Replumbing Chicago to Keep Carp Out

  • These fish get big. They eat a lot, and if they get into the Great Lakes, people worry they'll swallow up the food web. (Photo by the USFWS)

You might recall that Michigan got a kind of asian carp scare a few weeks back. Biologists found one asian carp near Chicago, past an electric barrier that was supposed to keep them away from Lake Michigan. They worry if carp make it to the Great Lakes and rivers in Michigan, they could crowd out native fish. Congress worries the barrier might not be enough and it wants a more permanent solution. Shawn Allee reports that won’t happen anytime soon.

“Eco-Sep” – The Corps of Engineers’ Study

Brush up on your Asian Carp Knowledge

More on the Electric Barriers

Transcript

Joel Brammeier’s with the Alliance for the Great Lakes, an advocacy group. When I meet him, I expect him to be completely freakin’ out, since just a few weeks ago biologists found one live Asian carp on the Great Lakes side of the electric carp barrier. That’s the, um, wrong side of the barrier, since we want Asian carp to stay on the other side, the side closer to the Mississippi. Anyway, Brammeier’s is either a good actor, or maybe he actually feels OK, since now other people, the right people, are freakin’ out, too. Those would be people in Congress.

“We’ve seen over the past few months, more energy devoted to predicting and preventing a crisis to the Great Lakes than I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Brammeier says Congress doubts that electric barriers, poisons, or other gadgets will keep the carp out of Lake Michigan for good, so there’s talk about the mack daddy of Asian carp prevention: hydrological separation. This just means cutting off canals that connect Lake Michigan to rivers that head west. That’d make it impossible for carp to swim to the Lake.

“I think what folks are realizing now is that the only way to achieve that is physical separation between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. That’s easy to say, but it’s incredably difficult to conceptualize how that happens.”

Brammeier says the good news is that back in 2007, Congress already asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to figure all this out. The bad news is that the study’s moving too slow for Congress. The Army Corps was planning to finish its proposal in, say, five years. Tomorrow, a U.S. Senate committee will debate asking the Corps to speed things up. They want the study finished in less than two years.

“Twelve to eighteen months with the right people, the right funding and leadership strikes me as a generous amount of time to get the answers we need.  It’s simply a matter of prioritization.”

“To do that in 18 months in my and my team’s opinion is not a reasonable assumption.”

This is Dave Wethington. He’s in charge of the study for the Army Corps of Engineers. Wethington says the real issue isn’t whether the Corps can propose some way of separating Lake Michigan from rivers that head west. He says it can do that. It’s that that there’s a lot to consider.

“What kind of impacts could there be to commercial shipping, passenger boats, recreational boats. What kind of flood risk could there be, to the Chicago area specifically.”

None of this is enough for some Michigan congressmen. Representative Dave Camp is from the 4th district.

“The problem is that it’s taking far too long. This will speed that up. What we’re trying to bring is this sense of urgency to the problem that, frankly, the bureacrats don’t get.”

Camp admits even if he gets his study eighteen months from now, he’d still have a problem. Re-jiggering the water canals around Chicago won’t be cheap, and there’d probably be a fight over that, too. Still, he says he’d rather have that fight sooner rather than later. After all, we might still have time to stop the carp’s invasion, but we’re pressing our luck if we wait too long.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

By the way, we still don’t know where that carp that was caught beyond the electric barrier came from.  Scientists are using DNA tests to figure out whether it just swam through the barrier or whether someone released it into the wild. Biologists say that happens from time to time.

That’s the Environment Report. I’m Rebecca Williams.

Invasive Bugs Still on the March

  • Adult emerald ash borer (Photo by David Cappaert, Michigan State University, courtesy of the Michigan Department of Agriculture)

The emerald ash borer is still chewing its way through the state’s ash trees.

This is the Environment Report. I’m Rebecca Williams.

The emerald ash borer is a very expensive pest. It’s an invasive beetle from Asia that was first discovered eight years ago, near Detroit. It has killed more than 50 million ash trees just in Michigan alone. The beetle has also infested 13 other states and two Canadian provinces, and it has cost the state of Michigan millions of dollars.

That’s your tax money, and you might have also had to pay to have dead trees removed from your own yard.



More information on the invasive bugs


How to identify the bugs and larvae

A related TER story

Transcript

Deb McCullough is here with me and she’s a professor of forest entomology at Michigan State University.

