University Place

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

– I am delighted to be here, and I’m delighted to welcome all of you to our Go Big Read 2018. I chose The Death and Life of the Great Lakes as this year’s Go Big Read for a whole number of reasons. First, it chronicles the series of events worthy of analysis and discussion, ecological disasters that have and will continue to affect us here in the Upper Midwest in many different ways. The book suggests future potential policy choices, some of which will deepen the disaster and some of which will help heal what has happened in the past. Second, the book is written by a journalist, and not just any journalist, but an outstanding Wisconsin journalist who’s been honored with multiple national awards. Dan Egan knows how to turn an important science story into a page-turner, and if you’ve read the book, you know he’s just a great storyteller. It is no surprise this book has been a Top 10 New York Times Best Seller and was chosen last spring for the PBS News Hour New York Times Book Club. And third, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes deals with a subject that many of our readers here in Madison and on campus are personally connected to. I love this statistic: 80% of our students come from a state or a province that borders the Great Lakes, everything from New York through Ohio and all the way around to Ontario.

Many of you have spent a lot of time fishing, swimming, boating, or just enjoying the beautiful view out over one of the Great Lakes. This book illustrates the impact we have had over them over time. As Dan writes, the greatest threat to the Great Lakes right now is our own ignorance. We’re doing our part to change that, I’m happy to say that The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is generating lots of conversations on this campus and in our community. We distributed 6,000 copies to new freshmen at convocation last month and we have more than 150 class sections reading the book, ranging from biology to political science to nursing to ecology. There are also a number of community groups reading along with faculty, staff, and students, and they’re joining us here tonight, nearly 500 people on the Madison Public Library waiting list, and I’ll have to say that’s only second to Crazy Rich Asians, which I happened to look at two weeks ago, [audience laughs] and that had 950 people on the waiting list.

We have 1,000 people in person, and we anticipate another thousand are going to be watching the webcast. So we’re in for a fascinating discussion and if you haven’t read or haven’t finished the book, I suggest that you do so. Before I turn this over, let me tell you just a little bit about Dan Egan. He grew up in Green Bay and both sets of grandparents had summer homes on Door County. How lucky is that? So he got to know and love Lake Michigan from a very early age. Dan has covered the Great Lakes for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel since 2003. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and he’s won several national awards for journalism. He is at present a senior fellow in water policy at UW Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences. And I won’t hold this against him after last Saturday, he’s a graduate of the University of Michigan [audience laughs] and the Columbia School of Journalism. Dan and his wife and four children live outside of Milwaukee. Please join me in a very warm welcome for Dan Egan. Dan.
[audience applauds]

– Dan Egan: Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Chancellor, for that nice introduction. This is a big auditorium. This is a real thrill. I’m a son of Wisconsin, or actually probably a great-grandson of Wisconsin. I love this state, I love this university, and when I heard that the book was selected, I was doing backflips, literally. I’m going to talk a little bit about myself and about how I came to write this book and touch on some of the issues of the book. It’s not going to be a book report. It’s just going to be kind of a free-flowing who I am and how I came to be standing on this stage in front of all these people.
[audience laughs]

All right. Let’s see if this works. As the Chancellor mentioned, I am a native of Green Bay, and that is my hometown, it’s not necessarily a glamour shot, I don’t know what year it was taken, but I know I was born in 1967. And at that time and to this day, the Fox River, which runs through the middle of the town is one of the most heavily industrialized, hardest-working rivers anywhere in North America and in some ways the world. At some point there were, I think, 37 pulp and paper mills along this river, and as I mentioned, I was born in 1967, so that would make me maybe a 9 or a 10-year-old in the mid-1970s before the Clean Water Act really took effect, and I spent a lot of time playing on the banks of that river on the left side up toward the top of the picture around what is the De Pere dam. And I remember it was just natural for us as kids to see even then there were sewer pipes that would at times discharge from the river. We’d also play on the banks and it made my parents very nervous, I don’t think they were so afraid that we were going to fall in and drown, it was more like playing at the dump. And it’s sad to say that, but that was the case. In particular, I remember picking up these little nuggets of sulfur off the river bank and we would bring ’em home, [chuckles] and light ’em on fire, like a low-grade firework, and it would ooze like lava and have this awful stench, and I remember thinking, “Oh, this is nature’s bounty.”
[audience laughs]

