Tag: ecosystem

Citizen Scientists Help Uncle Sam

  • Citizen scientist divers brave the chilly waters of Washington State to count the marine life below. (Photo by Ann Dornfeld)

As governments tighten their belts,
it’s getting harder for them to pay
scientists to monitor the health of
the nation’s ecosystems. So increasingly,
they’re turning to citizens who do
that kind of work for free. Ann Dornfeld
reports on the growing influence of these
“citizen scientists”:

Transcript

As governments tighten their belts,
it’s getting harder for them to pay
scientists to monitor the health of
the nation’s ecosystems. So increasingly,
they’re turning to citizens who do
that kind of work for free. Ann Dornfeld
reports on the growing influence of these
“citizen scientists”:

It’s the kind of cloudy, wet day that most people spend indoors. But the cold and wet doesn’t matter as much when you’re planning to spend your day at the bottom of a Puget Sound fjord.

(sound of divers splashing into water)

About 75 miles from Seattle, these scuba divers are conducting volunteer surveys for REEF, an organization that monitors fish populations around the world. The data help researchers understand where fish live, and in what kind of numbers. It’s the kind of information governments need to understand how fishing and pollution are affecting waterways.

Back on the boat, surveyor Janna Nichols has just emerged from the 48-degree water. She pulls out her survey and goes down the list marking off what she’s just seen.

“Sunflower stars, definitely, many of those – saw a lot of those around. No sand dollars, no sea urchins. Ah! Ooh! Ah! Here’s an exciting one! I saw a giant nudibranch! A very small giant nudibranch. But those are very cool to see – a treat!”

Identifying fish can be tricky, because the same species can have different coloration depending on its age, gender, or even time of the year.

“Black-eyed gobies were everywhere. I would say under a hundred of them. And – they were mating! Because I don’t know if you noticed, they had black pelvic fins. And they kind of hover around and say “Hey, baby baby, look at me!”

As much fun as these “citizen scientists” have, professional scientists take the data these divers collect seriously. Last summer volunteer surveyor David Jennings went diving in Washington’s Olympic National Park Marine Sanctuary. He was excited to see the colorful tiger and china rockfish he’d heard were abundant at the park. But when he got there, he only saw a couple. So he looked at the past six years of REEF survey data to see how the rockfish populations had changed.

“One of the best sources was someone that wrote up a diving experience he had in 2002 where he saw dozens of tigers and many chinas. Whereas I in a week of diving saw two tigers and just three chinas. so it was a very big contrast to what people saw in the past.”

Jennings took the data to the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife. That’s the agency that decides fishing limits. Greg Bargmann is a department fisheries biologist who’s working on next year’s catch limits for rockfish. He says even though the REEF divers aren’t as highly-trained as the state biologists, the data they collect are more current and cover a wider area.

“The REEF survey shows a very dramatic decrease in abundance over the last five years. Our state surveys don’t show that, but we have a lot of imprecision in our surveys so we’re relying on the REEF surveys to look for changes in population.”

That’s because the state can’t afford to send its biologists out as often or to as many sites as the volunteers dive.

“We really appreciate the interest of our citizens to spend time going out there and using their own transportation costs and their own equipment to go out and collect data, and to listen to us and collect things that are not easy to do sometimes.”

You don’t have to dive to be a citizen scientist. In Ohio, citizens track everything from salamanders to spiders. In California, tighter budgets mean more poaching – and not enough game wardens. So states are training volunteers to do more work. And across the country, the Environmental Protection Agency relies on citizens to monitor water quality in lakes and streams.

Bargmann says while governments rely on citizen scientists more during budget crunches, he sees programs like these becoming increasingly important for keeping track of the health of the environment.