What’s the prognosis for Michigan’s ash trees?

“We’ve lost a lot and we’re going to lose even more. For example, Lansing and East Lansing – we’re right in the thick of it now, lots of dying trees, trees that died either last year, this year or will be dying in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, Grand Rapids had some infestations get started and they’re seeing a lot more dead and dying trees and it’s kind of rolling from the west to the east out of Grand Rapids. All these pockets that got started by firewood that was transported or infested ash nursery trees back before anybody knew about emerald ash borer. There are pockets of emerald ash borer in places like Traverse City and over by Alpena and Alcona County. We know that there are a number of localized and very spotty kinds of infestations in the Upper Peninsula as well.”


How much success do you believe that scientists like yourself, city managers, other people who are working on this… how much success have you had in slowing the beetle’s spread?


“I don’t know that we’re working really hard on that. I think the funding is pretty limited in terms of slowing the spread of the main infestations. The one area where we are trying some different approaches to slow the rate of the beetle in terms of its population growth and possibly to slow the spread is a pilot project that is underway in the Upper Peninsula to try to use a combination of insecticides and girdled ash trees and some targeted ash removals and harvests and so forth to slow the rate that the population spreads and slow down the progression of ash mortality out of these spots.”


So we’re in camping season now and moving infested firewood is one of the biggest ways we’ve been spreading the beetle. What do we need to know about moving firewood this summer?


“I do a lot of camping and we go fishing and we go hunting and in years past I always took firewood with me and I don’t do it anymore. It’s one of those things where we’re all just going to have to change our behavior because there are many of these outlier spots of emerald ash borer that we know got started from infested ash firewood that people took to an area. They left it. They didn’t burn it. The beetles came out and it only takes a couple of beetles to get a whole new infestation started. ”


“It’s illegal, you’re not allowed to take firewood across the Mackinac Bridge from Lower Michigan into Upper Michigan. You can’t take firewood across the southern border of Michigan. So we’re really asking people to get their firewood locally. A lot of times you can collect it locally or you can buy it from a supplier and just not start any more problems like these.”

Deb McCullough is a forest entomologist at Michigan State University. Thank you so much for talking with us.

“Okay, thank you.”

And that’s The Environment Report. I’m Rebecca Williams.

Decades Spent Battling the Sea Lamprey

  • John Stegmeier electro-shocking for lamprey in Sand Creek. Stegmeier is one of the many people who go out every year to find where lamprey are spawning. (Photo by Dustin Dwyer)

What has rows and rows of sharp teeth…. sucks blood and rings up a 20 million dollar tab?

This is the Environment Report. I’m Rebecca Williams.

If you were thinking shark… or maybe blockbuster vampire movie… nope! It’s actually the sea lamprey.

HOW DID THE SUCKER GET IN?

LAMPREY INFO

Transcript

It’s an invasive parasite found in every one of the Great Lakes.  It invaded the Lakes in the early 20th century, and no one’s been able to get rid of it.  It’s a fish with a round mouth like a suction cup.  It latches onto big fish like lake trout and salmon…. and gets fat drinking their blood.

Fishery managers in the U-S and Canada work to keep this parasite in check.  It costs them 20 million dollars a year.  Those are your tax dollars, by the way.

Marc Gaden is with the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.  It’s the commission’s job to protect the multi-billion dollar fishery.

Gaden says the lamprey control program has beaten back the lamprey’s population by 90 percent.  And he says for now, humans are winning.

“The threat from lampreys at the moment is like a coiled spring.  As long as you have your thumb on it you’re going to be okay.  But the moment you let up on that control they’re going to spring back pretty quickly out of control.”

Gaden says they’re using a combination of weapons against the parasite.  They include a targeted poison to kill lamprey larvae, traps and barriers and sterilizing male lampreys. 

He says we are probably stuck with the lamprey forever.  That means we’ll be continuing to spend millions of dollars… every single year.

 
(music sting)

This is the Environment Report. 

 
So we’ve been wrestling with the sea lamprey for decades… maybe you’re wondering who’s actually out there in the trenches?  Dustin Dwyer caught up with one of the lamprey hunters:

 
John Stegmeier stands in a shady stretch of Sand Creek near Grand Rapids, looking like a Ghostbuster. He’s wearing waterproof waders, and has a metal box strapped to his back, with wires and knobs sticking out.

