In reality, this is a battle that can not be won. The Mississippi
Basin and the Great Lakes Basin share a thousand mile long headwaters
consisting mostly of farm fields, wetlands and woodlands. All of it
is flushed and flooded during the spring breakup with every
depression and ditch full of water. Pathways will exist and carp
populations will expand to steadily increase the probability of
penetration.
If it has not happened yet, then we have been lucky. Sooner or later
all populations in the headwaters regions will reach full capacity at
which crossing over the head waters divide such as it is will be
biologically pressed.
Once it happens, it is also likely to go undetected for some time as
the population increases and spreads out. Carp in the Mississippi
was a rumor for a long time before they started filling boats.
Way more important is that we get over it and actively begin fishing
them and eating them as a staple of our diet. We are obviously
talking of tens of thousands of tons of protein here that happens to
be readily harvested. The native fishery is not so easily caught and
simply exploiting the carp to the maximum will leave ample room for
the native fish to recover and prosper.
Time to speak out
on invasive-species plans
BY MATT MARKEY
In the tense struggle
to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, the battle lines are
usually drawn near Chicago, where the Illinois River connects the
vast Mississippi River system to Lake Michigan, via a manmade network
of canals.
That waterway, called
the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, since it was built to carry both
sewage and barge traffic into the Mississippi River basin, is
accurately labeled as ground zero in the fight to prevent the carp
and other invasive species from reaching the lakes — the largest
surface freshwater system in the world.
But what we have
learned as the Asian carp crisis has drawn an increasing amount of
study from the scientific community is that we will not be able to
secure the Great Lakes by simply closing the Chicago canal. The Great
Lakes — this vault of incredible resources we know as the
consortium of Erie, Michigan, Superior, Huron, and Ontario –
unfortunately have many portals.
A recent study by the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers takes an in-depth look at four potential
flash points here in Ohio that Asian carp or other invasive species
could use to breech the now frighteningly porous natural barrier that
has separated the two water systems for millennia.
The review by the
Corps found that the section of the Ohio-Erie Canal at Long Lake in
Summit County near Akron should be considered as having “medium
probability” for providing a pathway for Asian carp now in the Ohio
River system to reach Lake Erie sometime within the next 20 years.
Asian carp gained
poster boy status in this issue soon after floods in the mid-1990s
allowed them to escape from fish-rearing ponds and wastewater
treatment ponds in the southern U.S., where they had been brought in
to remove algae and organic matter.
Once in the
Mississippi River, these carp, filter feeders that consume huge
volumes of plankton from the food web and starve out the young of
native species, quickly spread and overwhelmed resident populations
of gamefish, such as bass and crappie. The Asian carp that could one
day use the Ohio-Erie canal to slip into Lake Erie and endanger the
$7 billion fishing industry on the Great Lakes, are now believed to
be present as far north as downtown Minneapolis.
The canal was also
listed as a potential infiltration route for the invasive Northern
snakehead, a large predatory fish that is native to China, Korea, and
Russia, but showed up in the U.S. about 15 years ago.
Little Killbuck Creek
in Medina County, just west of Summit, was classified as having the
same level of risk to allow for the movement of several other lesser
known invasives — viral hemorrhagic septicemia virus (VHSv),
threespine stickleback, ruffe and tubenose goby and parasitic
copepod.
VHSv is a deadly
infectious disease that is believed to have originated in European
fish farms. The stickleback is a fish native to coastal areas, while
the ruffe is a freshwater fish found in Europe and northern Asia and
was likely introduced to the Great Lakes through freighters dumping
ballast water.
The tubenose goby is a
fish native to the brackish waters of the Black Sea and the Caspian
Sea, while the parasitic copepod, also known as anchor worms,
attaches itself inside the mouth of fish and feeds off its host.
Grand Lake-St. Mary's
in Mercer County and Mosquito Creek Lake in Trumbull County are Ohio
sites that the Corps determined present a “low probability” of
providing a route for invasive species to reach the Great Lakes.
After releasing its
reports for review, the Corps also opened the forum for public
comments on these studies. This is an opportunity for the citizenry —
the taxpayers, the voters, and concerned people of all stripes — to
be heard.
The reports might
present a daunting and quite foreign realm to wade through — the
review of the Ohio-Erie Canal site and its potential vulnerability is
nearly 60 pages of text, photos, charts, graphs, and maps. This makes
for tough sledding for those less familiar with the vernacular
employed by the biologists and scientists on the front lines in this
unholy conflict of man vs. nature — there are 22 different acronyms
used in the reports, including HUC (Hydrologic Unit Codes) and GLMRIS
(Great Lakes and Mississippi River Interbasin Study) — but it is a
worthy journey since invasive species such as lamprey, zebra mussels,
and round gobies have already proven to be quite destructive once
they reached the Great Lakes ecosystem and established themselves
there. The more informed we are on the new threats and other vital
issues, the better muscled we will be when it comes time to coax the
political entities into making the moves that best serve the future
health of our Great Lakes.
The highly detailed
assessments also include a list of the actions that could be
considered to counter these threats and reduce the likelihood of
additional invasive species reaching the Great Lakes system. The
areas deemed most at-risk will get the lion’s share of attention.
"Further efforts
will be concentrated on pathways that have an overall rating of
medium or high,” said Jack Drolet, a program manager with GLMRIS.
He added that the results of the risk assessments could assist in
implementing and updating any plan to manage the most vulnerable Ohio
sites.
The reports that have
been presented for public review and comment were compiled through
the combined efforts of numerous federal, state, and local entities,
with the Army Corps of Engineers working the point. The Corps is also
in consultation with a wide network of other federal agencies, Native
American tribes, state and local agencies, and nongovernmental
organizations to “explore options and technologies” that could be
employed to prevent invasive species from moving between the
Mississippi River and Great Lakes basins.
These reports, along
with a library of other documents related to invasive species and the
threat they pose to the Great Lakes, can be viewed at glmris.anl.gov.
Comments from the public may be submitted electronically at the same
Web site, or mailed to: GLMRIS Focus Area 2, Summary Report Comments,
1776 Niagara Street, Buffalo, N.Y. 14207-3199. Comments will be
accepted through March 22.
Contact Blade outdoors
editor Matt Markey at: mmarkey@theblade.com or 419-724-6068.
No comments:
Post a Comment