Salmon Fishery on the Rocks

  • The Chinook salmon was initially introduced to the Great Lakes in the 1870s. Michigan, New York and Wisconsin reintroduced the Chinook salmon to the Great Lakes in 1966. (Photo courtesy of USFWS)

There’s a decision looming for Lake Huron that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. The state must decide whether it should keep putting chinook salmon in the lake. The fish has been the driving force behind sport fishing in the Great Lakes. But the salmon’s future in the Upper Lakes is now questionable. Peter Payette reports:


It’s hard to overstate how drastically salmon transformed the Great Lakes after they were introduced more than 40 years ago.


Ed Retherford is a charter boat captain on Lake Huron.
He says in the old days on a weekend in Rockport he’d see cars with boat trailers backed up for a mile or two waiting to launch.
But that’s all gone now.


“You’d be lucky, except maybe for the brown trout festival, you’d be lucky to see twenty boats there on a weekend. It just decimated that area. You can imagine the economics involved.”


Chinook or king salmon practically disappeared from Lake Huron about seven years ago. Most of the charter boats are gone now because the kinds of fish that remain are just not as exciting to catch as salmon.


State officials figure little towns like Rockport lose upwards of a million dollars in tourism business every year without the fishery.

More about Chinook salmon from the DNR

A related Environment Report story

Ten Threats to the Great Lakes

Transcript

The salmon’s demise followed the disappearance of its favorite food, little fish called alewives. Scientists say there were too many salmon eating the alewives and problems lower down on the food chain caused by invasive mussels.


State fisheries biologist Jim Johnson says salmon would rather starve than eat something besides an alewife.


“So at first, the salmon went through a period of just being starved out. They didn’t have enough to eat. They wouldn’t switch to eating round gobies and they died of malnutrition.”


The changes in Lake Huron since have been significant.


Neither salmon nor alewives are native to the lake. And with them out of the way, native fish like walleye have come back.


The state continues to stock one and a half million Chinook salmon in Lake Huron every year.


But Jim Johnson says the walleye eat most of them. He says Lake Huron can’t support a big salmon fishery any more.


“It’s just not realistic. The lake doesn’t offer that and there’s nothing the DNR can do to change that.”


The question now is whether to stock any chinook salmon in Huron at all. Giving up on the most popular sport fish in the Great Lakes is hard to swallow but most people see the writing on the wall. So even if stocking continues, it will likely be a fraction of what it once was.


On the other side of the state, there are now worrying signs that the same fate might be in store for Lake Michigan.


There are lots of salmon in Lake Michigan today.


But charter boat captain Denny Grinold says something went wrong last fall. He says the big salmon, the four-year old fish that come up into the rivers to spawn in August, never showed up.


“You keep looking for ‘em. You keep looking for ‘em. You go out and you fish the patterns that you’ve fished in the past. Those large Chinook should be there and they just weren’t there.”


The warm water and lots of windy days last year might account for the missing fish. But research provides no comfort for the future.


The DNR has created a system of red flags to evaluate the conditions for salmon in Lake Michigan. These are based on things like how much food is available, the weight of the fish and how many are being caught.


Twenty of the 30 flags have been triggered.


The manager of Lake Michigan for the Department of Natural Resources, Jim Dexter, says the lake is not a happy place.


“The lake is very perturbed. It’s certainly not a stable, quality ecosystem. I mean it’s working right now. It’s producing a fishery. People are happy but it’s tenuous.”


There’s not much the state can do to change anything.


If the experience of Lake Huron is any guide, it’s the presence of those little feeder fish, alewives, that is critical.


At the moment, there are believed to be fewer alewives in Lake Michigan than at any time on record.


For the Environment Report, I’m Peter Payette.

Wild Rice Harvest Restores a Native Tradition

  • Chloe Aldred is one of many kids learning the tradition of harvesting wild rice. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)

For thousands of years, Native American tribes in the Great Lakes region have been harvesting wild rice. They call it manoomin.

But over the past few centuries, this tradition has been dying out. The rice beds have been shrinking, and the cultural knowledge has been disappearing. Many tribes were forced to relocate away from the wild rice beds. Starting in the 1870s, some children were taken from their families, into boarding schools. They were given English names and cut off from their culture and from the knowledge of how to harvest rice.

In Michigan, some people are trying to bring the tradition back.

Native Wild Rice Coalition

More about “The Good Berry”

The Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

Video of the Manoomin Project for at risk teens

Transcript

Roger LaBine is a member of the Lac Vieux Desert band of Lake Superior Chippewa. He says manoomin is central to his ancestors’ migration story.

“And they were presented in visions with seven prophecies and we would know where our homeland would be when we found this food that grows on the water, which is the manoomin.”

(paddling sound)

Here, on Tubbs Lake near Mecosta, you can still find wild rice. The rice beds look like a bright green meadow growing on the water. It’s the perfect spot for Wild Rice Camp. About 50 people are here, young and old, tribal and non-tribal. They’re here to learn how to harvest and process the rice.

Barb Barton is one of the camp’s instructors.

“So to harvest rice you use cedar ricing sticks, they look like shortened pool cues. You pull rice over the boat and knock the rice into the boat.”

(snd of knocking rice)

After a couple hours on the lake, everyone heads back to camp to process the rice.

Charley Fox has been ricing since he was nine years old. He’s showing us how to soften the rice in a copper kettle.

