Interview: Asian Carp

  • Asian Carp can weigh up to 100 pounds and are notorious for jumping out of the water and injuring boaters. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

The US Supreme Court has turned
down a request from Michigan and
other Great Lakes states. They
wanted the locks in a canal to
be closed immediately. That man-made
canal artificially connects the
Mississippi River system and the
Great Lakes. For now at least,
those locks will stay open to cargo
traffic. This fight is all about
a fish, a type of Asian Carp, that
many people don’t want to get into
the Great Lakes. Lester Graham
spoke with David Jude about the
threat of the fish. Jude is a
research scientist and fish biologist
at the University of Michigan:

Transcript

The US Supreme Court has turned
down a request from Michigan and
other Great Lakes states. They
wanted the locks in a canal to
be closed immediately. That man-made
canal artificially connects the
Mississippi River system and the
Great Lakes. For now at least,
those locks will stay open to cargo
traffic. This fight is all about
a fish, a type of Asian Carp, that
many people don’t want to get into
the Great Lakes. Lester Graham
spoke with David Jude about the
threat of the fish. Jude is a
research scientist and fish biologist
at the University of Michigan:

Lester: We keep hearing if this fish gets into the Great Lakes system, it will be devastating for the ecology of the lakes, ruin the commercial and recreational fishing. What is it that all these people think this Asian Carp fish will do to the Great Lakes?

David Jude: Well, I am sure they all watch the video where the fish are jumping out of the river, in the Illinois River, and harming some biologists and some people that are there.

Lester: Smacks them in the head!

David: Yes, so they are very concerned about that. And then biologists are concerned about the fact that they have taken over the river there, they are very voracious feeders, and so they have really crowded out a lot of other fish in the river. So there are a lot of things that are going on with regards to impacts on humans as well as impacts on fish communities that we certainly don’t like.

Lester: And these are big fish, they are up to 100 pounds.

David: Exactly.

Lester: There’s this electric barrier in place in the canal that is supposed to prevent these Asian Carp from swimming from the Mississippi River into the Great Lakes. Environmentalists say that there’s still too much of a risk, too many scenarios where the fish could get through because of flooding or some other scenario, and that canal should be closed. The Obama Administration is fighting that, the state of Illinois if fighting that, they say we need that open. There’s barge traffic carrying steel and rock and gravel and grain, all of this seems to be coming down to money. Is money the right measure when we’re looking at this situation?

David: No, it’s not. I mean traditionally, we’ve gone into the, a lot of these decisions are made and the environmental costs are not taken into consideration. The costs of having that canal open are going to be very very high and, uh, and you have to balance it against what the sport fishery and the commercial fishery is the Great Lakes is going to be because once they get in there it’s going to be a very detrimental impact on them.

Lester: This fish is knocking at the door, we’re not even sure it’s not already in, so, is there a certain inevitability that this fish is going to be in the Great Lakes and we should just start making plans to deal with it?

David: Well, I don’t think it’s inevitable and I think if we did stop them and somehow were able to shut down the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal and prevent that avenue, we’d go a long way toward preventing them from coming in. The other avenue for them getting in, of course, is people that like to eat them and they might bring them in and stock them. So, I think we should be doing everything we can right now to stop them, I mean this is our opportunity to do that. But, the other part of it is, because they’re so close, and because as you know there probably could be some in the Lakes already, you know, we should be prepared to have some plans on what we might want to do to try to, you know, focus on some of these optimal spawning sites and see what we can do to keep their populations down there.

Lester: David Jude is a research scientist and fish biologist at the University of Michigan. Thanks for coming in!

David: Oh, my pleasure.