It was only later that I learned it was an unfortunate byproduct of the pulp-making process. It was sulfur precipitating out. And it’s worth mentioned that both my dad and my grandfather were in the paper and pulp business, so their hands– and I guess to a certain degree my hands– aren’t perfectly clean in this story of what went wrong with this river. But things got better over time really fast with the passage of the Clean Water Act. It really did throttle what industry was allowed to put into the river. And if you were to go up there today where I was plucking sulfur off the river banks, they now have walleye fishing tournaments that draw so many boats you could walk across the river from boat to boat without getting your feet wet. I only bring this up because this is like my first exposure to Great Lakes water because this river flows into lower Green Bay, which is an arm of Lake Michigan. It wasn’t my only experience. As the chancellor mentioned, I had two sets of grandparents who had summer homes up on the Door Peninsula. When I found this picture I thought it was Algoma, but I think it’s Frankfort. The point is the same. Even in the 70s, the lakes farther north from Green Bay, and particularly Chicago, were still spectacular. They were still relatively fish-filled and cold and clear and safe to swim in and you don’t realize it when you’re a kid, but things are getting imprinted on you that stay with you.

I never would’ve gotten into the field that I got into had I not been exposed to these lakes in this manner when I was a kid. After I graduated from college, I headed out West, and this is relevant ’cause I guess when you write a book a lot of what happened in your life becomes relevant. I took a job at the Idaho Mountain Express in Ketchum, Idaho, which is in the middle of Idaho near the Sawtooth Mountains, and one of my first assignments, this is the summer of 1992, was to go up to this place called Redfish Lake where they were having a vigil for the return of the Snake River sockeye salmon, and I don’t know what you can read off of this screen here, but things were not going well for the Snake River sockeye in 1992. So these fish would swim– They would start their life in this lake some 7,000 feet above sea level and 900 miles inland, and then, they would tumble down the Salmon River, into the Snake, into the Columbia, out to the ocean. And then, after two or three years, they’d make their trip all the way back to Redfish Lake, hence the name Redfish Lake. They would turn a crimson when it was time to spawn and die and let the cycle repeat itself. Well, the cycle was choking when I got there.

This particular summer, there were eight fish that had been tracked passing the last dam on the migration. There were eight big hydroelectric dams and they had fish ladders. They could actually count the fish as they came and they had eight. And then once they get past the last dam, I don’t remember, it’s still 200 or 300 miles, and then it’s just nail-biting, “Is any going to make it back?” And this particular summer, one fish made it back. His name’s “Lonesome Larry,” and he was mounted in that lonesome way. [laughs] It’s a dirty joke.

They used his milt in a captive breeding program which is keeping this species of fish off the extinction list for now, but what really made an impression on me, standing on the banks of this Redfish Creek back in 1992, with maybe 50, 75 people watching a whole species just disappear. It was really… It was profound. There’s no other way to explain it. I stayed out West for about 10 years, and I did a fair amount of environmental reporting. And then in 2002, I moved back to my home state, not to Green Bay but to Milwaukee, and I took a job at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. And I remember, one of my first weekends here, I was walking along the Milwaukee Harbor with my daughter, who is here tonight. She’s now 17. Back then, she was 18 months or so. And we moved back with some trepidation because I loved the wildness of the West, but when we got to the lake this one day– this isn’t a picture from that day– but the salmon had come in to spawn, the Lake Michigan salmon. And I remember thinking, this is neat, you know, maybe Milwaukee doesn’t have the mountains but it’s got a heck of a lake. And there’s no better way to appreciate a Great Lake than to live for a decade in the desert. You look at it completely differently.

And I couldn’t believe all the people who were fishing for the salmon just in the downtown Harbor Front, but there was something weird going on. I had studied enough and learned enough about salmon spawning activity to realize that some of these fish on that particular day were trying to fin their way up these boat ramps, like ever swimming upstream. And I asked the fishermen, “What are they doing? Aren’t they here to spawn?” And he said to me, “These fish are basically born to be caught. They can’t spawn. They were planted three years ago and they are basically there for the enjoyment of the sports fishermen.” Now this blew my mind because though I’m a native of Wisconsin and I knew that the Great Lakes had salmon, I didn’t really know how or why. I had some vague idea that they might’ve been planted at some point, but I didn’t know that at this point it was really kind of a put and take fishery. And one of the jobs of a being a reporter is if you get interested in something to pursue it, and I go back to my newsroom and I suggest to my boss that we do a story on the salmon. And he says, “Everybody knows the story of the salmon.” Well, after talking to people for two or three weeks, I realized that everybody didn’t know the story of the salmon and I went back into his office and I made the pitch again, and he said, “Well, if you want to go back that far, why don’t you start at the beginning?” So here we are.
[audience laughs]

