Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads Event: Current Ecological Issues of the Great Lakes with James S. Diana, Director, Michigan Sea Grant College Program, University of Michigan

Fri, 05/19/2006 - 2:48pm

When: February 15, 2010 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

The Great Lakes have undergone massive environmental change since European settlement. Landscape alteration, water use, industrial processes, overfishing, and introduction of exotic species have all contributed. Future trends for the Lakes are also difficult to predict because new species or problems intervene before the current trends are completed. So, what lies ahead for our Great Lakes - and what is their current condition today?Join us for this fascinating presentation by James Diana, Director of the Michigan Sea Grant College Program at the University of Michigan. This event is held in conjunction with Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads 2010, which, this year focuses on the subject of Michigan and Jerry Dennis' award-winning book The Living Great Lakes: Searching For The Heart Of The Inland Seas.

Transcript

• [00:00:01.42] [MUSIC]
• [00:00:21.89] IRA LAX: Good evening everyone. My name is Ira Lax. I'm from the Outreach Neighborhood Services Department here at the Ann Arbor District Library. I'm going to welcome you all to this-- part of a series of events for the Ann Arbor/ Ypsilanti Read piece based around Jerry Dennis' book, The Living Great Lakes, which has really been a very popular book and these programs have been well attended. I want to thank you for showing such interest in our Great Lakes. Don't forget the Michigan Sea Grant group is 40 years old and they have a couple nice publications back there on the tables so help yourself to those.
• [00:01:08.46] And we want to welcome Jim Diana here for this presentation. He's a professor of fisheries and aquaculture at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan and he is director of the Michigan Sea Grant College Program. He got his B.A. in marine biology and M.A. in biology at California State University at Long Beach and his Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Alberta.
• [00:01:37.36] Michigan Sea Grant devotes itself to research, education, and outreach on the Michigan coast and the Great Lakes. And I'm sure Jim Diana will tell you a lot more about that. So please welcome Jim Diana.
• [00:01:52.15] JAMES DIANA: Well, thank you. I probably don't need it. I have a fairly loud and obnoxious voice as you'll learn in a few minutes. Thanks, Ira. So, it was a nice introduction you gave me. I should say about myself, I study fish. I brought this for my pointer for a couple of reasons: it makes sense. It makes sense in a lot of ways because you might not notice but the tip of my fishing rod is broken there. So a typically university professor, I'm too cheap to really use a good one. But you can never have a bad one. So a fishing rod for pointer seems appropriate. And since I study fish, I'm going to use fish as the overriding examples we're going to use related to the Great Lakes and changes in the Great Lakes. And when I told my wife I was going to do that she said, oh fish are boring. And I told her, how can you say fish are boring? I can't think of anything more exciting to talk about than fish. And hopefully by the end maybe you agree a little bit with that.
• [00:02:57.31] And so I want to talk a bit about the Great Lakes and put it into a sort of the concept of living here and what life is like in this region and how it's benefited by the Great Lakes. And let me just start with-- I really want to go on into the future but in order to do that I'm going to go back into the past. Because I can't remember who it was, but somebody-- maybe one of you'll remember the quote-- but that those who don't study history are bound to repeat it? Who said that? Does anybody remember? Sounds like was Winston Churchill or something like that. I'm not really sure. But that's absolutely true in this case, that we have a history on the Great Lakes that isn't unique today. A lot of the things we're dealing with today in a different form have been dealt with before. And a lot of the challenges have been overcome before. And so it's valuable to think about and to look at how that change occurred.
• [00:03:57.18] Some basic statistics on the Great Lakes-- and I'm not always going to say what's on the slide. So you'll get an idea of what's there and I'll talk about whatever I feel like. But I want to talk about the take home messages for today. Another rule for a professor is that they tell us that in order for people to remember something, you have to say it at least three different times. So I'm going to tell you what I'm going to tell you, and then during the talk I'll tell you what that is, and then at the end I'll tell you what I told you. And then maybe by tomorrow somebody here will actually be able to tell me what I told you and still remember it. But probably most of you won't.
• [00:04:35.93] But anyway, take home messages are actually several. One is that human civilizations have had a sort of a love-hate relationship with the Great Lakes. We love it in some ways for what it provides, but at the same time we hate it enough that we want to change it to make it provide something better the way we think it should be. And that's one of the big challenges that we face: that often times the way we think it should be is what causes the problems we have today. They've served for economic, social, and ecological values to humans ever since people settled in the area. Way back in the aboriginals that lived along the lakes, they largely gained the same kind of values out of the lakes that we do today. They've suffered massive damage. And some of those damages go way back to those times. Some are more recent. But, at the same time, they've also had massive recovery. And that's a very positive thing. In fact, I think the Great Lakes probably show a better history of recovering a damaged ecosystem than any other fresh water system in the world and maybe any other ecologically system in the world. At least of the scale of something that covers 20% of the world's fresh water. I mean, that's a massive amount of water. And that there are challenges that are going to remain.
• [00:05:56.84] OK, so let's go through this a little bit. The Native Americans who settled along the lakes used it for largely the same kind of functions that we do today: transportation, food, and really a way of life. Their way of life was largely defined by the lakes, by the seasons on the lakes, and by the animals and conditions on the lakes.
• [00:06:22.97] And when Europeans first came, they pretty much found the same thing. It's kind of an interesting history about how this region was settled. And for those of you who know it, you know that much of North America was actually settled from the Great Lakes out, rather than from the coast in. After the first 13 colonies settled along the Atlantic Coast, most of the transportation that occurred, occurred through the Great Lakes. And places like the Mississippi River were discovered by Marquette and Joliet on a canoe coming down the Mississippi River from its headwaters rather than up it from down South. Kind of an odd combination. You wouldn't think of that today but that's the pattern of the way civilization occurred around here.
• [00:07:11.67] La Salle, back in the 1600's, actually came above Niagara Falls and built a sailing ship that he sailed around the Great Lakes, the Griffon. And it was recently rediscovered actually in the bottom of the lakes now and is being preserved as a historical monument. And the voyageurs, who really discovered much of Northern U.S. and Southern Canada, mostly focused out of this region.
• [00:07:39.57] And it was an important area. It was important for timber. It was important for settlements. And particularly those settlements would use it to get rid of their wastes. The same as we do today. And it was important for transportation. Up until the transcontinental railroad occurred, really the most efficient way to get out to Duluth in the middle of the country was to go by ship through the Great Lakes. And was important for food. People fished it ever since they settled here. The quality of fish and the quantity of fish was something that made this region inhabitable.
• [00:08:19.15] Well, we inhabit this same region and I want you try to give you the idea that we value the benefits of this area and we share the responsibility of maintaining this area. We get a lot from the quality of water and the quality of life that occurs as a result of having the Great Lakes all around us: their aesthetic value, their recreational value, their value for transportation, their value for the economy, value for tourism. And, as a result, we need to worry about their condition and keep them in a reasonable state for our own future and for the future of our children and our grandchildren. Because that's really the magnet that make this area unique. That's what makes Michigan what it is. And that's what makes the Great Lakes region what it is.
• [00:09:15.43] Well, an important point: we think of pollution and all this damage as something that's kind of recent. But in fact, way back in the 1800s, we had lots of trouble on the Great Lakes related to that. And a good example is the cholera epidemic that occurred in Chicago. So Chicago got its drinking water from Lake Michigan. It also disposed of its waste in Lake Michigan. And if anybody knows anything about cholera, it's a fecal-borne disease that transmits through drinking contaminated water. And we tend to think of it from poor places where people don't have adequate sanitation. And it still exists and as a major killer today.