Related Links

Asian Carp Update

  • Charter boat captain Eric Stuecher says Asian Carp will likely ruin his business. (Photo by Jennifer Guerra)

A big monster of a fish is at
the center of a US Supreme Court
case. Asian Carp are making their
way up the Mississippi towards the
Great Lakes. Michigan’s Attorney
General filed a lawsuit asking the
Court to close a Chicago canal in
order to keep the carp out. The
shipping industry says, ‘no can do.’
Jennifer Guerra has
a closer look at what’s at stake:

Transcript

A big monster of a fish is at
the center of a US Supreme Court
case. Asian Carp are making their
way up the Mississippi towards the
Great Lakes. Michigan’s Attorney
General filed a lawsuit asking the
Court to close a Chicago canal in
order to keep the carp out. The
shipping industry says, ‘no can do.’
Jennifer Guerra has
a closer look at what’s at stake:

There’s one way to look at this as a purely economic story. In one corner you’ve got the people who ship cargo by water.

“Lynne Munch, senior vice president regional advocacy of the American Waterways Operators.”

She says, if the Illinois is forced to close two of the locks in the Chicago canal permanently, more than 17 million tons of cargo will have to be shipped by truck instead of barge, and hundreds of jobs will be lost.

“One company alone has reported that they will lose 93 jobs next year if the locks are closed. One of our towing companies estimates they’ll lose more than 130 jobs if the locks are closed.”

In the other corner, you’ve got the seven billion dollar tourism and fishing industries.

“Oh hi, I’m Eric Stuecher, I own a company called Great Lakes Fishing Charters.”

Stuecher takes people out on the Great Lakes and in rivers across Michigan. Salmon, Trout, Perch, you name it, he’ll help you fish it. But if the invasive Asian Carp get into the Great Lakes?

“It would probably cost me the business. They’ll eat anything they can get in their mouths, to the demise of so many of our other game fish.”

So that’s the economic side of the story. But what if we told you there’s more at stake here than dollars and cents.

“In terms of environmental impact, the Asian carp have the potential to seriously disrupt the Great Lakes ecosystem.”

That’s Marc Gaden with the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission. He says there are already a lot of pests in the Lakes.

“There are 180 non-native species in the Great Lakes, many of which came in accidentally. Precisely two of them can be controlled. That’s it. So that’s why biologists and others are very, very concerned about the Asian carp. Once they get in, the cat’s out of the bag.”

Asian Carp were first brought to the states by Southern catfish farmers. The carp escaped the South in the 1990s because of flooding and have been making their way north ever since. These fish are huge. They can grow to four feet and weigh up to 100 pounds, and they reproduce like crazy. In some areas, they reproduce so much that by weight they account for more than 90 percent of the fish in the Mississippi River system.

So you can see why people around the Great Lakes don’t want them.

That’s why Gaden and a lot of other scientists say we should somehow block the man-made canal that connects the big rivers to the Great Lakes for barges carrying cargo.

“We need to be open to saying, just because we’ve been moving goods on the canal by barge for decades and decades, doesn’t mean we need to continue to do it that way. Is there a better way to do it? Can we shift it to rail?”

Gaden and others have been arguing for 15 years to get some kind of permanent barrier built in order to stop invasive species from moving from one ecosystem to another.

“The government agencies that are responsible for doing things on that canal are not moving at the speed of carp, they’re moving at the speed of government. And we don’t have a minute to spare.”

That’s because new DNA tests suggest that Asian carp have moved well beyond the electric barrier meant to keep them out of Lake Michigan.

For The Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

Related Links

Greening the Golf Course

  • Audubon International estimates the average American golf course uses 312,000 gallons of water a day. (Photo source: Easchiff at Wikimedia Commons)

This time of year, golfing might be
the furthest thing from your mind.
But during the off-season, golf course
managers get to strategize how to best
treat their million dollar turf. Some
golf courses have a bad rap with
environmentalists. But, as Tanya Ott reports, there’s a budding
green movement in the golf industry:

Transcript

This time of year, golfing might be
the furthest thing from your mind.
But during the off-season, golf course
managers get to strategize how to best
treat their million dollar turf. Some
golf courses have a bad rap with
environmentalists. But, as Tanya Ott reports, there’s a budding
green movement in the golf industry:

Golf courses take knocks for using too many chemicals and too much water. Audubon International estimates the average American golf course uses 312,000 gallons a day.