The Great Lakes, they’re incredibly young. Archeologists are finding on Lake Huron evidence of settlement on what is now 100 feet below water. There’s a lake in Siberia that’s 25 million years old. The Great Lakes, as we know ’em, are 4,000 or 2,500 years old. A common misperception is that they were filled by the glaciers and they weren’t. They might’ve been originally, but they were carved by the glaciers. They carved these indentations in the ground and when they retreated and that ice melted, the water flowed into ’em and they filled up and they became the five Great Lakes that look a little bit better from this perspective. I like this. This is west to east. That kind of makes you look at ’em a little bit differently and that’s kind of what I’m in the business of doing, and so what we’re looking at here furthest on the left is the Superior, and then Michigan, and Huron, which really are one lake. They’re two lobes of the same body of water, which would technically make them the largest lake by surface area in the world, but I’m not going to get into that with the people from Lake Superior.
[laughter]

If you look down below, there’s Lake Erie. And then, there’s Lake Ontario below that. What this picture from space doesn’t show is the reality on the ground. I mentioned earlier that a lot of people think that the lakes are just filled glacial melt water. They’re not. They’re actually like a river. Superior, I don’t know if you can grasp this graphic, but the body of water on the left is Lake Superior and that’s at the top of this chain of lakes and they all flow into each other. Superior dumps into Michigan and Huron, Michigan and Huron dumps into Erie, Erie into Ontario, and Ontario out to the sea. So, they’re a dynamic system, ever emptying and ever filling up.

So another way to look at ’em: a classic map. Now, it was maps like this that, in a way, kind of doomed the Great Lakes as we knew them historically, because if you look at this, you can see that blue tendril, the Saint Lawrence River going out to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, which is the North Atlantic. And when you look at this on the map, that’s just tantalizing if you’re trying to settle a continent. You’re thinking, “That’s how we get inland.” The reality on the ground is a little different, the Saint Lawrence River in its natural state was just wild. It dropped some 250 feet from Lake Ontario down to Montreal. There were walls of rapids, walls of water that were just impassable to any kind of boat for thousands of years. And on the western side– I hope the slide can show it, but this faint yellow area is important because that’s the Great Lakes watershed.

And that means that any drop of water that falls inside that yellow area goes into the Great Lakes and, ultimately, out the Saint Lawrence River to the ocean. And if you look over by Chicago, it is remarkably close to the lake shore. It’s a matter of maybe six miles. But that was an important distinction because any raindrop that fell left or west of that divide went into the Mississippi River. So the Lakes were really, vast as they are, and they’re 94,000 square miles, which is about the size of the United Kingdom. They have 10,000 miles of shoreline, which is more shoreline than the Atlantic and the Pacific combined. But in a lot of ways, they were as isolated as a Northwoods pond because nothing could swim up the Saint Lawrence River and colonize Lake Ontario. And there was no water connection, permanent water connection at Chicago either. So, they were their own unique ecosystem.

And even if something could get up the Saint Lawrence River, once it got to Lake Ontario, it would move on to Lake Erie, and before it gets to Lake Erie you hit Niagara Falls, and things could tumble out of the lakes, but nothing could get into the lakes, and we couldn’t stand that. We wanted boats and stuff coming into the lakes and products going out of the lakes. So we started trying to connect them to the rest of the world. And the first big chink– I like to think of and I organize it in the book this way, Chicago and that whole side is like the Lakes’ back door and the Saint Lawrence River was the front door, and they were largely closed to the outside world until Lake Erie was the first chink, the first crack in this door. That was built… I think it opened in 1825, and that bypassed Niagara Falls, that gave boats a shot from New York Harbor, a boat could sail up the Hudson River and then take a left and take a 343 or so mile trip on a canal, the Erie Canal, that would plop it at Lake Erie. And from Lake Erie, it was a navigable sail all the way to Chicago. So that’s what the US did, and the Canadians couldn’t stand that we had unlocked the continent like this, so they were working busily on their own canal system.

They were trying to punch right up the Saint Lawrence River by building locks and canals and channels to tame these rapids. And they started that in 1689, and then four years after we opened the Erie Canal they built their own canal around Niagara Falls connecting Ontario to Lake Erie. So suddenly the lakes were open to the rest of world, a bit, the original Erie Canal was about four feet deep and it was maybe four feet wide and it could handle barges. The Canadians were always more ambitious, they wanted big schooners, sailing vessels, to be able to make their way out to the East Coast, into the lakes to the East Coast and beyond. And they kept chipping away. They kept ever expanding their Welland Canal to the point that in the 1930s it was handling ships that were almost 800 feet long and 80 feet wide. But these were like oversized ships in an oversized bottle because they couldn’t get down the Saint Lawrence River because the channels and the locks weren’t big enough at that point. So finally, once and for all, in the 1950s, the US and Canada got together and they decided they were just going to kick this front door down with the construction of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, which was really taming the Saint Lawrence River. The Welland Canal was already in existence.