• [00:09:56.49] Well, in 1850s, 3% of the population of Chicago died every year from cholera. It was a major problem because of this mixing of their waste and of their drinking water. And eventually they solved it the way that most of us solve problems like that. They shipped it out the somewhere else. They built the-- they reversed the flow of the Chicago River so that it went out through the Des Plaines River and out into the Mississippi. And they dumped their wastes there and it all went downstream-- somebody else got to deal with the problem-- and their drinking water and wastewater was separated. And the disease cycle was broken. And cholera was fixed. And that was one of the engineering marvels of the 1800's, reversing the flow of the Chicago River. If you've read anything about Asian Carp lately, that's where they're coming up today. They're coming up through that river that was reversed in order to get rid of the cholera epidemic. So a solution at one time and maybe a problem at another time.
• [00:10:56.38] Ira didn't say this, but if anybody has questions as we go along, just feel free to ask any time, OK? If I say something that you don't really understand, I do that quite often, so I wouldn't bug being interrupted at the time.
• [00:11:09.69] Well, what else did we do back then? We changed the landscape pretty dramatically. The whole shoreline of the Great Lakes was largely wetlands. And that was the agricultural area that we could use. So one of the first things we did was to change that into dry agricultural land. Put up dikes along the shore so that lake waters wouldn't flood the wetlands. Used that area with tiles and other things to drain the water away. And then used that area for agriculture. And that was a massive change.
• [00:11:42.76] Here's an example-- Elizabeth, you're like this-- this is Bay City. And on the left is Bay City in the [? pre-settlement ?] conditions of land cover and on the right is Bay City today. The light blue on the left here is all wetland. And you'll see that today there's very little wetland in that same region. All the yellow on that map over there is agricultural land. So it's all been changed over into agriculture. But the funny thing about this graph-- how many of you have you been to Bay City? All right. And Inner Saginaw Bay in general? What's your thoughts about it? Doesn't it seemed like a big wetland to everybody? Like all kinds of marshes and everything?
• [00:12:24.15] So it's in this state and we think it has a lot of wetlands. Think of what it was like in this state. Think of the numbers of water fowl that came through there. The amount of water and runoff from the shoreline that was filtered through there. The numbers of fishes that had their nursery areas in there. You can't even really imagine what it was like because we don't have anything comparable really in North America today.
• [00:12:53.22] So that was one modification that happened early on. Transportation was another. We had problems like this: Niagara Falls. Couldn't ship over Niagara Falls. And if you wanted to do much in the way of shipping, you had to do something. And so we built canals around Niagara Falls and another barriers. And those canals allowed ships to move upstream and bring in goods. They also allowed animals to move upstream in ways that didn't happen before. And that's kind of a summary of the canal system we have now. There are really two areas that are more or less impassable: the lower area on the Saint Lawrence River around Montreal, and then around Niagara Falls and Welland Canal. Both of those were barriers to fish and other organisms getting upstream, as well as boats getting upstream. And they've been dramatically altered as a result of the canals.
• [00:13:46.16] We also like to build dams. I don't know what it is exactly. Maybe we have some history on ourselves like a beaver, because beavers like to build dams and that sort of makes their home. And for some reason or other, humans like to build dams. I think we have over a thousand dams in the state of Michigan. I couldn't give you the exact number, but it's over that number I know. And some river systems by themselves have over a hundred dams on them.
• [00:14:11.22] And it seems like we've-- you know they aren't for flood control really. Not here. We don't really have floods that much. They are for industrial purposes. When they were first built, they were the way you could build a mill and use the power of the water to saw lumber or generate electricity or grind flour or whatever you would do with a mill. And what happened was, they built dams in the areas that had the highest slope because then you could entrain the most water behind there. And you could, in that way, have the most power for a mill. And often times that area was very close to the mouth of the river, where the river dumped into the one of the Great Lakes. And so, as a result of, that we cut off fish migrations. Some of these dams could be really pretty low-tech still in existence today. Some of them are pretty high-tech, hydropower dams that are generating electricity and doing a lot. But a great fraction of the dams have no real function anymore.
• [00:15:15.99] And this is a map of Lake Huron. On the left, historically, the Lake Huron watershed in the green is the area that fish could migrate to back prior to human settlement-- prior to European settlement, excuse me. And the right, the green is the area that fish can migrate to today before they run into a dam. And you can, see it's a pretty small area. Only a small lens of land around the lake is left open to fish migrations. And that's important because a lot of species might have their best locations to spawn or bring up their young upstream and their best locations to live as adult in the lake. And breaking that connection reduces the population that could be there. And in some cases actually remove some of the species from existing there because they don't have the possibility of making that connection.
• [00:16:07.70] Well, economically early on the major driver was logging. Back in the 1800's, people came into the forest, saw these magnificent old growth trees and said, that's a lot of money. We can make a lot of money out of that. And actually, many people think the growth of Michigan was established in the late 1800's and 1900's off of lumbering. The upper part of the state was mostly pine and mixed hardwoods. And the pines were particularly valuable; the white pine and red pine forests. But all of it was logged. Virtually all of Michigan was clear cut between 1870 and 1910.
• [00:16:52.36] They would float the logs down the rivers. As they came down the rivers, they'd mess up the banks. They'd tear things up. They'd have to move things out of the way so the logs could keep going. You've probably all seen the pictures of the lumberjacks running around on the logs, breaking them loose. And even the log rolling contest that they have are sort of related to them getting these logs to float down to the mills that were at the mouth of the stream. And that's what was left behind. Really a wasteland. An area that burned. The biggest fire we had in the state of Michigan occurred-- Peshtigo fire from Wisconsin came across the middle of the state and pretty much wiped out, I think the largest loss of life in a fire in the state. And it was over-- I think it was a thousand people died in two days in a fire that occurred because of all the scrap lumber and everything that was left behind and just sort of dried out, waiting to burn. So, it was a mess.
• [00:17:47.97] And the first victim was this thing called the grayling. So if you've been to the city of Grayling, that's what it's named after. Most you probably don't know that. Grayling are extinct in Michigan today. But the city of Grayling occurs right at the headwaters of the Manistee and the Au Sable River. And both of those had huge populations of Grayling back as recent as 1900. Unfortunately for the grayling, they're really easy to catch if you go fishing. So the lumber camps often went out and caught those and fed to the lumberjacks as a way of them surviving. They also, by logging and running the logs downstream, they kind of damaged the habitat where graylings spawn.
• [00:18:30.22] And so even though they were one of the most abundant fish in the southern part of the state, they became extinct in 1930. And they have not yet been reestablished, even though there have been several attempts. So it's a loss to our fauna. And to people who would go up to Northern Canada or out to Montana to fish for grayling, you'd have had that opportunity right here not that long ago. Yeah?
• [00:18:56.83] AUDIENCE MEMBER: How big were they? Like perch?
• [00:18:58.37] JAMES DIANA: No, they're like a trout. So they get to be maybe 15 inches long. They are a very fun fish to catch. And people like them because of this fin, which is really beautiful. It's kind of a-- that color doesn't do it justice. It's kind of iridescent purple fin. But they're much like a trout, catch them with fly rods and things like that. Well, so that was an example, not necessarily of an attempt, but an extinction of a species. At least from Michigan. Grayling are still living in other parts of the world today.
• [00:19:30.02] Lake sturgeon is another kind of interesting example. Very big fish here. They get over a couple hundred pounds in weight. and that was their problem. They were big. They swam in the nets. They tore up the nets. People didn't like that. If you were a commercial fisherman and also there was a big hole in your net because a sturgeon went through it, you got mad. And so you responded by trying to catch all the sturgeon and kill them. And that way they wouldn't tear up your nets anymore. And that was the plan. The plan was extinction. And it was kind of an interesting one because sturgeon are the source of caviar. So they're very valuable in that way today. They also produce something else called isinglass, which has a lot of properties. But one of them is, it clarifies beer. So just from sturgeon, you could get beer and caviar. And their choice was to try to drive it extinct. And they did a good job. This is the catch of sturgeon-- I think it's from Lake Michigan-- 600,000 pounds in 1890, driven down by 1910 to less than 100,000 pounds. And really no fishery exists today.