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

Related Links

How the West Was Warned

  • Wen Baldwin, a volunteer with the National Park service, pulls a non-stick teflon frying pan out of Lake Mead, the reservoir of Hoover Dam. Quagga mussels smothered the pan in a matter of weeks. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

A tiny aquatic pest called the
quagga mussel is invading lakes
and streams across the country.
It’s even clogging up pipes in
some big-city water systems, dams,
and power plants. When environmental
disaster strikes, sometimes people
scratch their heads and ask: how
could this happen? Shawn Allee reports, in the case of
one quagga mussel invasion, people
got plenty of warning:

Transcript

A tiny aquatic pest called the
quagga mussel is invading lakes
and streams across the country.
It’s even clogging up pipes in
some big-city water systems, dams,
and power plants. When environmental
disaster strikes, sometimes people
scratch their heads and ask: how
could this happen? Shawn Allee reports, in the case of
one quagga mussel invasion, people
got plenty of warning:

n 2007, biologists declared that quagga mussels had infested infested Lake Mead just outside
Las Vegas.

But years before that, park staff and volunteers like Wen Baldwin told folks how to avoid the
problem.

Baldwin says some people helped – most people told him to just drop it.

“Oh, it won’t happen to us. That’s the American theory – fire, cancer, whatever. Oh, it
won’t happen to me.”

But it did happen, and here’s how it went down.

Baldwin went to this conference out East where biologists explained how quaggas clog pipes at
water treatment centers and power plants.

“There was a presentation about them and I realized, hey, they could get in here and they
could cost me money, you money, everybody money. They could raise havoc as they have in
the Great Lakes.”

Baldwin got worried.

Quagga mussles hitchhike on boats, and Lake Mead is a boating hot spot.

Baldwin warned people – wash down your boat before you put it in the lake!

“I put on a lot of programs trying to get people on board. Just didn’t work that well.”

Now, quagga mussels are making a mess of Lake Mead – and Web Baldwin can show how.

Baldwin tests how well quagga stick to different material.

We’re on this dock one morning, and he pulls a rope out of the water.

The rope’s covered with shells that look like fingernail-sized clams.

Allee: “I reckon you have to be pretty careful with your hands, there.”

Baldwin: “Boy, they’ll cut you to ribbons. I go home looking like my hands went through a
meat grinder.”

At the end of the rope – he’s tied a skillet.

Baldwin: “They’ll stick to teflon.”

Allee: “They’ll stick to teflon. Your eggs won’t stick to teflon all that well, but quagga
mussels will.”

Baldwin: “They will. And anywhere they attach the glue they use will hasten the
deterioration of the surface they attach to.”

A quagga-coated teflon pan is a shocker – but what does a quagga invasion mean?

Well, for one, if you dock your boat at Lake Mead – you’ve gotta scrape it all the time.

Swimmers wear shoes to protect their feet from quagga-coated rocks.

And quagga are getting costly.

Zegers: “We’ve been monitoring water quality in the lake pretty extensively.”

Roefer: “These are the six locations we collect samples at.”

I’m with Ron Zegers and Peggy Roefer. They’re with the Southern Nevada Water System. It
provides water to Las Vegas and other cities.

They walk me through slides divers took near water intake pipes – deep in Lake Mead.

Roefer: “And this is where our intake is, on Saddle Island. This is actually the inside of the
rock structure you can see the quaggas on the inside of that. Quagga mussels were
approximately two inches thick.”

Zegers and Roefer say they’re trying plenty of things to keep quagga out of the water supply.

The first is the old stand-by: chlorine.

But too much chlorine can make people sick.

Zegers: “More of those disenfection byproducts form, which puts us closer to our
regulatory compliance issues, so we also have to be concerned about that also.”

Roefer: “You know we’re watching the alternative control strategies, the bio-bullets and
pseudo-flourence and those kinds of things.”

Allee: “Sounds like an arms race.”

Roefer: “Yeah, who can get there first. The annual for this is one to four million dollars.”

Allee: “One to four million dollars. You know, you could clean a lot of water if you didn’t
have to deal with these critters.”

Zegers: “That’s correct. Now it’s just an anticipated expenditure that certainly wasn’t
budgeted for when they first appeared, and now it’s just gonna be a way of life.”