This was the largest earth-moving project in history. The water still flowed, as gravity dictates, downhill, but now it flowed through a system that could handle what were considered at the time really big boats. And what’s hard to grasp is how excited everybody was in the Midwest about this at that time. People were convinced that Buffalo, Duluth, Green Bay, Chicago, were going to become world-class ports to rival anything on the coasts. This is a little excerpt from my newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, talking about the busy traffic coming into the port in 1959, the first season that it was open. The idea was we were going to bring the world right to our doorstep, and then we going to take our manufacturing might and we were going to open markets all around the world just by putting our stuff on ships. There was a problem. We built it. If you go down to the Milwaukee Port today it’s mostly salt and coal. And the reason is we built the Seaway, big as it is, it’s too small. It doesn’t really reflect the modern shipping fleet.

They built the Seaway portion in the 1950s to match the Welland Canal that was in existence at the time. And that Welland Canal was built in the 1930s. So, we basically opened, in the 1950s, in the age of space exploration, a navigation channel that was more appropriate for the 19-teens. And here’s some clips of just how exquisitely tight it is. And this is important. Just try to remember this image when we talk a little bit down the road about the front door and backdoor. There are places on the Saint Lawrence Seaway, I think this is the Eisenhower Lock in upstate New York. But all the locks are the same size, so every boat coming into the lake has to go through this exquisitely tight pinch point. It’s about 80 feet wide. And there’s a place– I don’t think is the lock– where you can actually drive your car under the Saint Lawrence Seaway.

So to think that our ports have this natural connection to the outside world is to fundamentally misunderstand that this is almost a completely man-made system. Okay, here’s another picture of how tight it is. I can’t imagine living in this house. You got to like boats, I guess.
[audience laughs]

That’s in the Thousand Island area. So we didn’t get the cargos that we hoped for, in that first year we were getting in Milwaukee like 11 of these overseas ships a day. Today we average about one a week. We opened the door and the cargos didn’t come flooding in, at least the cargos that we were expecting. What we got was some stuff that we didn’t expect. This would be the dreaded sea lamprey. And the sea lamprey was the first invasive species to really demonstrate how fragile, how ecologically-vulnerable these baby lakes were. The lamprey made its way up the canal system. You could say honestly, “It finned its way up. It swam its way in.” It wasn’t carried by any boat or anything. And the first one appeared above, I don’t know why it took so long, it took ’em a while, or maybe they were just laying low, but the first one appeared in Lake Erie in 1921.

And lampreys, they’re parasites, they attach themselves to the bellies of their prey fish. And this is a picture that’s in the book. That’s a lake trout and that’s a lamprey attached to its belly. And it’s basically like a vampire, it just sucks the blood out. One lamprey can kill 40 pounds of lake trout in the year and a half it’s swimming in the open waters of the lakes. And that’s not really that impressive of a number, but this is, in the early 1940s Lake Michigan was yielding some six million pounds of lake trout annually. We were fishing the heck out of the lakes, and this is an interesting side note. A big reason was it was safe fishing during World War II. You didn’t have to bring these trawlers off the coast, which they were vulnerable to attacks or at least the perception of that. So we fished the lakes hard, but the lampreys hit the lakes even harder. We were getting six million pounds a year out of Lake Michigan in the early 40s and by the late 1940s, early 1950s, that number was literally zero. The lampreys just took out the lake trout.

We decided to take out the lampreys. The guy that was holding that fish made it his life’s work to figure the lamprey’s vulnerable point and basically, is that it spawns in relatively few lakes and streams and it’s also a very ancient critter. There’s fossils that have been found that are 350 million years old or so, and this leaves it with a very crude liver, and so the idea was if they could find a poison that would be lamprey-specific, they wouldn’t have to dump it in the open water. They could dump it in the lakes and the streams in which the lamprey spawned and take ’em out in that pinch point and you knock ’em out. And so, by the early 1960s, we were dosing the Great Lakes, the tributaries, the rivers feeding the Great Lakes to the point that we were able to knock down lamprey populations to about 10% of what they were during their peak. That was good news, the bad news was behind the lampreys came another invasive species that swam its way into the lake, and that was the alewife, which is an ocean herring. It was swam in and with no lake trout or big fish to eat it, it just went to town.