• [00:20:35.58] And in fact, that's an underestimate of the fishery. Because that's what was reported. One of the favorite things to do back then was to catch sturgeon and pile them up on the beach and light them on fire. I have no idea why anybody would want to have a big pile of sturgeon-- sort of like logs-- lit on fire. It had to stink. It couldn't have been real pretty. And even when it was done, there must have been really a mess of whatever was there before. But that was commonly done. I guess burning them was better letting them just sit there and rot. I don't know. But they were trying to cause their extinction. Or, at least, get them out of their nets. Put it that way.
• [00:21:14.58] But luckily, that didn't quite work. So sturgeon still is here today. In fact, there's quite a good population down in the St. Clair River among other places. And people have a great love for the sturgeon. It's surprising. There's a group called "Sturgeon for Tomorrow" that, during the time when sturgeon migrate up the string to spawn, they sit on the banks and they watch the sturgeon and they guard them from other people going in and bothering them while they're spawning. So, nice to see. Kind of the opposite of what happened back in the 1900s.
• [00:21:47.88] Same thing could be said about commercial fishing. I'll kind of jump through this, but we can look at white fish and the advent of new nets and the decline in the white fish population as a result. Same kind of a curve that we saw with the sturgeon.
• [00:22:03.14] And what commercial fishing really did-- and it does this throughout the world, the Great Lakes are just one example-- is it fishes a high valued species until they're gone. Or at least commercially extinct where you can't catch enough to make it worthwhile. And then that's replaced with low value species. So in the Great Lakes, the high valued species were lake trout and lake whitefish. And by the 1970's they were largely replaced by carp and channel catfish as examples. Species that people don't particularly like to eat all that much.
• [00:22:39.42] Well I mentioned pollution already, but most of you when you think of problems in the Great Lakes probably think of pollution as a problem. The cholera epidemic is just one example. Back in the 1900's, early 1900's, both the saw mill-- the dust left over from cutting up log-- sawdust and effluents from tanneries caused major pollution by almost every major river system where it dumped into the lakes. In the mid-1900's, our discharge from domestic household waste caused phosphorus problems in the lakes and eutrophication. And, after World War II, we converted many of the things we used for bombs to things we would use for agriculture, produced things like DDT and PCBs and used them dramatically. They caused major pollution problems as well. And that continues today.
• [00:23:36.38] And this image is where things were in the mid-1960's on the Great Lakes. Not a pretty image. Time Magazine had an article in 1965 and it declared that Lake Erie was dead, that nothing could live in the polluted water that we had left in Lake Erie. And in 1960-- either 7 or 9, I'm not sure the date-- the Cuyahoga River caught fire and burned. The Cuyahoga River is in Cleveland. And does it drain Columbus? Because then maybe that explains it. I don't know. But, in any case, because of all the material in the water, the water actually caught fire and burned. And that wasn't the only time it caught fire and burned. That was just the time the press really caught on.
• [00:24:24.37] So let's continue on this line and then I'll try to hopefully show you some positive signs and a bit of recovery. But invasions of other species are what really has happened dramatically and seems to occupy our attention even a little more today. Here's an example of the common carp which is the first Asian carp they got distributed in the U.S. back in the 1880's when the head of the U.S. Fish Commission-- I think it was called-- decided that that would be a good species to plant because they were very commonly eaten in Europe and Asia. And so why not bring them here where we have another food fish? And so they introduced them broadly around the country. And it was a mistake. Nobody ever-- or very few people end up eating them from the wild. They love to go into these wetland areas and route around in the mud, sort of like a pig likes to do. And in doing that they stir up the sediment. They remove the vegetation. They turn it into a muddy mess where before it would have been a green lush area with a lot of emerging vegetation. So they change the ecosystem pretty dramatically. Pacific salmon are another example of a deliberate introduction. They were brought in and we'll talk about that in a little while.
• [00:25:39.38] Here's kind of an interesting unintentional introduction: rainbow smelt. Anybody gone smelt dipping? One, maybe.
• [00:25:48.36] AUDIENCE MEMBER: I did as a kid. Yeah,
• [00:25:49.86] JAMES DIANA: As a kid. So what was it like?
• [00:25:51.65] AUDIENCE MEMBER: Oh, you grab a net and you catch a whole net full at once. [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
• [00:26:00.72] JAMES DIANA: Yeah. In that group there, maybe?
• [00:26:03.72] AUDIENCE MEMBER: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
• [00:26:09.52] JAMES DIANA: Yeah. Lift nets there.
• [00:26:12.51] AUDIENCE MEMBER: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:26:13.71] JAMES DIANA: Yeah, so they got very-- they were released originally in Crystal Lake up by Benzonia. And they got out into Lake Michigan and eventually throughout the Great Lakes. And they expanded pretty dramatically. The time you'd notice them would be in the spring when they would run upstream to spawn and then as-- what's your name?
• [00:26:32.71] AUDIENCE MEMBER: Clark.
• [00:26:33.06] JAMES DIANA: As Clark was saying, they come in great numbers where you could just pick them up with their hand out of the water. And it generated some really weird behavior. One belief was that as sort of a macho thing-- rites of spring and all that kind of stuff-- one belief was that the first smelt you get, you're supposed to eat it alive. And smelt dipping became this early spring thing where you went out with a bunch of the guys I guess it, and you ate raw smelt, and you drank a lot of beer, and you threw up in your waders, and you had a great time.
• [00:27:05.69] AUDIENCE MEMBER: In the 1930s, they had a smelt carnival there. And people would come up, [INAUDIBLE PHRASE].
• [00:27:14.61] JAMES DIANA: And it's still not all that uncommon today to go smelt dipping. Nowhere near as abundant as they were back in the '30s to '50s I would say, but still abundant today. So they were unintentionally introduced. Same with pink salmon which got loose from a hatchery in Canada and became common in the Great Lakes.
• [00:27:37.06] And then we had the ship canals and they really were the ones that caused the most damage. The sea lamprey was the big species that came through that route. The sea lamprey was a marine species that got into the Great Lakes because it could get around Niagara Falls. And when it got into the Great Lakes it went crazy. Because they were all these big old fish that it could latch on to their side, raspe a hole in their side. If it managed to get in the right spot, say right next to their heart, it would kill them, because it would just suck the blood out of their heart. If it landed on their muscle it would just sort of generate a hole and suck the tissue out that way. So it wouldn't necessarily kill the fish but it would certainly not make them happy. And it went after lake trout because lake trout like to swim around the bottom and lampreys like to hang around the bottom.
• [00:28:26.18] But it found a situation where it just was out of control. So it when after lake trout, then it went after white fish, then it went after suckers, and then it went after burbot, northern pike, any large bodied fish. And basically added to the problem they were having with overfishing and drove many of them to local extinction. So there's a little chart showing the lake trout in red and index abundance of lake trout. And then the lamprey in black. And you can see that when the lamprey came on in the '50s the lake trout disappeared. Pretty clear relationship between the two. And as a lake trout-- I'm sorry, as a lamprey ate other things, you could see that it started to struggle a little bit. There weren't enough lake trout to support it. The other species weren't giving it such a good time. So it started to decline. And then on top of that, we got into a control system to take care of the lamprey and reduced its abundance further.
• [00:29:27.69] Well the alewife did the same thing. The alewife came through the same canals about the same time. And it came into the Great Lakes just as the lamprey was wiping everything out. And so here's this little fish, about the size of a sardine, that had no predators and just boomed. It went out, feed on everything it could. It became so abundant that estimates in Lake Michigan-- Ray, were you here at that time?