And it could become a a way of life for more lakes if we don’t stop quaggas from spreading
around.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Jellyfish Taking Over Oceans?

  • A jellyfish under the Ross Sea ice, on October 14, 2005 (Photo by Henry Kaiser, courtesy of the National Science Foundation)

Some scientists are warning
that as overfishing and climate
change affect the world’s oceans,
jellyfish will take over the
ecosystem. That could mean that
eventually, if you cast a net
into the ocean all you’d haul
in would be jelly blobs. But
as Ann Dornfeld reports, such
warnings may be premature:

Transcript

Some scientists are warning
that as overfishing and climate
change affect the world’s oceans,
jellyfish will take over the
ecosystem. That could mean that
eventually, if you cast a net
into the ocean all you’d haul
in would be jelly blobs. But
as Ann Dornfeld reports, such
warnings may be premature:

The theory goes like this. Overfishing is removing the main jellyfish predators from the oceans. And warming oceans could be more hospitable to jellies.

A new report published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution says jellyfish are already taking over. Its authors point to recent big jellyfish blooms as evidence.

But not everyone’s convinced.

“I think there’s a set of people that are sensationalizing the jellyfish bloom issue.”

University of Washington researcher Claudia Mills has been studying jellies for 30 years.

“I do think that probably jellyfish blooms are on the increase. But the problem is, we have so little baseline data that it’s almost impossible to really, honestly know that.”

Mills says there’s hardly any historical data on jellyfish populations, and not even much recent data.

She says it could be that the future of the world’s oceans is gelatinous and tentacled… or the blooms could just be cyclical.

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

Related Links

Tiny Pest Threatens the Las Vegas Lights

  • Hoover Dam's backside stretches more than 700 feet from top to bottom, but the dam's seeing trouble from the tiny aquatic zebra mussel. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

Hoover Dam generates some of the power that lights Las Vegas all night long. But there’s something
that’s making that job a bit more difficult. Shawn Allee found out, it’s a tiny aquatic pest:

Transcript

Hoover Dam generates some of the power that lights Las Vegas all night long. But there’s something
that’s making that job a bit more difficult. Shawn Allee found out, it’s a tiny aquatic pest:

The usual tour of Hoover Dam starts at the visitor’s center – way at the top.

Robert Walsh works with the federal agency that runs Hoover.

He says, go ahead – look over the edge.

Allee: “OK. That’s creepy. Seriously, that’s creepy.”

Walsh: “It’s spooky. Are you afraid of heights?”

Allee: “No, they don’t bother me at all.”

The dam stretches down 700 feet, and it holds an enormous reservoir – Lake Mead.

This tour is awesome, but Walsh says there’s another tour, too.

It’s, um, NOT so awesome.

It’s all about the trouble the tiny quagga mussel is causing Hoover and other nearby dams.

To get that tour, Walsh takes me to Leonard Willet.

Allee: “Where are we right now?”

Willet: “It’s kind of a work station where all the quagga mussel control activities take place
for Hoover Dam.”

Allee: “It’s quagga mussel central for this area?”

Willet: “Exactly.”

Willet first heard quagga mussels were growing in the nearby Lake Mead reservoir in 2007.

He called an expert for advice.

“First thing out of her mouth was, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ I knew it was a lot more serious.
And I asked her what we’re in for.”

Willet learned quickly enough – quagga mussels attach to nearly anything underwater.

He shows me a sandal that was in water – and is smothered in them.

They’re like clams the size of your pinky fingernail.

“We went from zero to THAT in seven months.”

And that’s the problem.

Hoover Dam uses water from Lake Mead to spin generators.

The water moves around in pipes – and quagga mussels can attach to them – just like on that sandal.

Allee: “What does that mean in a real practical sense?”

Willet: “Our intake towers would close off. Once you start closing off, you can’t spin the
generators. That’s just kind of the big view of it.”

Zero power generation.

That’s the worst-case scenario. It hasn’t happened – but it’s a fight to prevent it.

“Now, we’re going to go down to the third floor, which is the generator floor.”