And by the mid-1960s, biomass in Lake Michigan was estimated to be 90% alewives. For every 9 pounds of fish swimming in the lake, 10 pounds, 9 was an alewife, and they were great at breeding in the lakes, but because they were a true ocean fish they were vulnerable to die-offs, their kidneys were under constant stress to keep their salinity balanced appropriately, and so, they would have these massive die-offs by the billions. This is Chicago. I’d imagine some people in this room probably remember the dark days of the mid-1960s when the lakes were basically useless. I mean there was no commercial fish to be caught out there, and when you went to the beach, if you didn’t gag, you didn’t stay long because it was just a rotting mass.

I’m just going to read two paragraphs here because, and these aren’t my words, this is how a UPI news report characterized this infestation in the summer of 1967, in July 1967, the year and the month I was born. Quote, Chicago was running out of places to bury dead fish, out of money for their removal, and out of people to do that work. A dozen park districts quit their job in olfactory disgust. Morale among those remaining was described as low.
[laughs]

So, what to do? We got rid of the dreaded parasite or got control of the parasite that was the lamprey. And the logical step would be to bring back the lake trout that it destroyed, remnant populations of which still persisted on Lake Superior, but humans being humans, we figured we could not only fix the problem, but we could give the lakes an upgrade. And that’s when we brought in these salmon, and this is where I first got interested in this whole issue. And this guy here, he is the godfather of the Great Lakes salmon program. His name is Howard Tanner. He’s 94 or so now. He’s a great guy, and he’s also very confident that he’s the man who fixed the lakes. And he did, for a little while. If you kind of think about how bizarre this is, you’ve got this Atlantic herring that swam its way into the middle of the continent, and then we literally fly out from Oregon– I mean they were given tickets on a TC-29 or something– and brought to Midwest hatcheries, raised and planted to eat alewives. Nobody knew how this was going to work, and Michigan didn’t consult any other state. I mean, can you imagine this happening today? I actually can. It’s kind of frightening.
[audience laughs]

But it’s just remarkable that one state can decide that this is what we’re going to do because obviously, these fish don’t know the state lines that are mythically painted on the bottom of the lakes. But Howard hit a home run. I mean he turned a wasteland into what’s been estimated as a $7 billion fishery. This was at the peak. This picture doesn’t really capture it, but what was so interesting was that the lakes were dead to so many people for so long that they didn’t really understand how powerful and treacherous they are. I heard a couple weeks ago, they were expecting 18-foot waves on Lake Superior and a couple years ago Michigan had a 20-foot wave recorded at a mid-lake buoy. People were going out in canoes, like six or seven miles, to chase this exotic bounty. And this picture I think was taken from the September, I think it was 1968 or ’69 when a storm came in and dozens had to be rescued from helicopters. I think seven or eight people died. But it was a resounding success from the late 1960s to almost today.

The problem is these invasions didn’t stop with lampreys and alewives. The next wave came not by swimming up the seaway channels on their own, but in the ballast water of these ocean-going freighters, the few that still do come to the Great Lakes, about one a day now during the nine-month shipping season. That stream you see coming out of the side of the boat, that’s ballast water. And one of these ships can carry like six million gallons of ballast water and it’s used to balance a ship on the open seas. The problem is it’s not dead weight, it’s anything but, and that’s how we now have 100, and it’s a running number, 86, 87, 88 non-native species in the Great Lakes. None of ’em have been more devastating than this little bugger and its cousin, the zebra mussel. You look at that and you think, “How much trouble can that be?”

But, and I don’t think I’m being too extreme here, you got to look at it as like a cancer cell, because it’s just one of trillions. This is a picture from Northern Lake Michigan. Those are just dead shells. Zebra mussels came in the late 1980s and right behind ’em were a very closely related mussel from the same place, the Caspian Sea Basin, brought in the same way, in ballast water from an ocean-going freighter. And the zebra mussels were just like an appetizer, the quagga mussels have just done a number like you cannot believe on, well, let’s look at Lake Michigan. The top graphic shows the mussel density of zebra mussels. They can’t live at great depths of water, and they can’t filter year-round. Quagga mussels are a little bit bigger, they can live at almost any depth, they filter year-round, and they’re now blanketing the bottom of Lake Michigan at densities up to 100,000 per square meter.