Gil Rogers is with the Southern Environmental Law Center. He says that’s a boatload of water.

“In Georgia, they’re defined as agriculture – which doesn’t make any sense – but that allows them to use a lot more water than they would otherwise be able to.”

That can be a problem, especially in places with water shortages. Places like Atlanta, where a federal battle over water rights might soon leave the city high and dry.

(sound of rain hitting metal roof)

Of course, on this day, water doesn’t seem like much of a problem. It’s been raining all night. I’ve come to the Stone Mountain Golf Course, just outside Atlanta, to talk to superintendent Anthony Williams. He won golf’s highest environmental stewardship award this year.

(sound of power screwdriver)

Technicians raise the reels on the mowers to help protect the wet turf. Williams says it’s been a tough fall. In October, a big storm – they call it the 500 year storm – dropped 16 inches of rain on Stone Mountain in one day. Williams says the only thing that saved his course were the acres of native plants.

“When that flood – literally – came into the property, those plants did exactly what nature created them to do. They fluffed out. Fanned out and really just acted like a sponge.”

When Williams took over a few years ago he ripped out the non-native ornamentals and replaced them with native perennials that don’t require any additional watering. Just rain.

(sound of rain on roof)

Stone Mountain isn’t just using less water. It’s also using fewer chemicals. Williams’ crew is creative. Take, for instance, one of their big problems: wild geese. They can do a lot of damage to million dollar turf.

“We refer to it as the in-and-out damage. The ‘in damage’ is when they’re actually eating the grass and physically tearing the green up. The ‘out damage’ is as they’re walking, well, (laugh) the eaten grass becomes, well, goose droppings and then the cleanup is very, very difficult.”

Conventional golf courses spray foul-tasting chemicals on the grass or light fireworks overhead to scare the geese. But at Stone Mountain, their secret weapon is a 13 year old hound dog named Cushman. When the geese see Cushman coming, they think he’s a predator. Williams says it works like a charm!

This focus on environmental stewardship is paying off financially. Anthony Williams says they’re using significantly less fertilizer and insecticides. He estimates they’ve saved nearly $50,000 on chemicals in the last two years.

How confident is he about the health of his golf course? I asked him if he was willing to put his course to the test. Apparently, some old-school players still lick their golf balls to clean them. Not a good idea when there’re pesticides on the grounds. Would Williams do it now?

“There’s a lot of things in nature that you probably wouldn’t want to eat or put in your mouth. So the golf ball’s going to encounter a lot of those along the way. I would definitely line up with the ‘do not lick your balls.’ I’m gonna be on that side of the fence.”

More golf courses are starting to look at their environmental impact for the first time. They’re planting different grasses.

And nearly 1,000 US golf courses use recycled or reclaimed water. Another reason not to lick your balls.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tanya Ott.

Related Links

Flushing Out Unwanted Stowaways

  • A ship shown emptying its ballast tanks. (Photo courtesy of the United States Geological Survey)

Invasive species like the zebra mussel
have spread into lakes and rivers across
the country. But scientists are cautiously
optimistic they’re on the right track
to closing the front door to new invaders.
David Sommerstein reports:

Transcript

Invasive species like the zebra mussel
have spread into lakes and rivers across
the country. But scientists are cautiously
optimistic they’re on the right track
to closing the front door to new invaders.
David Sommerstein reports:

Most invasive species have snuck into American waters by hitchhiking in the ballast water of foreign ships. They cause billions of dollars of damage to economies and ecosystems.

Researcher David Reid keeps the official list of invasive species in the Great Lakes. He’s with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He says a new invader hasn’t been found there since 2006, a period of three years.