The generators are inside broad metal cylinders.

Big water pipes turn the generators. Smaller ones cool them off.

“Well, we circulate cold water from those pipes. If those start to plug up with mussels, then
you can’t keep a generator cool, if those … it shuts down due to overheating.”

Right now, it takes a lot of scraping to keep everything clear.

All this effort’s adding up – Willet says he’ll spend 2 million dollars soon on new equipment.

Even with that, Willet is still a bit jittery about some pipes outside, at the very bottom of the dam.

“The one that’s probably the scariest of all is, we have a fireline that runs around here.
Mussels love it. Then, your firelines, when they’re needed, are plugged with mussels. So
that’s another area you have to really be careful of, safety-wise.”

This didn’t have to happen.

Quagga mussels invaded eastern rivers and the Great Lakes first.

Experts figure the mussels hitched a ride West on someone’s fishing boat.

Apparently – someone didn’t clean their boat properly – and mussels dropped into Lake Mead.

Allee: “When they built this amazing structure during the Depression, do you think they had
any idea that something like this could ever happen?”

Willet: “I think there was a lot of disagreement among professionals that a little mussel the
size of your finger nail could impact a large hydro facility, but we’re quickly learning a bunch
of them can impact water and power delivery.”

Willet says if boaters aren’t careful – they’ll spread quagga mussels to the Pacific Northwest, where
there’re lots of dams and hydro power plants.

After all, if it can happen at mighty Hoover Dam – it could happen anywhere.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Interview: Book Blames Coast Guard for Invaders

  • Ships sometimes bring unwanted travelers with them (Photo by Lester Graham)

Invasive species hitchike on foreign cargo ships and end up in US waterways. Lester Graham talked with the author of a new book about why the government has done so little to stop these aquatic invaders that are damaging the environment:

Transcript

Invasive species hitchike on foreign cargo ships and end up in US waterways.
Lester Graham talked with the author of a new book about why the government has done so little to stop these aquatic invaders that are damaging the environment:

Lester Graham: “Maybe you’ve heard about Zebra Mussels. The thumbnail-sized mussels have invaded freshwater lakes, rivers, clogged water intake pipes, and damaged the environment across a good portion of the US – and they’re still spreading. The Zebra Mussel is just one of dozens and dozens of invasive species brought into the US by foreign cargo ships entering the Great Lakes though the St. Lawrence Seaway, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. What happens is ships in Europe or Africa or Asia take on ballast water, sucking up millions of gallons of water from a foreign port. Aquatic life is sucked up with it. Then, as the ships take on cargo in the Great Lakes, the ballast water is discharged, and with it things like Zebra Mussels and other foreign pests. Many of those species have spread from the Great Lakes into the Mississippi River system, and then transported by recreational boating in every direction from there. Jeff Alexander has written a book that chronicles not only those invasions, but the utter failure of the government to do anything effective to stop these introductions. Jeff, you make the argument that these invasive species, biological pollution if you will, amount to a more serious environmental disaster than the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska. How’s that?”

Jeff Alexander: “Well the Valdez, there’s no discounting the severity of the Valdez oil spill. But oil spills, over time, can be cleaned up to a certain extent, and the ecosystem can recover. In the Great Lakes, ocean freighters have brought in 57 species, they’ve caused billions of dollars in damage, and they’ve transformed the entire ecosystem.”

Graham: “There are eight states that border the Great Lakes, and members of Congress are aware of this problem, why haven’t they taken action to ensure this problem is dealt with once and for all?”

Alexander: “The shipping lobby has been very effective at keeping regulations at bay, the Coast Guard, which is the lead agency in the US, has just totally dropped the ball on this issue. They’re the ones who’re supposed to be the guardians of the Great Lakes when it comes to ships, and the Coast Guard is very close to the shipping industry. They have social events together every year. A lot of people blame the shipping industry for this problem, but I tend not to. They certainly have fought the regulations but, in the end, the reason that we have regulatory agencies is to protect public health and the environment. And our regulatory agencies haven’t done the job, and our politicians haven’t done the job – no one seems to have the backbone to stand up to the shipping industry and deal with this problem.”