And you may think that’s impossible, but they stack on top of each other almost like coral and the biologists that I’ve worked with at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee say, “We could walk, if we drained Lake Michigan, we could walk across the lake on a bed of quagga mussels all the way to Muskegon, Michigan.” Each one of ’em can filter a liter of water a day, so they are literally sucking the life out of the lakes. And so the first round of invasions we had was really a top of the food chain phenomenon. This is a bottom of the food chain phenomenon. They’re locking up all that energy. And this is a quick graphic just showing, you don’t have to look too hard at it, but those are the prey fish in the lake or the prey base in the lake.

They’re basically what the salmon and what’s left of the lake trout depend on. And if you look at it, it’s just crashed. I mean the lake has just been gutted and the result is in many ways grim. This is the last commercial fishing boat in Milwaukee. The picture’s actually taken up off the Door Peninsula, the last commercial fisherman sailed his boat up there in 2011 to go fishing with his dad one last time and we went out with ’em from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He moved to Alaska. After we were fishing on this day, we went to the cottage that they staying in and he was talking to his parents, he was a fourth-generation commercial fisherman, he was talking to his parents about why he’s leaving and he’s taking his kids with him, and the grandparents are losing the grandkids. And the mom is crying, she’s sobbing, and he said to her, “I’m not leaving this lake. The lake left me. It’s gone.” And it’s not just on Lake Michigan, this sad guy, I came across him on Lake Huron and he had just moved back from California and it was the fall salmon run or it should’ve been, this was in 2014 or ’15, and he brought his buddy up and he remembered the great salmon runs of the 1980s, and when I saw him, he was just sitting there, forlorn, asking, “What the [silent pause] happened?”

It’s an ongoing story. We’re going to get back to this in a second but I want to jump to, I talked about the front door, this is the back door. This is the Chicago Canal. I showed the picture of the Great Lakes Basin at the beginning. What Chicago did was they destroyed the Basin dividing line. Its river, the Chicago River, used to flow into Lake Michigan. This canal sucked Lake Michigan across the Continental Divide and into the Mississippi River Basin. The reason they did it was Chicago was choking on its own filth. They were sending their sewage into Lake Michigan and they were pulling their drinking water from Lake Michigan and lots of people were getting sick, so this was a matter of survival, and it made a lot of sense at the time, just as did the Saint Lawrence Seaway. So here’s a picture of the Mississippi River Basin, and you can see up in Chicago, the map doesn’t even really reflect it, but that was not part of the Great Lakes Basin until this river was constructed in 1900.

So look at, it’s 40% of the continental United States is all the sudden connected to the Great Lakes by this 160-foot wide channel that didn’t just carry filth, it also carries… fish! This is a dreaded bighead carp. They are going great guns in the Mississippi River Basin and had Chicago not reversed its canal or built this canal, they would not have a direct pathway into the Great Lakes. But because we do now have this linkage to the outside world, we have the threat of this species, which is not insignificant. They can grow to over 100 pounds and eat up to 20% of their weight a day in plankton. The only thing that’s keeping them out of Lake Michigan right now is an electric fish barrier that has a history of failing, and if they get into the lakes, there’s really no telling what’s going to happen. One US official once said, “It’s just a matter time until they become a carp pond,” which would really be a tragedy.

There’s two species of fish. This is the bighead. This is the slightly smaller silver carp. These are the notorious jumping fish, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the YouTube videos, but these things get agitated by the whir of a boat motor and they jump out and the researchers that I work with, they won’t go out on the river now without hockey helmets. I was out with this guy one day, this is on the Illinois River which is connected to the Mississippi. His name is Ryan Briny, and Ryan caught 13,000 pounds of these silver carp in one day. He would chase them into nets, and he could see the water rippling, and then, they’re start popping and he was like a rancher, he’d drive ’em into the nets, and then he’d pull the nets and he’d fill up his jon boat. This day was 13,000 pounds, a typical catch.

That same year, the total harvest, commercial harvest for perch on all of Lake Michigan, it had been reduced to the fishery on Lake Michigan for perch had been reduced to the bay of Green Bay was 20,000 pounds. So what we were pulling in a year out of Lake Michigan, he was almost pulling in a day out of the Illinois River. And these fish actually get sent to China. They’re processed, and it’s a very popular fish food, and, yeah, they taste okay. I had fish and chips and it tasted like fish.
[audience laughs]

I just don’t know how much fish you want to be eating out of the Illinois River. The problem with this canal, with the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, this backdoor, if you will, is that it’s a two-way street. Stuff is migrating toward the Great Lakes and stuff is spilling out of the Great Lakes. In 2007, so just backing up, this map here, boom, that’s all zebra and quagga mussel habitat once this canal became a reality, it became a reality back in 1900, but nobody was thinking about, “Ooh, what’s the wisdom in doing this?” So zebra mussels and quagga mussels spread like cancer through the Mississippi River Basin and they were eventually towed over the Continental Divide and first appeared in Lake Mead. This is in 2009, I went out here and talked to this guy. This is not the first mussel found, but he was with a coworker, the first guy to find a mussel. They didn’t know what it was.