I meet him in the middle of the stream, where he’s prowling for sea lamprey larvae. But he tells me to stay up on a log out of the water, because he’s packing a charge.

“That’s giving little pulses of electricity into the water. And then if one comes up, then we give them a fast pulse, and that would keep them from being able to swim and we’re able to scoop them up with our paddles here.”

 They go into a bucket alive, then they’re counted for a survey. These surveys help determine where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service decides to dump a poison targeted specifically for sea lamprey.

Stegmeijer is one of just a dozen people on a survey team that’s responsible for testing every stream and river in the entire Lower Peninsula, plus the southern shores of Lake Erie.
On days like this one in the gentle stream of Sand Creek, he says, it’s a fun job.

“But there are days on little trout streams in beautiful woods and there are days in agricultural ditches next to dairy farms that might smell a little, and there’s some industrial ditches.”

In short, he has to go wherever the sea lamprey larvae go, and sometimes they go to some inconvenient places.

It’s all part of the battle to keep the sea lamprey in check, and Steigmeyer says it’s not exactly a losing battle.

“We’re kind of winning it, but it’s only a kind of win because we can’t get rid of them.”

What they can do is control them – keep the population low.
Stegmeier says if they weren’t doing this, sea lampreys could devastate the multibillion dollar fishing industry in the Great Lakes, but even with the treatments, every year, sea lampreys make it farther up Michigan’s rivers to spawn. And every year, there’s more area for his small team to cover, and more places that need chemical treatment – treatment that can get extremely expensive.
Still the battle must be fought.

For the Environment Report, I’m Dustin Dwyer in Grand Rapids.

  
You can take a look at a sea lamprey’s ugly little face… and see photos of what the lamprey does to fish at environment report dot org. 

I’m Rebecca Williams.

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

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

Eating Asian Carp

  • Dr. John Holden from Rockford, Illinois is the CEO of Heartland Processing, which aims to convert millions of tons of Asian carp into pet food, fishmeal and fish oil. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

There are rivers in the Midwest that are just flush with fish. Normally, that would be great, but these are two species of invasive Asian Carp – and they shouldn’t be there in the first place. These foreign fish breed so quickly and grow so large, they push out native fish species. There are entrepreneurs who dream of getting rid of Asian carp. Shawn Allee looks at what they’ve cooked up and whether it could do any good:

Transcript

There are rivers in the Midwest that are just flush with fish. Normally, that would be great, but these are two species of invasive Asian Carp – and they shouldn’t be there in the first place.
These foreign fish breed so quickly and grow so large, they push out native fish species. There are entrepreneurs who dream of getting rid of Asian carp.
Shawn Allee looks at what they’ve cooked up and whether it could do any good:

One businessman wants to take on Asian carp.

He’s John Holden and he started up the brand-new Heartland Processing company.
When I visit his factory in central Illinois, Holden walks me around his machines.

They transform fresh carp into fish oil and dry fishmeal. Holden says the fishmeal might make good pet food.

He’s tested it his own dog.

“He just inhaled it. You got more of that for me?”

Unfortunately, there are no carp today – and I have to settle for a dry-run demo.

John Holden is a doctor by trade, but he started his business after he watched Internet video of carp in the Illinois River.

“I went onto YouTube, and I said, this is nuts.”

“What did you see when you went onto YouTube?”

“Fish jumping like it was boiling water. The most poignant one was the department of natural resources one. All of a sudden they’re jumping out of the river, and smacking the DNR people.”

Actually, a guy from the state Department of Natural Resources is on-hand to vouch for this. He’s Chris McCloud.

“We’ve had conservation police have their teeth knocked out.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Oh no.”

McCloud says the state wants to cut back the carp population – not out of some vendetta, but because silver and big-head Asian carp pretty much took over the Illinois river from native fish.

McCloud says the agency’s got a plan.
Commercial fishing fits into it.

“It basically says, let’s see what this can do and then determine how much processing would be needed to make a dent in a population that’s so voracious.”

Now, my question is: Will massive, commercial harvesting of carp really work? I mean, the Illinois river’s 275 miles long, and I’ve seen videos that it’s thick with Asian carp.

To get an informed opinion, I head to the Illinois Natural History Survey.

Kevin Irons works there – he tracks carp populations along the Illinois River.