Graham: “Are the foreign ships that bring in this cargo and take away grain or the other things from the Midwest so economically valuable that it is worth this economic and environmental cost?”

Alexander: “There is some debate on that, but the best economic study estimated if we kept these ocean freighters out of the Great Lakes, made them offload their cargo in Montreal and put it on trains and trucks, it would cost us an extra $55 million a year to move that cargo. That’s compared to the estimate of $200 million a year that foreign species are costing us in terms of economic and environmental damage. It’s not a stretch to make the case that the environmental and economic costs have far exceeded the economic benefits.”

Graham: “Jeff Alexander’s new book is ‘Pandora’s Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway’. Thanks, Jeff.”

Alexander: “Thank you.”

Jeff Alexander spoke with The Environment Report’s Lester Graham.

Related Links

Interview: Keeping Alien Invaders Out

  • Asian Carp is one species that is very dangerous to the Great Lakes ecosystem (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

Nature never made a connection between the nation’s big rivers and the Great Lakes. But Chicago did. A canal was dug connecting the Mississippi River system – including the Missouri, the Ohio and all their tributaries – to all of the Great Lakes at a point on Lake Michigan. It opened up commercial shipping to the interior of the nation.
But it also opened up both bodies of waters to aquatic life you don’t want traveling back and forth. Invasive species such as the zebra mussel have traveled from one to the other. Asian Carp have already caused havoc in the Mississippi. Some biologists worry the Asian Carp will destroy the four-billion dollar fishing industry in the Great Lakes if it gets in. There’s an electric barrier in place, but some people don’t think that’s enough.
Joel Brammeier is with the environmental group Alliance for the Great Lakes. His group is proposing a barrier that will separate the Mississippi system from the Great Lakes completely, to stop those invasive species. He talked with Lester Graham about the barrier:

Transcript

Nature never made a connection between the nation’s big rivers and the Great Lakes. But Chicago did. A canal was dug connecting the Mississippi River system – including the Missouri, the Ohio and all their tributaries – to all of the Great Lakes at a point on Lake Michigan. It opened up commercial shipping to the interior of the nation. But it also opened up both bodies of waters to aquatic life you don’t want traveling back and forth. Invasive species such as the zebra mussel have traveled from one to the other. Asian Carp have already caused havoc in the Mississippi. Some biologists worry the Asian Carp will destroy the four-billion dollar fishing industry in the Great Lakes if it gets in. There’s an electric barrier in place, but some people don’t think that’s enough. Joel Brammeier is with the environmental group Alliance for the Great Lakes. His group is proposing a barrier that will separate the Mississippi system from the Great Lakes completely, to stop those invasive species. He talked with Lester Graham about the barrier:

Joel Brammeier: Well, ecological separation means no species moving between
the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes. When you consider the problem of
invasive species, unlike chemical pollution, which you can reduce to a certain
safe level, there is no safe level of invasive species. Once two get in, they can
reproduce, and the damage is done, and there’s no going back. So, an
ecological separation means stopping fish, and eggs, and other critters from
moving back and forth between the two systems.

Lester Graham: How do you do that when there’s so much commercial traffic
and recreational boating, and just the water flowing through?

Brammeier: Well, in our research, we found that tech fixes – electrical barriers,
sound barriers, blowing bubbles through the water to try and deter fish from
moving – those things can reduce the risk. But for invasive species, risk
reduction really isn’t enough – you need 100% protection. And to do that, we’re
probably looking at some physical barrier that prevents water and live organisms
from moving between those two great watersheds.

Graham: I can imagine the commercial shippers are not thrilled about that.