What’s interesting, if you look at his hands closely, they’re all cut up, and that’s because these things are razor sharp, and so, when they got out West, they made short work of the West’s waters which are much warmer, the chemistry is perfect. And so, 2007 they were finding one. By 2009, the canyon walls were just black with these mussels. I think this is a B-29 bomber that crashed in Lake Mead, and this picture was taken in 2009, two years after the first mussel was discovered, and you look at it now and it’s just, the whole lake is just fundamentally changed in just a matter of years.

And they’re doing everything they can to keep these mussels from spreading into the Pacific Northwest. They have these checkpoints. I want to just back up a second. They have these checkpoints at the boat ramps out West, and they’re looking for the potential for somebody to be bringing in mussels. And if you’re coming from a Great Lake state, or if you have a wet hull, or there’s some bilge water, they’re going to make you get basically a hot pressure wash, which will kill zebra mussels and quagga mussels. If you skip your turn in this line and go around one of these checkpoints, you can end up paying $5,000. Even if you’re a local guy, say, on Lake Powell in Page, Arizona, and you have a jet ski and everybody knows you only jet ski on Lake Powell.

If you don’t get your vessel checked, you’re going to the courthouse. And some people were actually threatened with jail time. I mean the lengths that they’re going is just remarkable. $5,000 fines! They were actually hot spray washing swimming noodles when I was out there because they were wet. Okay, $5,000 for a jet boat. These seaway freighters that are coming in through the front door, the way it works now, they have to flush their ballast tanks with mid-ocean salt water, the hope is that it will expel or kill any unwanted hitchhikers. If they don’t do that, they have to agree not to discharge their ballast water. And every ship coming in the seaway gets tested and if it has saltwater in its tanks, then it’s good to go. If it doesn’t, it has to promise not to discharge that water.

If it does discharge that water, and as I mentioned earlier, they can carry up to six million gallons of this ballast water from anywhere on Earth, the fine, when I was doing this reporting in 2014, was $3,000. So, if you remember that picture of how exquisitely tight that pinch point is at the front door, if you keep those doors shut, not to boats necessarily, but to the bad stuff that they’re carrying, you save a continent’s worth of trouble. They’re now estimating that if these mussels which gum up pipes and drinking water systems get into the Columbia River Basin, they can do a billion dollars worth of damage to infrastructure per year. And at this point, we’re getting one ship a day and we’re still getting invasive species. We’ve gotten, I believe, four in the last two years despite the industries. They have done a lot, but they’re not doing enough. This door is still open, and it’s not just something that should frighten people out West.

This was provided to me by the University of Wisconsin. It’s a bicycle pulled from Lake Mendota, I think, last year or the year before. Zebra mussels turned up in Lake Mendota for the first time, I think it was in 2015, and this is my point, I guess. What happens in the Great Lakes matters to everyone in the country because the Great Lakes really are just a beachhead for all these biological invasions to take hold. Once we open those doors to those ships sailing up the seaway, these species are going to hop on a boat ride, on currents, and they’re going to spread, and it’s going to become a continent-wide problem. It’s not just a matter of changing the name of the things that are living in the lakes. The mussels can so fundamentally disrupt the way energy flows that they really are a form of biological pollution. And I would imagine this is an issue here on Lake Mendota. These toxic blue-green algae outbreaks, and the mussels are implicated in this because while they’re brainless, they are smart enough to eat everything that’s floating in the water, but this toxic algae.

So, when you get a bloom now, it’s basically selected, it’s basically given this toxic algae a running start. And so, in the 1960s, you’d have an algal bloom and it could be a whole assemblage of species. And now, this is Lake Mendota, but on Lake Erie, the plumes, they span 2,000 square miles at times and they’ve knocked out the drinking water to cities as large as Toledo. And you can’t just boil the water to fix it, ’cause that only increases the toxin that’s in this algae. So, it is a biological problem, a pollution problem, every bit as vexing as anything that’s coming out of a smokestack or a pipe. It’s actually worse because it breeds. We need to fix the ballast water problem. It’s not an easy problem to fix, but it is fixable. This is a picture of the SS Eastland in 1915 in the Chicago River. This is what happens when a boat is improperly ballasted.

