the Gulf. It’s believed the dead zone is caused by excess nitrogen on farm fields in the Midwest that’s washed to the Mississippi River and then to the Gulf. A government task force has determined that if the flow of nitrogen into the Gulf can be cut by 30 percent, the size of the dead zone can be reduced. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports… a new study predicts a 30 percent reduction won’t be enough to make a difference:

Transcript

The government has been working with agriculture, environmentalists and scientists to
come up with a way to reduce the size of a ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico. The dead
zone causes problems for the fisheries in the Gulf. It’s believed the dead zone is caused
by excess nitrogen on farm fields in the Midwest that’s washed to the Mississippi River
and then to the Gulf. A government task force has determined that if the flow of nitrogen
into the Gulf can be cut by 30 percent, the size of the dead zone can be reduced. The
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports… a new study predicts a 30
percent reduction won’t be enough to make a difference:


The idea that fertilizer used on a corn field in the Midwest can cause a ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico
is hard to fathom. But when you realize that all or parts of 31 farm states drain into the
Mississippi basin, it becomes a little easier to understand. Excess nitrogen causes a huge algae
bloom in the Gulf. When the vegetation dies, it decays on the bottom and bacteria feed
on it. The huge expanse of bacteria depletes the oxygen.


Nancy Rabalais is a professor with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. She
says most life under the water needs that oxygen to survive.


“The oxygen is depleted in the water column so that the fish and shrimp, anything that
can swim, leaves the area. All the indicators show that it’s gotten much worse since the
1950’s to present, and that’s consistent with the increase in nitrogen in the Mississippi
River.”


Since 1985, Rabalais has been measuring the size of the dead zone every year. The zone
ranges in size from about 2,000 square miles to about 10,000 square miles.
That’s about the size of Lake Erie.


Jerald Horst is a biologist with the Louisiana Sea Grant. He says it’s hard to know the
exact impact on life under the sea…


“Very difficult to say ‘Gee, this year the shrimp
production is down somewhat because of hypoxia,’ or whether the shrimp production is
down somewhat because of a host of other environmental factors.”


But the fear is the hypoxic zone could stop being a dead zone that shrinks and grows
– and one year disappeared altogether… and instead become a permanent dead zone where nothing would ever live. That’s happened in a few other places on the globe such
as the Black Sea. It’s not clear that the same kind of thing can happen in the Gulf, but
signs are ominous. Horst says upwellings of oxygen-starved water near the shore after a
storm used to be very, very rare. Lately, they’ve become more and more frequent. He
says it means the problem is getting worse.


There’s still a lot of debate about whether the dead zone in the Gulf is a serious problem.
But, at this point, most agricultural agencies and farm groups have stopped disputing the
science and whether their nitrogen is causing the problem. Now they’re trying to figure
out the best and cheapest way to deal with it.


The government task force that’s working on the problem has arrived at an Action Plan;
the task force has determined the amount of nitrogen getting into the Mississippi River
needs to be cut by 30 percent to reduce the Gulf zone by half in ten years.


Donald Scavia has been working on the problem. He was involved in the debate when he
was a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He’s
retired from NOAA and now directs the Michigan Sea Grant. From his office at the
University of Michigan, Scavia explained how the task force arrived at the figure.


“We agreed to a 30 percent reduction because it was similar to what was done in other
places, probably acceptable to the community and will head us in the right direction.”


After arriving in Michigan, Scavia started research to determine if a 30 percent reduction
would do the job. Using three very different computer models, Scavia and his team
learned that they could actually predict the size of the dead zone from year to year…


“From that analysis, that not only looked at the size of the zone, but actually looked at
potential inter-annual variability caused by changes in climate, changes in weather say
that probably 35 to 45 percent nitrogen load reduction’s going to be needed to get to that
goal in most years.”


Scavia’s study was published in the journal Estuaries.


A 35 to 45 percent reduction is a much tougher goal than the 30 percent the task force is
recommending. As it is, states were planning massive artificial wetlands and extensive
drainage programs to soak up excess nitrogen before it got to the tributaries that fed the
Mississippi River. They also planned to get farmers to reduce the amount of nitrogen
they’re using. That’s a tough sell for a couple of reasons. First of all, it would have to be
voluntary because nitrogen use is nearly completely unregulated. Second, farmers
often use what they call an insurance application of nitrogen… they use a little more than
is actually needed to get a good crop, because nitrogen is relatively cheap. The excess
often ends up washed into ditches and streams and creeks and rivers… and finally to the
Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone. So… cutting nitrogen flow into the
Mississippi by 30 percent was a huge task. Cutting nitrogen by as much as 45 percent… well… you can imagine…


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

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ACTION PLAN NOT ENOUGH TO SHRINK GULF ‘DEAD ZONE’ (Short Version)

  • Small shrimp fishers are concerned about the Gulf of Mexico 'dead zone' because shrimp can't survive in the oxygen depleted water. (Photo by Lester Graham)

A new study predicts the government’s plan to reduce the size of the ‘Dead Zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico won’t be strong enough to make a difference. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

A new study predicts the government’s plan to reduce the size of the “Dead Zone” in the Gulf of
Mexico won’t be strong enough to make a difference. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Lester Graham reports:


The Dead Zone in the Gulf is believed to be caused by excess nitrogen used by farmers in the 31
states that drain into the Mississippi and ultimately into the Gulf of Mexico. The Dead Zone
causes problems for the fisheries in the Gulf. A study published in the scientific journal,
Estuaries, predicts that an Action Plan put together by a government task force might not
go far enough. Michigan SeaGrant director Donald Scavia used computer modeling in the
study…


“What we tried to do here is take three different, very different models and ask the same question
of those models to try to get an answer.”


The answer was the same… the government task force plan to reduce the amount of nitrogen
reaching the Mississippi River by 30 percent is not enough. The models indicated a 35 to 45
percent reduction is needed to shrink the Dead Zone by half in the next ten years.


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

Related Links