• [00:29:54.94] AUDIENCE MEMBER: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:29:55.70] JAMES DIANA: Yeah, where like 80% of the fish biomass was alewife that they could collect in Lake Michigan. A non-native species and one species. Just an enormous overpopulation. As a result of that overpopulation, they competed for food, they didn't do particularly well, and in the spring there would be these die-offs where alewives would die and float up on the beach in various numbers. And they were a real nuisance. They were so bad that I think it was 1969, city of Chicago's water intake was shut down because dead alewives plugged the pumps. And they had to turn it off I think for several days to get the things cleared out, to move out the dead alewives that were floating up into the city's water supply. And I can't imagine the water was great when they turned it back on again. But anyway, it was a major nuisance.
• [00:30:47.95] And that occurred partly because of what had happened with the lamprey and partly because of its own effect. Now the alewives also had some significant effects on other species. They're believe to have wiped out several different species of ciscos, or at least brought them to such low abundance that we barely see them today. More recently we worried about ballast water. Since the 70's, when the St. Lawrence seaway was really improved and ocean going vessels could run all the way up the system, their ballast water brought in things like zebra mussels. We'll talk a little more about zebra mussels and their effect in a minute. Brought in a lot of other things as well.
• [00:31:30.26] So, I said I wasn't going to go doom and gloom, but so far it hasn't been very pretty, has it? Let's try to move ahead a little bit, because really what happened next was outstanding. I mean unbelievable, the response that happened as a result of all these changes. And it more or less started in the 1960's with the introduction of Pacific salmon. And the person who is generally credited with that is a fellow by the name of Howard Tanner who was the head of the fisheries division in the Michigan DNR. He decided to stock initially coho salmon, ultimately chinook salmon too. And the whole-- if you read the documents back then, the whole idea was for salmon to eat alewives to stop this problem. And if salmon happened also get caught and create a sport fishery that would be OK. But really that wasn't the main goal. But salmon did very well. And it was kind of interesting. Because they had been introduced several times before. Different forms of salmon had been brought in as well. But none of them really had been successful. But there was 80% alewives out of the Great Lakes. The first group of coho salmon that came in we're like this big and this big around. People described them as footballs. That's what they looked like. Because they had so much food out there, they didn't know what to do it. And it created a fishery that was kind of funny. I won't tell that story because I'll go on too long. But now that fishery is a multi-billion dollar industry- fishing for salmon in the Great Lakes. And that is something that influences the economy of our state and several other Great Lakes states enormously.
• [00:33:08.72] So here's sort of that timeline. And I will talk too much about the early part because I already have. But look at how quick the recovery occurred. In the late '60s, the salmon were introduced. 1972, we passed a clean water act with the idea being we knew many waters like the Great Lakes waters were so contaminated that they were damaging our main use of them. We couldn't get good drinking water from our own streams that there were right outside of our towns. And that wasn't a good thing obviously, and started to recognize the need for us to take better care what we had. And at the same time, in the late '60s, there was a very influential person named Rachel Carson who wrote The Silent Spring, which was a book about DDT and use of DDT. And what that ended up doing was causing DDT use to be banned. DDT was a chemical that was used as a pesticide to kill insects on mainly agricultural farm. But it was sprayed on places to control mosquitoes and all sorts of things.
• [00:34:11.07] The interesting part of all that is that DDT and PCBs both were bad enough in the Great Lakes that there were some really bad evidence of their damage. For example, I don't know how many of you've ever seen the pictures of the cormorants with the crocked bills that they crossed over each other? Little baby cormorants were so deformed from their concentration of pesticides that they had grown bills that would not work. And when the mom and dad stop feeding them, they were going to starve. And that was a big concern.
• [00:34:41.73] Interesting, if you know anything about cormorants today, to realize at one time we were using them as our worry about the Great Lakes and now we're using them about our worry about what they're doing to the Great Lakes because they're so abundant. And bald eagles couldn't reproduce in the Great Lakes. They sat on the eggs. Their eggs shells were thin because DDT caused thin egg shells. And they'd crush their own eggs when they sat on their nests. So it was quite a mess. And as a result of that, not only was the Clean Water Act passed to try to clean up domestic ways, but DDT banned, PCB production banned, as a way to try to clean up that problem. And it happened very quickly surprisingly. In 1976, salmon were already controlling alewives pretty well. By 1984, people were actually starting to worry that there were too many salmon and they were eating too many alewives and alewives were going to go extinct. And what were we going to do then? In a matter of just a few years.
• [00:35:38.27] And at that time, the sport fishery across the Great Lakes was valued at something like a billion dollars. So in a matter of about 20 years, a pretty dramatic change. Now some of the contents, some of the DDT and PCB cleaned up slowly. It didn't all of a sudden, everything was very good. But it did clean up. So, finally the future. I kind of went on a little longer than I should have about the past. But remember, the past will give us a good idea on how we ought to react to the future. And in my view, the biggest ecologically problem that's occurring currently in the Great Lakes is what's going on in Lake Huron. And you'll probably find that as surprising because if you were reading the paper at all, pretty much everybody would say the Asian carp, right? How many have read something about the Asian carp lately? I'll talk a little bit about the Asian carp later. But I don't think the Asian carp is anywhere near the problem-- the ecologic change that's occurring in Lake Huron. And it's probably going to occur in Lake Michigan and Lake Ontario in the near future.
• [00:36:43.12] And what happened in Lake Huron? It's the combined effects of all these things we just got through talking about. The zebra mussel invasion and how they cleared out the water. As a result of the loss of plankton, changes in the food web. The loss of stocked salmon, so there's no salmon fishery or very little salmon fishery in Lake Huron today. Some of the native species have actually rebounded as a result of all that. And the alewife has become almost extinct and Lake Huron. So big changes have occurred. Some of that's positive, some of it's negative. It's changes, though, that we need to react to.
• [00:37:19.64] Let me just go through that a little more carefully. So on the left is a picture off the end of a dock at sort of a typical time-- I think this is actually Lake Erie-- prior to zebra mussel invasion. And the water would be a little murky because waves would break and cause turbidity and that sort of thing. On the right, is that same dock, same location now, after zebra mussels came into the lake. And the water is so clear you don't even see water. But what you see is algae on the bottom because now the material in the water been cleared out. The light can penetrate to the bottom, allows algae to grow there where previously it didn't. So that was a big change. All this turbidity in the water wasn't just mud, it was also phytoplankton and zooplankton-- little microscopic creatures that live in the water that other things feed on.
• [00:38:08.99] Zebra mussels have colonized-- and more recently the quagga mussel, which is a closely related species. When it says there dreissenids, they're both is that genus, driessenia. But anyway, those two individual types have colonized the lakes greatly. And particularly the quagga mussel colonizing deeper water has causes this massive change in what's available in the plankton. The round goby have now come in and started to feed on the zebra mussel as well as expand itself. And so now it's eating fish eggs and other things. And good question as to what it's going to drive.
• [00:38:49.22] But here's an example of what's happened. These are data from the USGS lab here in Ann Arbor. And since about 2002, you can see it all basins of the lakes, the number and the biomass of zooplankton has declined pretty dramatically. There's not much plankton in the water anymore. Same thing has happened to the benthos. Diporeia are little scuds that grow on the bottom of the lakes. And they were once very, very common. And you can see again, in around 2004 they've dropped off to almost nothing. Here's a picture-- that's what a scud looks. Sort of like a sow bug in a way. And on the right there is the abundance of diporeia in the year 2000. And the darkest blue is 5,000 individuals per square meter. A square meter is about three feet by three feet. That's a lot of bugs on the bottom of the water. And you can see that all of the open basin of Lake Huron pretty much had diporeia in densities in the order of several thousand. Here's 2003, only three years later. It's even gotten worse since then but really now diporeia is relatively rare in the bottom sediments. And so fishes and other organisms that depended on that part of the food web now are high and dry as far as food is concerned.