“The last time that occurred in our records was in the 1950s.”

Reid has his fingers crossed.

A new rule requires ships to flush their ballast out in the ocean before entering American waters. Reid says it seems to be working.

“We’ve found that saltwater is really quite effective against most of types of organisms that are likely to survive fresh water.”

The invasive species problem is far from over. Researchers are testing out technology to kill critters that can live in saltwater, too.

For The Environment Report, I’m David Sommerstein.

Related Links

Diversity in Urban Forestry

  • Forest researchers say cities need to plant different kinds of trees. Many cities plant only a handful of species. (Photo courtesy of the US Forest Service)

Urban forest researchers say cities
need different kinds of trees. Having
too many of the same kind of trees
encourages pests. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Urban forest researchers say cities
need different kinds of trees. Having
too many of the same kind of trees
encourages pests. Lester Graham reports:

Pests have already wiped out native trees such as chestnuts, elms and now ash.

James Kielbaso is a forester with Michigan State University. He says native trees are great but, one of his students has found some cities are too reliant on them.

“An urban tree population should not consist of any more than ten or fifteen percent of any one species. He’s finding the trees that are most over-used tend to be our native trees.”

In some cases, maples make up 30% of a city’s trees. That means if a disease or a pest hits maples, a city could lose a third of its urban forest.

Kielbaso says people should plant tree species not already in the neighborhood and a few hardy foreign species could help diversify a city forest.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

Interview: Big, Nasty Fish

  • Some biologists worry the Asian Carp will destroy the four-billion dollar fishing industry in the Great Lakes if it gets in. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

There is a man-made canal that connects
the Mississippi River system with the Great
Lakes. The Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal
makes shipping cargo between the waterways
possible. It also makes it possible for invasive
pests in the water to invade both systems.
The big concern right now is a big, nasty group
of fish known as Asian Carp that’s already
invaded the Mississippi and some of its
tributaries. An electric barrier has been built
in the canal to try to stop the fish from getting
into the Great Lakes. Lester Graham talked with
Jennifer Nalbone about the problem. She’s the
Director of Navigation and Invasive Species with
the environmental group Great Lakes United:

Transcript

There is a man-made canal that connects
the Mississippi River system with the Great
Lakes. The Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal
makes shipping cargo between the waterways
possible. It also makes it possible for invasive
pests in the water to invade both systems.
The big concern right now is a big, nasty group
of fish known as Asian Carp that’s already
invaded the Mississippi and some of its
tributaries. An electric barrier has been built
in the canal to try to stop the fish from getting
into the Great Lakes. Lester Graham talked with
Jennifer Nalbone about the problem. She’s the
Director of Navigation and Invasive Species with
the environmental group Great Lakes United:

Jennifer Nalbone: They are just incredible eaters, and they get as big as 3 to 4 feet, 80 to100 pounds when mature. And they are just prolific. Some species, the females can produce over 1 million eggs in their lifetime. So the fear is, like they’ve done in the Mississippi River Basin, they’ll get so big, they’ll have no predators, they’ll eat so much food, and there’ll be so many that they’ll basically take over the ecosystem. In some areas, where they’ve invaded, upwards of 90% of the river’s biomass is carp.

Lester Graham: You’ve probably seen this fish on videos or something like that – they’re the ones that as a boat passes by, they’ll jump out of the river, and sometimes even hit the boaters.

Nalbone: I admit, the first time I saw a video of the jumping silver carp, I was so startled I laughed at it. But there’s nothing funny about 50, 60, 70 pounds of fish flying at you when you’re going 20 miles an hour. It could kill someone.

Graham: Now, there’s this electric barrier in place that actually shocks the water so the fish is discouraged from coming into the area. But now there’s concern that the fish has invaded a nearby river, the Des Planes River, that’s very close to this canal. So, why’s that a problem?