(snd under)

“It takes the moisture out of the rice kernel, gets the outer shaft brittle to where you can roll it in your fingers. it’s a golden color, it’s ready to go, ready for the next stage where they dance on it!”

Saige Mackay is 11 years old. She’s in a little pit, wearing moccasins.

“I’m dancing on the rice. It shells the rice so you don’t have the husks on it, like husking corn.”

(dancing sound under)

Then it’s on to the winnowing stage. That’s where they use birch baskets to separate the husks from the rice. Then they clean the rice, and it’s finally ready to eat.

Zhawan Sprague is the daughter of a tribal chairman.

“My dad really wanted me to learn more about how to like, harvest rice, so I’m really excited how it’s going to end out.”

A lot of people here are first timers.

Roger LaBine says he loves having all the kids around.

He says to the Anishinaabe people, everything has a spirit. He says the spirit of the manoomin is glad to have them back.

“It’s been waiting for us. By us coming out here and harvesting this rice, it’s helping us to enhance it. Not only the rice bed but it’s a healing process for us, it gives us that incentive to carry it on. We need that. It’s our identity. It’s almost like a language, we lose our identity if we lose our language, if we lose our dance, if we lose our drum.”

LaBine says on the last day of camp, they’ll return one day’s harvest back to the water, to re-seed the rice beds for next year.

“And say thank you, Miigwetch, give us all that we need and no more than we need so that we can carry this on.”

Rebecca Williams, The Environment Report

Prairie Dog Wars

  • Keith Edwards, a rancher in Kansas, is in favor of poisoning the prairie dogs. (Photo by Devin Browne)

Often we hear stories about
the government trying to get
farmers and ranchers to do
things that are better for
the environment. But Devin
Browne has a story about a
rancher trying to do something
better for the environment
and getting in trouble with
the government:

Transcript

Often we hear stories about
the government trying to get
farmers and ranchers to do
things that are better for
the environment. But Devin
Browne has a story about a
rancher trying to do something
better for the environment
and getting in trouble with
the government:

In western Kansas, there’s a war going on. People are suing each other and threatening each other and there’s poisons and noxious gasses involved. They all call it the ‘prairie dog wars,’ but few of them agree on what it is they’re really fighting about.

Some people say this is about a bad neighbor who’s ruining things for other ranchers. Some say it’s about whether you can let wildlife live on your land. And still, other people say that the conflict in Kansas is about whether the government gets to tell you what you can do on your own land.

(sound of prairie dog barking)

Prairie dogs about a foot tall, in the squirrel family, though technically rodents. Ranchers hate them because they eat grass that’s meant for cows. But biologists love them because where there are prairie dogs there are also all the other animals that need them for food or shelter – hawks, foxes, badgers, owls, and maybe most importantly – the black footed ferret, one of America’s most endangered mammals. We’ll tell you more about the ferret in a moment.

“It’s been said that prairie dogs are the most important animals on the plains and I agree with that.”

At the center of all this controversy is Larry Haverfield He’s a bearded guy in bib overalls, a born and bred Kansas rancher. Four years ago, he stood up at a county meeting and said he liked prairie dogs. And he wasn’t going to kill them anymore.

Ever since then his neighbors have been organizing against him.

Keith Edwards is one of them.

“We’ve had county meetings, we’ve had a petition, we’ve filed the legal complaints that you can go through the county, and we’ve done that several times.”

Second, third, fourth generation ranchers will tell you so in no uncertain terms they’ve been fighting a war against the prairie dogs. But now these ranchers are fighting against one of their own, Larry Haverfield. It’s gotten ugly. Some might even say petty.

Again, Larry Haverfield.

“Well, they’ve threatened to come in on us, and they have, we haven’t paid all the bills yet either.”

When he says come in on us, he means come in onto his property. Exterminators hired by the county to poison the prairie dogs, the one or two days a year when he’s not home – when he and his wife are in court, in Topeka, battling lawsuits. And then, not only the poisoning, but the bill for the poisoning – for thousands of dollars.

This might sound like illegal trespassing, but, in Kansas, there’s nothing illegal about it. An old law, from 1901, says that the government can poison varmints on your land & then bill you if you don’t kill them yourself.

Haverfield says it’s not just the prairie dogs that are affected by the poisoning. The endangered black footed ferrets eat prairie dogs to survive. Since there are so many prairie dogs on the Haverfield’s land, it was decided that they should host one of the first re-introductions of the ferrets. Since it’s endangered, it can’t be legally poisoned.

But the ferrets didn’t stop the county. Haverfield says the state law and the federal Endangered Species Act are working against each other.

“That’s quite a conflict, we think the endangered species act will rule in that argument.”

And an environmental group thinks Haverfield should be able to do what he wants on his land. Ron Klataske is with the Audubon of Kansas.

“Basically, the conflict in western Kansas is: are landowners allowed to have native wildlife on their land?”

Ironically, ranchers such as Keith Edwards say they’re worried about being able to do what they want on their land too.

“Our question is: what will be able to do with our land when the black footed ferret becomes established? And we poison prairie dogs and it accidentally poisons a ferret? Does that leave us open for a lawsuit? Scares us to death.”

Edwards is afraid that this is only the beginning – that if he can’t poison what he wants on his own land, will he have any freedoms as a farmer at all?

Haverfield says he plans to stick to his principles and keep the prairie dogs & the ferrets on his land, no matter what it costs him.

For The Environment Report, I’m Devin Browne.

Related Links

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.

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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.

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