• [00:40:16.65] That affected the forage fishes. In 2002, roughly, the alewife crashed. There's alewife abundant in 2002. It was something on the order of a hundred thousand tons in Lake Huron. By 2005, it was almost an immeasurable amount. And it really hasn't recovered since. Other species have shown lesser change. You can see the rainbow smelt is sort of kicking along about traditional levels, maybe a little less. Traditional on a 1990's scale, not a 1930's scale when they were really abundant. The bloater. You can see that it's getting difficult if you're a predator living in Lake Huron to make a living because what was once at a total estimated biomass of 300,000 tons is now at an estimated biomass of less than 50,000 tons. And if you looking alewives, zero. And that's what happened as a result. The chinook salmon in the lake trout fishery collapsed. Chinook salmon had the highest fishery ever in Lake Huron in 2002. Something like 11,000 fish were caught in charter fishing alone. By 2005 that was down to 2,000 and it's dropped off further since. Lake trout delayed a little bit but showed much the same trend. And that's a kind of chinook salmon they were catching. Little skinny looking things that were really sickly because there wasn't enough food in the lake for them to grow very well. And so it looks like the salmonid fishery has collapsed in Lake Huron.
• [00:42:02.89] Some of the native species have rebounded as a result. This is the emerald shiner. Emerald shiner abundance in 2005 and then in 2006 thousand just boomed. Walleye, a popular game fish, really took off in the late-- after that collapse of the alewife. And so native species are returning. Some of the introduced species are going. Same thing's true with small mouth bass and others. And it kind of leads us to this question: what's a fishery going to be like in the future? Should we continue stocking lake trout and chinook salmon? Or do we settle on the natural fish community and maybe a lower level of fish production?
• [00:42:48.32] Well before you all say the obvious thing is you don't stock anymore, let's look at economic effects a little bit. So this is a charter boat. Not sure where-- port of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. OK, well it's not in Michigan but that's OK. If it were in Ohio we wouldn't pay any attention to it but it's not. Charter boat fishing is a big industry in the state. And charter boat fishing is largely maintain by these kind of pictures. People going out and catching a lot a big fish. That's what they advertise, that's what they try to do. Many charter operators will actually guarantee you if you don't catch a fish, they'll take you on another trip. That's how convinced they are that they can put you on fish.
• [00:43:33.40] But that's how much this whole operation depends on the salmon. Without the salmon, this whole operation falls apart. And that's exactly what's happenned in Lake Huron. 70,000 anglers back in 1998. Almost that number in 2002. Down less than 30,000 anglers going charter boat fishing today. And the estimated lost in just 10 communities in Lake Huron is $19 million just from the loss of charter boat fishing. Now, most of the money generated for the economy out of fishing actually comes from-- not from charter boats but from people who own their own boats and go out and stay in hotels and do all that sort of thing. And that's even more dramatic. So the loss of the chinook is going to be a major economic impact on a number of communities that don't have much money, don't really have much alternatives for jobs, and are living in our state where unemployment is already a big problem. And it's only going to get bigger.
• [00:44:40.03] So that's a big issue. How do we deal with that kind of change? That's the question we need to deal with. And the interesting part about this is when Lake Huron was first-- well, no-- when salmon came in and started controlling alewives, several people make predictions about we're stocking too many salmon and they're going overexploit the alewife. And that was made in Lake Michigan and it was made in Lake Ontario. I'd have never hear that statement made for Lake Huron, which collapsed. But what do you think is going to happen in Lake Michigan, in Lake Ontario, given that all these events have already occurred? It's going to be a good question as to where they go. But in some ways it looks like the writing's on the wall, unless we can do something to really stop that overexploitation of the alewife from occurring very quickly.
• [00:45:34.44] OK, so that's already here. What happened in Lake Huron is already here. Its potential to spread to Lake Ontario or Lake Michigan is already here. Asian carp is something yet coming. And you've heard the stories. It's coming through the canals. It gained most of its interest, and I think the reason most people have seen it, is because of it jumping out of the water. People run through in the boats and there's fish popping out of water like popcorn. And you know hitting people as they drive by in a boat, landing in their boats. And that's generated a lot of concern about the Asian carp. And rightly so. Nobody wants to see the Asian carp in the Great Lakes.
• [00:46:19.30] It's now is very close to Lake Michigan. They actually collected DNA from the water in Calumet Harbor-- which is near Chicago-- meaning that potentially there's already fish in Lake Michigan. They've collected fish from several other areas, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Just a sporadic fish here and there. But knowing how our collections work, a sporadic fish here and there is probably not the only fish that's in the water because we don't do that much in the way of sampling and collecting. Jennifer Granholm and governors of all the Great Lakes states have gone together and sued the Army Corps of Engineers to close locks on the Chicago River. And they're estimate on the suit is that $7 billion in economic damage will occur by the loss of salmon fishing in the Great Lakes if the carp get it.
• [00:47:11.18] So far the government hasn't really responded to that. They've said they're going to do various things. They're going to put $73 million dollars into making a better barrier. My friend Dave Jude tells me that-- and this is true-- those barriers, the electrical barriers-- electricity effects a fish based on its size. And so big fish will probably get stunned and not go through the barrier. But what happens to a little larval fish that goes through there on a fast flush. It could easily get through that kind of a system. It may have already done that. So the only real way to stop it is to close the canal. That's a very controversial thing because there's economic value in the shipping that goes on.
• [00:47:51.34] But I honestly don't think the grass and-- I'm sorry, the silver and big head carp-- the two main ones that these Asian carp are-- are going to create the damage that's been predicted because of two things. One, I've already told you. And that is there's no plankton left in the water. And both of these things eat plankton. So every estimate I've seen of their biomass out in the open waters of the lakes are that the lakes can't support them. So they may occur in harbors and bays, in places like Green Bay and Saginaw Bay. But they're not likely to be very abundant in the open water of the lakes given their need for food and the lack of food that's already there.
• [00:48:34.83] Secondly, they have very specific reproductive requirements. They have to migrate up river and spawn. And their eggs have to drift downstream and remain up in the water column until they hatch and until they absorb their yolk sac. And I've heard people estimate 25 miles. I think it's actually a longer distance of free flowing river than that. But most of our rivers have, as I said, dams right near the end. So they don't have the habitat for spawning to be very successful either.
• [00:49:02.48] So I don't know that either any species will be quite the problem that they predicted. But I also find it funny, given the clear evidence that the Saint Lawrence seaway has resulted in all these other species coming in, why we're talking about closing the Chicago canal and not the Saint Lawrence seaway. Or why we're not thinking of better ways of controlling that avenue, which has created huge damage, compared to this avenue, which may create damage. Honestly, I wouldn't mind seeing them both changed. But I'm not in control of that. I love the fish. I don't necessarily love the shipping I guess.
• [00:49:41.00] Other changes: botulism. This has been something that's gotten around in the lakes because of the same results. Because of changes in the algae they grow and the things that are there due to the new species that are here. And it's killed a lot of birds and it's caused a lot of problems. We've seen increased nuisance algal growth. Both things like in Lake Eerie where we get these big strains of lyngbya, a new algae that's gotten in. It rolls up into ropes and ends up all over the beach. Or just algal blooms like you see here in this harbor where you get blue-green algae that are growing and causing problems. In fact, in the deep water of Lake Erie we have areas that go out of oxygen every summer. And the extent of that depends on a variety of things, but it's a big indicator of this change that's occurring. The change that's occurring in Lake Erie is probably different than the change that's occurring in the other lakes because Lake Erie is shallower, more nutrient rich, a whole different fish community, a whole different kind of a system.