Nalbone: Our concern is with flooding. Just last year, we saw major floodwaters in the Des Planes River, where floodwaters connected the Des Planes and the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal in streams of water several feet deep. And carp could be carried into the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal in those floodwaters.

Graham: So, what are you proposing? How could we stop the fish from going any further?

Nalbone: Well, the long-term solution is hydrologic separation of the Mississippi River Basin and the Great Lakes Basin. Army Corps of Engineers has been authorized to study that problem, but that’s a multi-year project. Right now, what we’re concerned about are floodwaters this fall. We are pressing that the Army Corps of Engineers put in place sandbags or berms in the low points between the Des Planes and the Canal. And also fill in some of the culverts in the IMN Canal that connect to the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal.

Graham: Now, I’ve watched this situation for years – long before the Asian Carp invaded the Mississippi River system – and I’m wondering, even if further millions of dollars are spent, to try to put up barricades or stop this fish, whether it’s simply inevitable that this fish will get into the Great Lakes.

Nalbone: Well, this is a battle against time right now. If we can block the future floodwaters from the Des Planes – which is probably our biggest hole in our defense right now – and plug the culverts in the IMN, we can buy ourselves some good time. But we won’t be out of the woods until we separate the Mississippi and the Great Lakes Basin. But we can’t let this invasion happen. It would be, perhaps, the greatest anticipated ecological tragedy of our time. So, I don’t think that inevitable is an option. We have to get it done.

Graham: Jennifer Nalbone is with the group Great Lakes United. Thanks, Jennifer.

Nalbone: Thank you, Lester.

Related Links

Pet Pythons on the Loose in Florida

  • JD Willson holding a juvenile python. (Photo by Samara Freemark)

Foreign animals that get released
in the wild usually don’t spark that
much interest. But when that species
is a giant snake, well, most people
sit up and take notice. That’s the
problem facing the state of Florida,
where Burmese pythons have moved in
to Everglades National Park. Now,
scientists are trying to figure out
if the snakes could spread to the
rest of the country. Samara Freemark reports:

Transcript

Foreign animals that get released
in the wild usually don’t spark that
much interest. But when that species
is a giant snake, well, most people
sit up and take notice. That’s the
problem facing the state of Florida,
where Burmese pythons have moved in
to Everglades National Park. Now,
scientists are trying to figure out
if the snakes could spread to the
rest of the country. Samara Freemark reports:

Meet South Florida’s newest invasive species – the 20 ft long, 200 lb,
Burmese python.

“They’re impressive animals. They’re really impressive animals. And
they’re breeding
like crazy out there.”

That’s python researcher JD Willson. He says the pythons probably started
off as pets –
until their owners got bored of them and dumped them in the Everglades. Now
those pets
have procreated their way into a huge wild population.

“Certainly thousands. Certainly tens of thousands. Some people have gone
as far as to
say hundreds of thousands.”

Willson says most pythons won’t attack humans. But they do pose a big
threat to local
ecosystems.

“These are snakes that are top predators. They eat alligators, they got a
bobcat record, a
couple of white tail deer. These are a predator that native wildlife are
just not prepared to
deal with. They’re not used to having a giant snake around.”

Florida lawmakers are considering putting a bounty on the pythons – paying
hunters to
kill them. And people in neighboring states just have their fingers crossed
that the
pythons won’t spread north.

But no one really knows enough about the snakes to come up with a good
control plan.

Willson and some other researchers are trying to change that.

“This is the python enclosure.”

They’ve built a little artificial habitat in South Carolina, surrounded
it with a really tall
wall, and filled it with 10 pythons. The researchers want to learn more
about how the
snakes behave in the wild, and see if they can make it through a winter
with freezing
temperatures.

(sound of door opening)

The snakes are tagged with radio transmitters, so the scientists can track
them and record
data on how they’re doing.

Freemark: “It’s safe to be in here?”

Bower: “Oh yeah, they’re not aggressive.”