As I mentioned earlier, the ballast water is put in special tanks around a boat to give it a balance, and this boat did not have its ballast water in the right place and when people boarded the boat it rolled slowly and it killed almost 900 people who were on their way down to Indiana to spend a company picnic at the dunes. It was just a disaster. What we need to do is we need to get the attention of the shipping industry to the point where they are better partners at working with us. They have taken big steps. They’ve agreed to flush their water, their ballast water, with saltwater which has gone a long way to reducing the number of organisms in a ballast tank. But, it’s like Jurassic Park, life finds a way. You may think a glass of water’s just a glass of water. That’s a drop of sea water.
[laughs]

That’s what’s lurking in there, it’s been filtered and concentrated, but this is anything but dead weight. The shipping industry’s been sued, and they’re being forced to put ballast water treatment systems on their vessels so they can do as much as is scientifically and humanly possible at this point to keep the next invasion from happening. But at the same time, they’re working with members of Congress to pull back the Clean Water Act protections that mandate this kind of treatment. So, we can’t go backwards right now. Knowing what we know, it would boggle my mind that we would loosen protection for the Great Lakes. And you might say, “Well, it’s already kind of a lost cause,” and it’s not. I had that sad, sorry fisherman sitting on the banks of Lake Huron a few slides back. This isn’t all bad news.

This is another invasive species. It came from the same place as the zebra and quagga mussels, the Caspian Sea Basin. It came the same way, aboard an overseas ship sailing up the seaway. And this little bugger is a nuisance to anybody who’s trying to fish with bait because they’re very smart and they will nibble the bait right off your hook, but they’re also nature-built to eat mussels. So they’re unlocking the energy that is, or has been before this, tied up in these mussel shells, and anything that can eat a goby is doing all right. And gobies are everything. This is an interesting picture. This is the bottom of Lake Michigan, that’s a piece of research equipment, those two flaps. This is a native type of algae called cladophora, and all the white stuff below that are zebra or quagga mussels, and the cladophora is growing on it. And that’s, like, all you see until you circle the gobies.
[laughs]

There they are. They’re everywhere. They’re the largest small fish out in the lakes now. And it just so happens that the salmon fishery that is collapsing, is collapsing because the salmon will not deign to go to the bottom and bang their noses into the rocks and grub out a living on gobies, but native lake trout do, and native lake trout are now making a comeback like never since the arrival of the lampreys in the 1940s. We’re getting to the point now where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are looking at having a future of a self-sustaining native lake trout population. Whitefish native species, they’re not typically a piscivore, a fish-eating fish, but if it’s death or a goby, they’ll take a goby. And you talk to the commercial fishermen, and they say, “These fish don’t have teeth so they have to eat these gobies whole.” And the commercial fishermen are telling me that they come in and the whitefish have their cheeks ripped open from getting their mouths around these fish. They’re saying it’s evolution on the fly, and it, in a way, is. Walleye are doing great, not far from where that guy was sitting. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but Lake Huron has a spectacular walleye fishery and it’s making a huge comeback on Green Bay, and on Lake Erie, as well.

So what we’re seeing is kind of the top of the food chain stitching itself back together with these native species. The bottom of the food chain may look more like the Caspian Sea than the native Great Lakes but there’s a balance, and I think nature does a very good job of finding a balance. If we can just give it a breather, if we can just stop these invasions from constantly roiling the lakes. Nobody can predict what the next species is going to do. Maybe it slips in and without making a ripple or maybe it is the next zebra mussel, so vigilance is the order of, the word of the day and people ask, “What can I do?” Well, pay attention to what’s going on in the Senate. It’s a perennial bill. It’ll be coming up again this year, I’m sure, to try to roll back Clean Water Act protections for the Great Lakes, in terms of ballast water. But another thing you can do and should do, and it doesn’t have to be a Great Lake, any body of water you live on, make sure your kids have a history with it.

Like I said at the beginning, I wouldn’t be standing here if I didn’t have these Great Lakes imprinted on me as a child. This is me and my brothers, I believe that’s Lake Superior, sometime probably in the early 1970s, and these trips matter. And it doesn’t have to be Lake Superior, it could be Lake Mendota, any lake, any body of water, you just got to make sure that the next generation has an ethic, an experience with the lake so they have an ethic for taking care of ’em because we let that slip in the 1960s and we paid dearly for it. And this is my last picture, taking my son out for a quick swim after a victory over the Chicago Bears [audience laughs] on Lake Michigan three blocks from my house. Thanks a lot.
[audience applauds]