• [00:50:41.69] So that was kind of not a very uplifting little end either. But let me say that I think these are issues that can be dealt with. Some of the issues I presented as what's going on in Lake Huron right now are things that actually, in some ways, are positive. Native species are returning. That's something we've tried to do for quite awhile. Now that the alewife are down, they seem to returning on their own. So maybe we can-- we need to readjust how we live in association with the lakes. Obviously botulism and the spreads of the things like that is not good for the lakes. But at the same time, the water quality and conditions are far better in Lake Huron right now than they were in the height of the alewife and lamprey problem. And maybe ecologically we can do some manipulation. We've had success in the past. We might get success in the future. Economically may we have to change the way we expect income to come. Maybe tourism can't just be "let's go out and catch as many of the and as big a fish as we can possibly catch." Maybe we need to get a little more enlightened as far as the whole fishing and nature experience which is what people bring away from fishing trips far more than the number and size of fish they catch.
• [00:51:58.40] So I don't think that necessarily this is all gloom and doom. But I do think readjusts the way we should be thinking about the Great Lakes, the potential future that we might have in the other lakes, and we should be planning accordingly that that might be the future. And we ought to-- if there's anything we can do either to avoid it or to kind of cushion the move that way, that's what ought to be happening next. So with that, I just thank you for your attention and I'd be glad to answer any questions you have and thanks.
• [00:52:30.60] [APPLAUSE]
• [00:52:34.38] Oh, thank you.
• [00:52:37.48] IRA LAX: If you wouldn't mind, I'm going to have a mike in the back here. If you wouldn't mind stepping up to the mike it'd be great. And Jim won't have to remember to repeat the question. Because we are recording this for-- you'll be able to access it off our website in a few weeks.
• [00:53:00.27] JAMES DIANA: So I have one other alternative. Solomon back there was one of my GSIs and he's got a test with him that we can distribute to everybody and see how much you actually learned if you don't ask any questions. Yeah.
• [00:53:14.72] AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm curious about the probability of temporary aquaculture. because of fish lay such million of eggs, I don't know if it's just improbable to ever reestablish what was there. But is that a remote possibility?
• [00:53:38.68] JAMES DIANA: So the question on aquaculture, are you thinking of aquaculture in order to reestablish fish populations?
• [00:53:43.59] AUDIENCE MEMBER: Right, the ones that have been depleted.
• [00:53:45.32] JAMES DIANA: So that's sort of what the hatcheries are doing now. They're growing eggs. They're getting them up to a size where they should survive. And they're sticking them out in the water.
• [00:53:52.92] AUDIENCE MEMBER: So it's already in practice?
• [00:53:55.45] JAMES DIANA: That's how the salmon are introduced, yes.
• [00:53:57.89] AUDIENCE MEMBER: I've been-- I've relocated from South Carolina. I've been a [UNINTELLIGIBLE] for 18 years. I've been following the Great Lakes. I love them. And I'm just hoping the best for them.
• [00:54:07.86] JAMES DIANA: Well you led me into something that I can't pass up because I also study aquaculture. And I think aquaculture could have a big potential value to the state of Michigan. And that value would be in growing fish in some of these coastal communities where this economy is now going to lag and growing them for consumption. Trying to get rid of commercial fisheries having a product that might be a fresh fish that's produced locally and consumed locally. And I think-- I think it has a lot of potential for the state. The state so far has been against the idea of aquaculture for food consumption by and large because they worry about pollution problems and other things. But most of those things can be handled if done well. And I would like to see that happen. So I think that is one of the diversifications of coastal economies that would really be useful. But that's aquaculture to actually eat the fish.
• [00:55:10.26] AUDIENCE MEMBER: I've heard that populations of-- there are populations of lampreys that are starting to spawn offshore that are not swimming upstream to breed. This might be a real challenge for lamprey control and [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]. Could you talk maybe a little generally about lampreys and how they might be involved in the Lake Huron collapse [INAUDIBLE PHRASE].
• [00:55:30.27] JAMES DIANA: Yeah, so, a little bit. I'm not a lamprey expert by any means. But I haven't heard of them breeding in standing water. They are breeding in the St. Mary's River which is too large to treat with the chemical. And so there is a higher population of lamprey in northern Lake Huron than anywhere else because that's where the St. Mary's dumps. They have tried spot treatments of things where they can find a lot of lampreys and they'll go out and put some poison right on the spot, but not try to treat the whole river. I think the lamprey have had an effect there because lamprey scarring is still significant in northern Lake Huron. But actually the biggest collapses occurred in southern Lake Huron where the lampreys don't penetrate so much. So I think they're not independent but the bigger effect is the ecosystem level effect rather than the lamprey effect in my view. But I'd be glad to look at evidence both ways really.
• [00:56:27.54] AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. You mentioned sawdust. My home town's Menomonee on Green Bay on the Wisconsin border. And still sawdust washes up onshore, after storms especially. Sawdust, bits of bark, pieces of wood. And these mills have been closed-- sawmills-- for over a hundred years. And the rate of which is coming up seems to be about the same it was when I played on the beach as a kid.
• [00:56:53.47] JAMES DIANA: Is that right?
• [00:56:53.77] AUDIENCE MEMBER: And these things are very long lasting. They get kind of buried into toe sand and then they get washed up. I was curious on the lake trout-- you mentioned that those seem to be coming back. And yet the salmon are drop. Is it because the salmon are eating-- have to eat alewives or what are the lake trout?
• [00:57:13.66] JAMES DIANA: Well so lake trout diets in Lake Huron now are-- not entirely-- but are eating the round gobies, the little benthic fish that sits on the bottom that's expanding. And the round goby wouldn't be consumed by salmon because they swim up in the water column to forage. Salmon are kind of a funny-- they're interesting, I'll put it that way. When they were introduced to the Great Lakes they really hit the alewife. The alewife populations declined, people expected them to switch over to bloaters and to switch over to smelt and they really didn't. They really continue to hammer alewives even though alewives were much lower an abundance. And it seems like they're tied into that. Now they did eventually start to eat bloaters and they did eventually eat a few smelt. But never really shifted completely, even though those species were more abundant than what they had eaten in the past. And they're both species that are up in the water column. So they seem to really like alewives for whatever reason. The lake trout, though, swim near the bottom and do forage one more benthic prey. And there's still nature reproduction of lake trout in Lake Huron. Not a great level but there is. They're still stocking lake trout in Lake Huron. And lake trout there are not as of emaciated as the chinook salmon are. So they are finding alternative prey.
• [00:58:35.44] AUDIENCE MEMBER: What happened to the perch? When I was a kid we had a lot of perch. And now they're rather rare.
• [00:58:41.79] JAMES DIANA: Yeah, another interesting story. So perch have these big cycles too. In Saginaw Bay-- we were doing studies in Saginaw Bay in the 1980's. And at that time, perch were so abundant that they didn't grow well. They called them stunted. They basically grew about that big. Once in awhile, you'd get a big one that would get into the outer day and do well but they were really, really abundant. And alewife-- and walleye were hardly even in there. Now, as the alewife has declined and as the DNR has stocked more and more walleye, the walleye are really abundant in Saginaw Bay. And they are hammering young perch. And the perch population is never-- a lot of young perch produced, none of them make it to adulthood. They all get eaten by walleye along the way. So it's a natural predator/prey thing. It's probably a little out of balance to what it should be. And why the walleye continue to maintain such high abundance in that situation seems a little odd. But they definitely are controlling the perch right now.
• [00:59:46.09] AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'd like to go back to the aquaculture discussion. My first question is, when you discuss aquaculture in terms of being a viable industry in the state of Michigan, are you thinking about this in terms of native fish being raised for aquaculture in the state?