Inside a student volunteer, Rick Bower, is tracking the snakes with a radio
receiver.

“As you sweep it across, you can see how the signal strength changes and
you get an idea
of where the strongest signal is coming from.”

The receiver tells us we’re basically standing right on top of one of the
pythons.

“Yeah, he’s right at our feet. Yeah, he’s down there.”

But we don’t see anything, even when Willson starts jabbing a stick at
the source of the
beeping.

“Somewhere within an 8 foot radius of where we are, there’s an 11 foot
snake. And he’s
hiding in this aquatic vegetation. And not only can we not see him, but
poking in the
vegetation doesn’t seem to be eliciting too much of a reaction.”

He’s a really sneaky snake.

Whit Gibbons is also working with the crew. He says that if the scientists
have so much
trouble tracking down their pythons, in an enclosed cage, using radio
transmitters –
there’s no way bounty hunters could make even a dent in the Everglades
python
population.

“So they find a hundred, so what. There’s a hundred thousand left. No
one’s going to find
100,000. I mean, we’ve got ‘em in a small enclosure, 10 big snakes,
over 75 feet of snake
if you add them up. And you can’t find them.”

Instead, Gibbons says people could opt for a harm reduction strategy- focus
on limiting
the spread of the snakes, try to protect species they threaten.

“One position is, ‘okay, they’re here, here’s what they can do to
us, or to our pets, or to
the wildlife. Let’s learn to live with them.’”

The South Carolina python study ends next summer. JD Willson says he’s
not sure what
they’ll do with the snakes afterwards. But he does know one thing –
they’re not going to
release them back into the wild.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Genetically Altered Eucalyptus Trees

  • A company called ArborGen is working on altering Eucalyptus trees, so they can be turned into paper and biofuels more easily. (Photo courtesy of the National Biological Information Infastructure)

There’s already a lot of genetically
modified corn and soybeans out there.
Now, Mark Brush reports, one company
is working on genetically modifying
trees:

Transcript

There’s already a lot of genetically
modified corn and soybeans out there.
Now, Mark Brush reports, one company
is working on genetically modifying
trees:

The company is called ArborGen. And it’s working on altering Eucalyptus trees, so they can be turned into paper and biofuels more easily.

Eucalyptus is native to Australia and New Zealand.

But ArborGen has already got 330 acres of these genetically altered trees planted scattered across the South.

And now it wants the government to allow these trees to flower. And that has people like George Kimbrall worried.

He’s an attorney with the International Center for Technology Assessment. He says if they spread they’ll be bad for the environment.

“They’re water suckers. They don’t allow for much undergrowth. They’re poisonous to most animals. The leaves, the animals can’t eat them. Why would we want the south covered in Eucalyptus trees?”

When eucalyptus was brought over to California – it did become invasive. And there are some reports that it’s invasive in Florida too.

ArborGen says it’s altering these trees so they won’t spread in the wild.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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

Abandoned Pet Pythons Invade Everglades

  • Large Burmese pythons are now regularly encountered along trails and visitor areas in the park (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service)

A python native to Asia is popping up in one national park. Kyle Norris reports:

Transcript

A python native to Asia is popping up in one national park. Kyle Norris reports:

The Burmese Python is showing up in Everglades National Park in Florida.

That’s because people who no longer want their pet pythons are releasing them there.

Now these babies are big — usually they between 6 to 12 feet long. And there could be as many as 150,000 pythons in the Everglades.

The snakes are not so much a threat to humans. But they are a threat to animals – especially to endangered ones.

Scott Hardin is an exotic species coordinator. He’s with the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission.

“You just got a great big snake, nothing like it, nothing analogous in the native snake fauna in Florida. So it opens up a whole new range of prey that was not susceptible before.”

He says officials are brainstorming ways to deal with the problem.

They’re trying to rig up some really big traps. And they’ve also thrown out the idea of a bounty — basically a cash reward for catching the snakes.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

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