“As biologists we’re very encouraged by the Heartland Processing plant and commercial fishermen that are taking the fish out. From some of the research we’ve looked at, the only way we can reduce the numbers is by commercially harvesting them”

Irons walks me through his argument.

To start, he opens a freezer.

“These are the ones that will jump out and hit ya.”

“This one’s like 2.5 feet long.”

“That’s a relatively small one. There are many that are 3-4 feet long.”

Irons says the two troublesome varieties of Asian carp are native to Russia, the Mideast and China.

They’re small in China – they’re super-sized here.

“Nowhere else in the world do we have populations like this because they’re over-fished everywhere else. People in the YangTze River rarely see them over 4-5 pounds because they’re taken soon in their life cycles.”

How big can they get here?

“The world record was taken in St. Louis – nearly a hundred pounds.”

Irons says Chinese and other ethnic food markets in the US sell Asian carp but most Americans won’t touch them.

“We might go to a restaurant and get a walleye or perch fillet – they’re boneless and they’re beautifully done. These can be just as tasty, but they have bones. My wife, if she gets a bone in her fish, she’s just about done; she doesn’t want to mess with the bones. We’re pretty spoiled.”

Irons says if most Americans won’t eat Asian carp, maybe processors like Heartland can pick up the slack by making them into pet and animal feed.

It might not eliminate carp, but Irons says it might get darn close.

If it works too well – and Heartland runs out of fish on the Illinois River – Irons says there are plenty of carp waiting for processing in the Mississippi and other rivers.

For the Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Environmental Review Halts Ferry

  • The Hawaii Superferry service has been suspended until an environmental impact study can be completed. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

It’s been rough sailing for a Superferry that transports passengers and vehicles around the Hawaiian Islands. A lot of people who live in Hawaii, as well as businesses and tourists, depend on the Superferry. But there’s been a lot of concern about the ferry’s impact on the environment. Heidi Chang reports the Superferry is now suspending its service. The last voyage will take place today:

Transcript

It’s been rough sailing for a Superferry that transports passengers and vehicles around the Hawaiian Islands. A lot of people who live in Hawaii, as well as businesses and tourists, depend on the Superferry. But there’s been a lot of concern about the ferry’s impact on the environment. Heidi Chang reports the Superferry is now suspending its service. The last voyage will take place today:

Back in 2007, Hawaii legislators passed a special law that allowed the Superferry to sail between Oahu and Maui, before an environmental study was completed. The Hawaii Supreme Court has ruled that’s against the law.

Robert Harris is the director of the Sierra Club. It’s one of the groups that challenged the Superferry and the state in court. He’s worried about the impact it might have on traffic and that natural resources could be taken without better oversight.

“One of the first days of operation, some people on Oahu drove a truck over to Maui and loaded up on a bunch of river rocks, and were transporting it back to Oahu, and they were fined, I think significantly for that.”

Harris says the environmental review will also look at whether the ferry might be disturbing whales or transporting invasive species that could endanger native plants and animals.

For The Environment Report, I’m Heidi Chang.

Related Links

Invasive Screening Program Could Save Bucks

The U.S. economy could save billions of dollars a year if the government
would screen for invasive species. Lester Graham reports that prediction is
based on a recent study on screening out problem plants:

Transcript

The U.S. economy could save billions of dollars a year if the government would
screen for
invasive species. Lester Graham reports, that prediction is based on a recent study
on
screening out problem plants:


The study shows when a country screens for potentially harmful species of plants that
could spread like weeds, the cost of the screening is miniscule compared to the cost
of
the damage the plants cause. The study is published in the Proceedings of the
National
Academy of Sciences. It looked at the costs and benefits of Australia’s invasive
species
screening program.


Phyllis Windle specializes in invasive species. She’s with the environmental group
Union
of Concerned Scientists. Windle says it’s long been assumed that screening out pesky
plants would be worth the cost.


“But what this study does is that it really shows that prevention pays off and it
has good
data to illustrate that.”


Factoring in the scale of the U.S. economy to Australia’s, the Union of Concerned
Scientists estimates for an annual cost of a few million dollars, the U.S. economy
could
be spared a few billion dollars in damage by invasive plants.


For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Invasive Die-Off Stirs Fishery Debate

  • A naturally reproduced wild lake trout fingerling. (Photo courtesy of MI DNR.)