• [01:00:09.87] JAMES DIANA: That would be the best solution in my mind. There's a couple of alternatives. I don't know that it'll ever reach a big industry stage, but there's a guy up near Lansing who's growing marine shrimp in an indoor system. And it seems to work and seems to produce a reasonable amount. So marine shrimp are never going to get out in the wild, never going to cause any of those problems. They're going to have some advantages because the diseases they typically get are going to be so far away that they're probably not going to gain the disease here. And if that system can be economically viable that might be another alternative. But otherwise, yes, it would be species that-- well, either species that are under control where they can't get out like an indoor recirculating system or species that are common here. Some people have talked about white fish as being a potential because the white fish fishery has gone way down. But I don't know how rapidly they grow necessarily.
• [01:01:09.11] AUDIENCE MEMBER: Which brings me to my second question and that is Asian carp were originally brought into this country from Asia, different parts of Asia. And they were raised to actually clean up the water in lagoon systems in aquaculture facilities. and I think, especially the big head, is being raised as a live food fish. So it seems as if this is an industry where the Asian carp had been able to escape during early flooding. And I'm wondering why are they not mentioning this when they're talking about the Asian carp and its migration up the Mississippi to the Illinois and enclosing in on Lake Michigan. Why is the agriculture industry not being held accountable for the day millions of dollars that are being spent in trying to prevent their invasion into the Great Lakes?
• [01:02:13.48] JAMES DIANA: Yeah, I can't really answer the why entirely. But let me tell you a little bit about it. That is, those species were brought in-- well, the grass carp was actually brought in by the U.S. government and given out to aquaculture systems to grow to try to control vegetation. The big head carp I think was brought in on a permit but were not by the government. And I think the silver carp was brought in by the government and distributed. So in a way they both share responsibility if you want to see it that way. The escape of those two species undoubtedly occurred from aquaculture systems. And I agree with you. I haven't heard anything. I don't know that aquaculture for those species has ever been very valuable here.
• [01:03:05.97] I should say that I do a lot of research overseas on aquaculture. and in Asia they grow something on the order of-- combined of those three, of the common carp, grass carp, silver and big head-- they grow 14 million tons a year. And of all thin fish in the world combined in aquaculture we grow about 32 million tons. So almost a third of it is carp. So you're right, there's tremendous fit food production in other places off of those. But I guess, looking at how do you document which "who" to fine for the violations-- would you fine a catfish farmer because he's in aquaculture growing something else? And as I say, I don't think there's any viable carp facilities that have made a living and are commercially viable now out of carp culture. So it was a mistake, no doubt. It's almost like the people who are responsible aren't here to be punished for that responsibility.
• [01:04:10.49] AUDIENCE MEMBER: Could I ask one more question?
• [01:04:12.83] JAMES DIANA:Fine with me.
• [01:04:13.83] AUDIENCE MEMBER: OK, I'll jump to the virus--
• [01:04:17.87] JAMES DIANA: VHS?
• [01:04:19.04] AUDIENCE MEMBER: --Viral Hemorrhagic Septicemia. It seems as if this virus is showing and then disappearing and some people say it's going to wipe out certain species of fish in the Great Lakes. And I'm wondering if you've heard to the most recent word on the spread of this virus and if we can expect it to impact the ecosystem into the future?
• [01:04:44.93] JAMES DIANA: It's not really my specialty but I think what I've heard has been that it's spread much more slowly than anybody anticipated. I heard that now they've isolated some in Lake Superior which up until now had been virus free. But when it first hit and really hit hard in the Saint Lawrence River and in Lake Sinclair, especially on species like muskellunge, there was a concern that that was going to be a big issue throughout the Great Lakes. Lake Sinclair has not tested positive for VHS since that very first time. And the Saint Lawrence River the same thing.
• [01:05:20.42] So why it hasn't spread more rapidly, I don't really know. I'm starting to wonder, but I would give it time before I would say maybe it's not as big of a threat as we initially thought. It doesn't seem to be spreading that way. And that is a big issue because there's a lot going on to try to stop that spread: regulations on how to deal with your boats. In our case, in research, we're not allowed-- if we collect fish for use in the lab, we can't really them because they're afraid we're going to reintroduce VHS. So we have to kill a lot of fish that we didn't have to kill in the past. And I feel sad about it anyway. But I really don't know where VHS will go. It certainly hasn't spread as rapidly as we thought it would.
• [01:06:07.83] AUDIENCE MEMBER: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
• [01:06:30.41] JAMES DIANA: That's absolutely true. VHS, as much as anything, has hit the aquaculture industry. Because in order to sell or to introduce fish in other places, you have to prove they're VHS free. And the tests are fairly expensive. Right now there's a big limit on that. So it's almost shut down aquaculture for many species right now. And unless the state sort of adopts we're going to have these veterinarians and they're going to be state employees and you can pro-- sort of like they do with agriculture, it probably will shut down aquaculture. Not only aquaculture but the state level stocking of fish as well. Hi.
• [01:07:19.09] AUDIENCE MEMBER: The last couple of years I have had the heartbreaking [INAUDIBLE PHRASE] 35 last summer. Mostly loons. And I just wonder if anything-- well I guess botulism-- but I just wonder if there's any attention being paid or any ideas about how to deal with this because it never happened before. I've been up on that beach for 15 summers and it's just pretty awful.
• [01:07:52.30] JAMES DIANA: Yeah, the botulism is something I don't know that well but my understanding of it is it's occurring through this sort of change in the ecosysem. The zebra mussels filtering of food, the deposition of material on the bottom, things like gobies that are higher or maybe more, I don't know, resistant to it or something, but are passing it onto other species. So I've heard a lot of sort of casual statements of these-- this is what's causing it. But I don't know that we really know the cause of botulism that much other than the botulism organism.
• [01:08:35.51] AUDIENCE MEMBER: If the birds are dead on the beach, is that a health problem for my dog or for my grandchildren or for--
• [01:08:44.91] JAMES DIANA: I think for sure for your dog which might eat it. You hopefully your grandchildren wouldn't eat them. But spread of botulism-- again, you're a little out of my range, but I think it's through food consumption. I don't think it can be through the skin or through breathing. So maybe if they handled one and licked their hands or something, they might be able to get it-- kids, I'm talking about. But I think the likelihood is low. But pets for sure could.
• [01:09:16.22] AUDIENCE MEMBER: If the licked?
• [01:09:18.69] JAMES DIANA: Well, if they were handling one of these dead birds and then put their hands in their mouth, they might be able to spread it.
• [01:09:23.20] AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, I mean the dogs.
• [01:09:24.47] JAMES DIANA: Oh, if the dog ate it or licked it or whatever, I think they'd have the potential. But I don't really know that well. But I think it's pretty much through the food pathway that is spread.
• [01:09:36.70] AUDIENCE MEMBER: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
• [01:09:37.20] but it's pretty hard to keep the dogs away.
• [01:10:09.55] JAMES DIANA: Yeah.
• [01:10:10.04]
• [01:10:15.02] AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have two unrelated questions if I may. The first is, as far as the dams that are not being used in these areas. I know a few of them have been taken out. I'm not sure if there's a general movement to get a lot of these unused dams out of there to expand the migration. Is that happening or are there just? Is it too expensive to move them out?
• [01:10:42.25] JAMES DIANA: Well I think that when dams have to come up for relicensing-- especially small-scale hydro dams-- there's been a real emphasis on trying to remove them rather than repair and keep them an operation. And many of these small-scale hydro dams are no longer being used for hydroelectric power. But those are often dams upstream. Take Argo Dam as an example. If we removed Argo Dam, we'd restore some small stretch of the river in between two dams. It's a natural river. But we wouldn't get sturgeon migrating up from Lake Erie because they're already blocked off so many places down below.
