By Doug Draper
If you or I were to take a couple of oranges across the Peace Bridge – even oranges that were grown in Florida or California – and customs officers on either side of the border caught us trying to “import” them without reporting them, they have the authority to pull us over and turn our vehicle inside out looking for any other “exotic” item we might have in our possession.
Schools of Asian Carp splash their way to the Great Lakes in the waters of Illinois. If they make it, ecologists predict a potential disaster for our lakes. Photo courtesy of Great Lakes Fisheries Commission
But if a big ship from half away around the world happens to dump its ballast water in the Great Lakes, releasing an exotic species like zebra mussels or round gobbies that can wreak havoc for native species in the lakes, hardly any effective action has been taken by the Canadian and U.S. governments over the past few decades to regulate and police that kind or importation.
Now the Great Lakes face the invasion of a non-native species the likes of which could make the impact zebra mussels have had on the food chain of the waters look like a Sunday school picnic. That species – known generically as the Asian carp – could virtually trigger an ecological catastrophe for communities in the Great Lakes region and destroy a recreational and commercial fishery for Canadians and Americans worth billions of dollars a year.
The name Asian carp has taken on a life of its own as a monster fish imported from Asian regions of the world and actually refer to four species of fish – bighead, black, grass and silver carp – that can grow more than three feet or more than a metre (some have reached seven feet in length and weighed in at 150 pounds) and are veracious eaters of algae and other aquatic foods our native fish depend on for survival.
“They get really, really bit and they are incredible feeders,” says Jennifer Nalbone, a director of navigation and invasive species for Great Lakes United, a Buffalo-based coalition of environmental and other groups across the Great Lakes basin. During a recent interview on CUIT 89.5 FM, a Toronto-based publicly supported radio station, Nalbone warned that the Asian carp, which were imported to the U.S. a decade ago and accidentally escaped their pens and entered the Mississippi River system during a flood, are now at the” door of the Great Lakes” and constitute an “emergency” for boundary water communities in both countries.
A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services official holds up an Asian Carp caught in a connecting channel to the Great Lakes near Chicago, Illinois. If these invasive fish enter the lakes, they could vacuum up all the food native fish species need to survive. Photo courtesy of the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission
These fish, which appear to have no predators on this continent, are capable of vacuuming a river or lake dry of food for other fish, and they have been doing it as they have moved north up the Mississippi watershed to the Illinois River and other waterways that connect to Lake Michigan. Since 2002, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been zapping waters in the Chicago area, connecting the Mississippi watershed to Lake Michigan, with electrical fields to discourage the fish from entering the Great Lakes.
But the fish have continued to move closer and government agencies have recently resorted to using a poison called Rotenone to kill the fish as they approach. Although the chemical has a short lifespan, the problem it poses is that it kills native fish as well as the Asian carp.
Canada’s federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans is now working with the U.S. Army Corps to prevent the carp from entering the Great Lakes but groups like Great Lakes United believe more government action is needed to prevent what could be an ecological catastrophe. Great Likes United is urging you to contact your federal, state and provincial representatives to focus on preventing these fish from entering the Great Lakes before it is too late.
You can learn more by visiting Great Lakes United’s website at http://www.glu.org/en. Listen to Jennifer Malone’s recent interview on CUIT 89.5 FM by clicking on. http://besustainable.com/greenmajority/1979/12/04/tgm166-feature2/