Brammeier: Well, I think it remains to be seen. Nobody’s quite sure where the
best place is to put a barrier. We discussed about half a dozen different
scenarios under which you could implement that kind of separation. The
Chicago waterway system does support about 25 million tons, give or take, a
year of commercial commodity traffic – and that’s a significant amount. The
reality is that most of that cargo is internal to the Chicago waterways. So, there
isn’t a huge exchange of cargo between the Chicago waterway and the Great
Lakes. And that’s a good thing. That means we have opportunities to actually
split the system back to the way it historically was, and at the same time, solve
our invasive species problem.

Graham: Now, we can see how that would benefit the environment, but how
would it affect the economy?

Brammeier: Well, again, going back to this issue of commercial navigation. If we
create a separation in this system that has a minimal impact on most of the cargo
in the Chicago waterway, we’re really talking about potentially a very small
impact. And, frankly, there’s an opportunity here to create a benefit for
commodity movements as well. A lot of the cargo transfer facilities on the south
side of Chicago are outmoded, outdated, and not competitive. And, any
investment in this kind of project that changed that and also allowed cargo to
move more efficiently and created new port facilities, could have that kind of
benefit, besides protecting the Great Lakes from invasive species.

Related Links

Asian Carp Barrier on Low

  • Asian Carp can grow up to 110 pounds (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

A stronger electric barrier
to keep an invasive fish out of the
Great Lakes is set to be turned on.
But people who travel past the
underwater barrier are worried about
electric shocks. Chuck Quirmbach
reports:

Transcript

A stronger electric barrier
to keep an invasive fish out of the
Great Lakes is set to be turned on.
But people who travel past the
underwater barrier are worried about
electric shocks. Chuck Quirmbach
reports:

This barrier is supposed to keep Asian carp from getting into the Great Lakes.

Those fish escaped from Southern fish farms years ago. They’ve spread up the Mississippi river.
Now they’re near a canal that connects the Mississippi system with the Great Lakes.

Biologists worry the big fish would ruin Great Lakes fishing and the Lakes’ ecosystems. Start up
of ‘The Stronger Barrier’ was delayed because of concerns the electric current could hurt crews
on barges and people on recreational boats as the vessels passed by.

U.S. Coast Guard Captain Bruce Jones recently gave thumbs-up to running the new barrier at
low power.

“ We believe it will continue to keep the Great Lakes protected from carp through the winter, until
spawning season starts.”

But biologists don’t think the barrier will work well enough at low power. And barge operators
don’t want it on at all. They’ll be discussing the concerns at a meeting in Chicago in January.

For The Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

Related Links

Study: 1/4 of World’s Mammals at Risk

  • A study finds that 25% of all mammals are threatened with extinction (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

A new survey shows that at least
one fourth of the world’s wild mammal
species are at risk of extinction. Julie
Grant reports that scientists find human
activities are largely to blame:

Transcript

A new survey shows that at least
one fourth of the world’s wild mammal
species are at risk of extinction. Julie
Grant reports that scientists find human
activities are largely to blame:

The mammal survey took five years, and 1,700 experts in
130 countries to complete. Their results are just being
published in the journal Science.

Jan Schipper of Conservation International is a lead author.
He says the assessment paints a bleak picture.

“It was in fact surprising to find out that 25% of all mammals,
to which we currently have sufficient information, are
threatened with extinction, meaning they are either critically
endangered, endangered, or vulnerable.”

Schipper says hotbeds for extinctions are in Southeast Asia,
Africa and Central and South America – and it is largely
driven by consumers.

For example, if we demand bananas in the middle of winter,
it drives growers to cut down native forests for banana
plantations – but without those native forests, many
mammals are left without a place to live.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Keeping a Big Fish From Butting In

  • Asian Carp can grow up to 110 pounds (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

There are invasive fish swimming their
way toward the Great Lakes. If they get in,
they could swallow up a multi-billion dollar
sport fishing industry. Mark Brush reports,
officials are investing millions of dollars
to keep Asian Carp out of the Great Lakes:

Transcript

There are invasive fish swimming their
way toward the Great Lakes. If they get in,
they could swallow up a multi-billion dollar
sport fishing industry. Mark Brush reports,
officials are investing millions of dollars
to keep Asian Carp out of the Great Lakes:

Asian Carp were imported by fish farms in Mississippi and Arkansas to control algae.
But the fish escaped during floods. They swam out of the fish ponds, and into the Mississippi
river. And they’ve been moving north ever since.