• [01:11:22.90] And I think that's the big problem we have, that the functional dams are often the lowest dams, the ones that are still used in hydropower and the ones that maybe hold back as much water as any. So it isn't likely that those are going to come out quickly. But there is a movement within the DNR and really in general that if there's not a good purpose for the dam, why keep it? And that's sort of what the argument on Argo was about: if it really is in bad shape and it really is going to go down-- and I don't know the answers to either of those-- then maybe we should take it down.
• [01:12:00.87] AUDIENCE MEMBER: It just seems like a lot of the expense of removing them is just removing all the junk that's accumulated-- the toxins and the metal tailings and everything that's accumulated in back of them that is just too expensive.
• [01:12:12.85] JAMES DIANA: That's absolutely true. So we've been doing a little bit of work down on Mill Creek. They removed that dam just above-- right at the bridge-- Dexter Road bridge. And the fish have maintained their populations below that. So that's not a typical dam. It was really small and there wasn't-- there's not a very big creek up above it either. It's not quite the same as a major river.
• [01:12:36.43] AUDIENCE MEMBER: This is very naive question: they said they introduced Pacific salmon into the Great Lakes. Obviously the Great Lakes are freshwater and I know that the salmon migrate upstream into fresh water, et cetera, et cetera. But isn't salt water part of the natural cycle and how do they obviate that need? Maybe it's not a need.
• [01:13:00.87] JAMES DIANA: It appears it's not. So there are some salmon-- for example, sockeye salmon, when they migrate to the ocean they're sockeye salmon. There are also sockeye salmon that move into a big lake and stay there. They call them kokanee. Same species just in a different environment. They don't grow the same because they aren't out in the big water. But it appears that the salinity didn't really matter too much for the chinook or the coho. They both reach-- in the salmon's life history, the young rear in the streams and when they reach a certain size they become what they call a smolt. And at that stage they're tolerant of sea water and they migrate downstream. They do the same thing in the Great Lakes. They turn into a smolt. You can identify them because they're really silvery. They migrate downstream, hit the Great Lakes. They're silvery when they're in the lakes. But they don't ever run into salinity. And survival is actually higher in the Great Lakes than it is in the ocean. Probably because there aren't a whole lot of killer whales and other things to eat them here that would reduce their survival. But it doesn't appear that their survival is at all affected by the lack of salt water. Thank you. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I
• [01:14:11.59] have a quick comment about dam removal and then a question. The other consideration about dam removal is public safety. You leave a dam there eventually-- it's got to be maintained or it's liable to fail unexpectedly in a big flood event and that's really dangerous and costly. So it's expensive to take dams out but sometimes it's more expensive to leave them in.
• [01:14:35.40] JAMES DIANA: And a lot of these dams that are up for relicensing have been around a long time and are exactly that.
• [01:14:41.71] AUDIENCE MEMBER: So my question is a very naive one. I'm not much of a fisherman. Is there a big recreational difference? Is it more fun to catch Pacific salmon than lake trout? And if it's not, then should the state be spending all this money stocking pacific salmon when they could stock lake trout or not stock anything at all?
• [01:15:00.94] JAMES DIANA: Interesting question. First of all, I'm sorry that you're not a fisherman. It's kind of a shame.
• [01:15:04.28]
• [01:15:06.88] AUDIENCE MEMBER: [INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
• [01:15:07.40]
• [01:15:10.51] JAMES DIANA: But secondly, yeah, people-- oh, I'll just say it? I don't like the taste of Great Lakes lake trout compared to the taste of chinook and coho salmon. That's my own preference but lake trout are fatter and they kind of taste richer. On the other hand, inland, lake trout aren't like that. So it's not a consistant characteristic. But when they had a big problem with bacterial kidney disease back in the late '80s, early '90s in Lake Michigan. And chinook salmon crashed. And all the charter anglers were going out for lake trout. And it seemed like as long as they were catching fish people were fairly happy. They sort of followed the same thing in Lake Huron. And they're still fishing for lake trout. But they say that people are would rather go to Lake Michigan and fish for chinook than stay in Lake Huron and fish for lake trout. Especially when most of the people who go on charter boats are coming up for their vacation. They're not local residents so that they have that choice of doing one of the other.
• [01:16:12.12] There's been a battle in this state for a long time. The state would like Paciic salmon, the legacy of Howard Tanner who brought the Pacific salmon in and claims that the whole Great Lakes were restored because of the Pacific salmon. In some ways he's right. And the federal government-- which the USGS lab or the Fish and Wildlife Service before it and I think even NOAA-- their goal is more restoration of native fishes, which the lake trout would fall. So there has been this debate "what should be our restoration targets?" And maybe now in Lake Huron we have that opportunity to move to native fishes because there is no other alternative. And maybe that same plan should be going in place in other lakes to keep from having the chinook fishery totally collapse. Just let's reduce chinook and go at lake trout and walleye and species like that. Yeah?
• [01:17:12.29] AUDIENCE MEMBER: Where do we stand on introducing a mussel predator?
• [01:17:16.60] JAMES DIANA: A muscle predator-- so there are a few. Actually, the round goby seems to eat the mussels. Lake sturgeon seem to eat mussels. And then I've heard that some kind of bird-- it's not loon. Some kind of duck?
• [01:17:30.21] AUDIENCE MEMBER: Diving ducks.
• [01:17:30.90] JAMES DIANA: Diving ducks? Yeah.
• [01:17:32.91] AUDIENCE MEMBER: INAUDIBLE PHRASE]
• [01:17:34.01] JAMES DIANA: So I've heard they eat mussels too. Now I don't know that will ever get enough of a mussel predator to really get rid of zebra mussels, but I think anything could help as far as reducing them. They're probably going to start to hit an equilibrium where they're going to run out of plankton just like everything else. And so maybe they'll reduce in abundance as a result of the changes they've created on the lake. That's not uncommon for a pest to kind of overshoot and change the nature of the place. And then it's long-term numbers decline because it's changed it. Gypsy motns is an example. They show up. They're a big problem for a few years but then they disappear. They seem to come and go. Now zebra mussel hasn't done that so far but who knows.
• [01:18:29.46] AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just wanted to share some information actually. I'm not sure if you covered the Asian carp issue. I came in a little bit late. So I just have an announcement. There's a public hearing, Wednesday from 3:00 to 6:00 in Ypsi. The International Joint Commission is coming to hold a public hearing on the Asian carp issue. So if people aren't aware of it, you are now. And it's in Ypsi. I don't know the exact location so I apologize for that. It's at the Marriott? The Eagle Crest? OK. And I'm sure it can be found online as well. The Ann Arbor/Ypsi Reads-- I think it's part of that program that they're hosting. So the International Joint Commission holding a public hearing, 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday. So go and participate if you can. All right. Thank you.
• [01:19:19.24] AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a question. Maybe a naive one as well. But you mentioned the collapse of the plankton populations? Is there any possibility of them restoring themselves with the zebra mussels decline or other fish? Or is that an irreversible or long-term change?
• [01:19:34.12] JAMES DIANA: Well, it depends on the species. So the plankton themselves probably could restore, especially if they don't go out of all the lakes, because they'll be nearby colonization. But even on the toes of glaciers with new water becoming established, plankton gets in there pretty quickly. It easily sticks to birds and things and gets transported around to regrow. Things like diporeia, with more complex life cycles-- when we lost the giant mayfly from Lake Erie and Saginaw Bay, that was back in early '70s, I believe. Something like that. Anyway, in Lake Erie it took 30 years before we saw them come back again, even after the water improved. Saginaw Bay they haven't come back yet. So more of these larger, longer lived benthic invertebrae might not come back or come back very slowly. But the zooplankton and phytoplankton probably would reestablish.
• [01:20:34.32] IRA LAX: OK, well thank you all very much for coming. And Jim Diana, thank you very much for your wonderful presentation.
• [01:20:40.94] [APPLAUSE] JAMES DIANA: Thanks.
• [01:20:47.68] [MUSIC]