The fisheries in the Great Lakes are seeing dramatic changes. In one lake, an invasive species that has become part of the food chain has collapsed. But some native fish are doing better because of that collapse. Lester Graham reports some fishery managers are debating what to do next:

Transcript

The fisheries in the Great Lakes are seeing dramatic changes. In one lake, an invasive species that has become part of the food chain has collapsed. But, some native fish are doing better because of that collapse. Lester Graham reports some fishery managers are debating what to do next:


When we started digging canals, connecting the lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, things changed a lot for the fish in the Great Lakes.


First, the sea lamprey got into the lakes through the Welland canal that bypasses Niagara Falls.


The lamprey is an eel-like parasite that nearly wiped out the big fish in the Great Lakes by attaching to them and sucking the life out of them.

Also slipping through the canals was a smaller fish, the alewife. Since the lamprey wiped out most of the predator fish in the lakes, the alewife population exploded. They out-competed native fish for food. It got so bad, that by the mid 1960s, if you weighed all the fish in Lake Michigan, more than 80% of the weight would have been alewives.


So, once wildlife managers got the sea lamprey under control, they had to figure out what they could do to get alewives under control. The fish biologists decided to introduce new predators, trout and salmon, to prey on the alewives. These fish were not native to the Great Lakes. Expensive nurseries were built by federal and state game agencies to keep supplying new trout and salmon every year to prey on alewives.


Forty years later, in Lake Huron, the alewife population collapsed, and in Lake Michigan alewives are declining rapidly. Mission accomplished, right?


Well, in that 40 years, a whole recreational fishing industry has grown up around fishing for those introduced trout and salmon. Some fishery managers now say we have to find a balance of the right amount of alewives to sustain the introduced trout and salmon fishery. So, recently states have cut their trout and salmon stocking programs to give alewives a chance to recover.


Tom Trudeau [who] operates a fish nursery for the state of Illinois says it would cause trouble to try to take the Great Lakes back to native fish only.


“We do have this industry that we have pressure to keep. You know, you’re putting a lot of people out of business if you get rid of it.”


And Trudeau says because of ecological damage, many of the smaller native fish on which big predators used to feed have been wiped out.


“So, I mean, of the six or seven species in that category, we only have one. And a couple of them are extinct. So, I mean, we could talk about going back to the ideal situation of pure native species, but we’ve disrupted the habitat so much.”


So, the argument goes, the invasive alewives are now needed. But something unexpected happened when the alewives disappeared from Lake Huron. The native fish, walleye, yellow perch, and lake trout started doing better.


Dave Fielder is a fisheries research biologist with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.


“We’ve long known that adult alewives were a predator and a competitor on newly hatched perch and walleye fry. We just didn’t realize how substantial that effect was until finally the adult alewives were removed from the system and now we’re enjoying some greatly increased reproductive success. Walleye, particularly in Saginaw bay, are at some of the highest levels that we’ve seen in a long time.”


But, after 40 years, people are used to fishing for those introduced trout and salmon. And some fisheries managers are wondering what will happen to all those expensive nurseries that provide their jobs.


What happens to all of those charter boat fishing operations, fishing tourism, if the government were to stop stocking those trout and salmon? Would they switch to fishing for native fish? And, can the native fish even survive in the long-run since so many of the smaller native prey-fish are no longer around?


Dave Fielder says it’s hard to say.


“So, we’re kind of in the middle of a change – it’s really a paradigm shift in many ways – and that’s always scary because nobody really knows how we’re going to end up, but I prefer to be optimistic. I think there are a lot of reasons to be hopeful in regards to the benefits that we’re seeing for our native species.”


But some fisheries managers say the debate of whether to go all native or to try to find the right mix of native and non-native fish is not over. Since invasive species, pollution, and habitat destruction have changed the Great Lakes so much, wildlife managers think they’ll still have to keep stocking one kind of fish or another to keep the recreational fishing industry going. If that’s the case, does it matter whether it’s native fish, or the introduced fish that anglers have grown to like so much?