(sound of boats)

Thad Cook is on a tributary of the Mississippi River in Illinois. This river is more than
400 miles upstream from where Asian Carp first escaped the fish farms.

Cook is looking
for two types of Asian Carp known as Silver and Bighead Carp. It turns out t’s not hard to find them. He dips an electrified pole into the water – and the fish jump right out of the
river and into the boat.

(sound of fish flopping in boat)

Cook is with the Illinois Natural History Survey. His group, along with several others,
has been making trips like this one for years. They’ve been keeping a close eye on where
the fish are going. He takes a guess at how big this fish is.

“No he’ll go… uh.. he’s probably…”

“Hold him out there Jimmy!”

“Yep, six, seven, eight, nine, ten pounds.” (Laughter)

His fish story could have gone a lot further. Some types of these Carp can get up to a
hundred pounds. There aren’t many fish that can compete with an appetite like that.

Biologists are finding that these carp are pushing native fish species aside as they spread
north through the Mississippi River system. And some fear it’s only a matter of time
before they swim their way into the Great Lakes.

David Jude is a fisheries biologist with the University of Michigan.

“I’m very concerned about what impact they would have in the Great Lakes because
they’re planktovores which means they filter zooplankton from the water column. And, they’re just huge fish. And so they have the potential for having
a tremendous impact on our ecosystems.”

He says the silver and bighead carps are filter feeders. They pass up eating smaller fish –
and head straight for the bottom of the food chain.

Jude says if Asian carp get in, it’ll make a bad situation worse. The Great Lakes are
already losing zooplankton from other invasive species. Asian Carp could
destroy a 4 billion dollar a year sport fishing industry.

(sound of canal)

And here is where the battle line is being drawn. The fish have been spotted thirty miles
downstream from this spot on the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal. A century ago,
engineers blasted through solid rock to connect the Great Lakes with the Mississippi
River system.

Chuck Shea is with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“Any type of fish that would want to move between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi
river basin – has to pass through the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal – there’s no other way to swim through. So, they have to come through this body of water we’re standing in front
of right now.”

Shea is in charge of the construction and maintenance of two electric fish barriers along this canal.
When this barrier is online, machines will pulse electricity into the water. The electric current shocks
the fish – making them swim away.

This barrier hasn’t been turned on yet. There have been delays due to funding shortages. And they’re still
doing safety testing with the Coast Guard.

Right now, the only thing that would keep the carp from getting into the Great Lakes is a temporary electric
barrier built six years ago.

The good news is that there still seems to be a little time. Biologists say, so far, Asian Carp haven’t moved any
closer than thirty miles from the barrier for the last couple of years.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

Related Links

U.S. Gets an ‘Eco-Checkup’

  • Wetlands, such as these in Michigan, have decreased, according to a report on the country's ecosystems (Photo by David Kenyon of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources)

A new report about the state of the nation’s ecosystems was recently released. And the results are so-so. Jennifer Guerra has the details:

Transcript

A new report about the state of the nation’s ecosystems was recently released. And the results are so-so. Jennifer Guerra has the details:

Think of the report as the environmental equivalent of an annual physical exam.

Here are the results: the number of wetlands in the country is down and virtually every stream contains contaminants. On the plus side, it looks like soil erosion has decreased. And farmers are able to produce more food on less land.

Robin O’Malley plans to take those results to federal lawmakers. O’Malley is with the Heinz Center. It’s the non-partisan think tank responsible for the report.

“In the same way the chairmen of the federal reserve comes up and reports to congress about how our nation’s economy is doing, we think we need to do that kind of thing at a national scale for the environment.”

In addition to the report, the Heinz Center also included a little roadmap of sorts to help the lawmakers along.

For The Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

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