For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Multimillion Dollar Parasite Fight Continues

  • A sea lamprey, the first invasive species in the Great Lakes. (Photo courtesy of the USEPA)

One of the most destructive invasive species in the Great Lakes was also the first one to arrive. The sea lamprey invaded the Lakes more than a hundred years ago, and no one’s been able to get rid of it. As Rebecca Williams reports, it’s the only invader in the Lakes that managers have been able to control… but it takes millions of taxpayers’ dollars every year to keep the blood-sucking parasite in check, and there’s no end in sight:

Transcript

One of the most destructive invasive species in the Great Lakes was also the first one to arrive. The sea lamprey invaded the Lakes more than a hundred years ago, and no one’s been able to get rid of it. As Rebecca Williams reports, it’s the only invader in the Lakes that managers have been able to control… but it takes millions of taxpayers’ dollars every year to keep the blood-sucking parasite in check, and there’s no end in sight:

(Sounds of tank bubbling)


There’s a sea lamprey sucking on Marc Gaden’s hand.


“You can see he’s really got my thumb now, I’ll try and pull him off my thumb – this is a suction cup (popping sound of lamprey being detached).”


Gaden is with the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. It’s a group that was created by the US and Canadian governments with one main purpose: to control the sea lamprey. Gaden isn’t in any actual danger when a lamprey’s hanging on him. They don’t feed on warm-blooded creatures. But fish are another story.


“The mouth is ringed with sharp teeth, row after row of these sharp teeth, and in the middle of the mouth there is a tongue that flicks out and it’s sharp as a razor. What that tongue does is files its way through the side of the fish’s scales and skin and then the sea lamprey has access to blood and body fluids of the fish and that’s what it does, it feeds on them.”


Sea lamprey get fat drinking fish blood and fluids. They leave bloody holes in the side of fish, wounds that often kill the fish. Each lamprey can kill 40 pounds of fish a year.


Lamprey got into the lakes through manmade canals that connected to the Atlantic Ocean. By the 1940’s, the exotic species had invaded every one of the Great Lakes. Marc Gaden says by the 1950’s, lampreys had killed off most of the big predator fish in the Lakes.


“There’s literature around that time period that talked about gaping bloody wounds that commercial fishermen were finding on their catch, the commercial catch was beginning to go down the tubes, also because of overfishing, but sea lamprey was a major cause of that decline.”


Paul Jensen’s family used to fish for the popular lake trout before the lamprey wiped them out. Jensen now fishes for whitefish. He’s one of a small pool of commercial fishers who still pull a living from the Lakes.


“Every port along southern Michigan had commercial fishermen. South Haven, St. Joseph, Ludington, Manistee… There aren’t any, they’re gone. And one of the main reasons they’re gone, I think can be traced back to sea lamprey.”


Jensen says most commercial fishers these days have to do more than catch fish. He also runs a marina and builds research boats. Jensen says commercial fishers either had to adapt to the changes the lampreys brought or get out of the business.


“The whole food chain has just been devastated and turned upside down by exotics, and it’s been kind of a mystery; we have no clue as to where it’s gonna go. We’re glad with what we’re getting but I don’t know if we have much control of where it’s going.”


The people who manage fisheries have been wrestling for control over the sea lamprey. Marc Gaden says the lamprey control program has reduced the parasites’ numbers by 90 percent over the past 50 years. But he says lampreys have recently rebounded above target levels in several areas of the Great Lakes.


“It goes to show you these are crafty beasts. Even though they’re primitive and haven’t evolved much since the time of the dinosaurs, they still will find ways in which to spread and find new stream habitats and we always have to try our best to stay one step ahead of them.”


Gaden says the fishery commission has been aggressively treating the areas where lamprey numbers are too high. The main method is a lampricide that kills lamprey when they spawn in streams. Researchers are also working on chemical attractants to lure lampreys into traps.


But all of this takes money. Since the 1950’s, the US and Canada have spent about $300 million to keep lampreys in check. Marc Gaden says that sounds like a lot of money, until you look at the value of the fishery. It’s valued at about 4 billion dollars a year.


“So the amount of money we spend, upwards of 20 million a year, to keep lampreys under control, is a tiny fraction of the value of that fishery. But nevertheless it’s a cost we’re going to have to endure in perpetuity because the lampreys are not going away.”


But the Bush Administration’s proposed budget cut some of the funding for lamprey control. The fishery commission is hopeful that Congress will restore the funding. Marc Gaden says if we want any sport fishing, any tribal fishing, any commercial fishing… lampreys have to be kept under control, and that takes steady funding from Congress.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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