Today’s post is a challenge because there are multiple storylines converging. As I’m writing, I’m thinking about you, my readers, and wondering which storylines you will find interesting because I find many things interesting that not everyone does! I’ve been hearing about the looming danger of Asian carp since getting involved in Great Lakes environmental advocacy, but I know this topic may not be as familiar to many of you. 

What are Asian carp?

The term Asian carp generally refers to four invasive species of carp: bighead, silver, black and grass. These species were brought to the southern United States from Southeast Asia in the 1970s to help control algae and weeds in aquaculture ponds and wastewater treatment facilities. However, both flooding and accidental releases of the fish allowed them to get into local waterways. They made their way quickly into the Mississippi River system and have now spread across much of the US, including the Illinois River watershed. They are now wildly overpopulated in many waterways.

In November, 2021, the Illinois Department of Natural resources announced that it was proposing a new name for Asian carp: Copi. There were two reasons for the proposed name change. One was that in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, anti-Asian sentiment had turned more vitriolic and there was a desire to shift from unfairly associating another challenging issue with Asian countries and peoples. The other reason was a marketing ploy to encourage people and the food industry to purchase more Asian carp for consumption, essentially as an invasive species control mechanism. I will note that both the name Copi and the fish appearing on menus have been slow to gain traction.  

Why are they a problem?

The primary threat from Asian carp is competition with native species for food. They eat native species out of existence given that some carp can grow to up to four feet in length and and 100 pounds. Given their size, which I know sounds insane, a secondary threat is boat and person safety in and on waterways when they are present. Notably silver carp are so physical that they come flying out of the water and can impact boat stability, safety and navigation. Watch the first 30 seconds of this video clip as illustration. 

How can we keep them out of the Great Lakes?

The Great Lakes Fishery Commission, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada all take the position that the only way to preserve the Great Lakes fishery is to prevent the introduction of Asian carp into the lakes. The focal point to prevent arrival are the waterways in Illinois leading into Lake Michigan. 

It’s now that I link us to my last post on the waterways around Chicago. Asian carp have been seen as close as nine miles out from Lake Michigan in the Chicago River and their DNA has been traced to even closer but they have not yet been documented in the lake. The most specific focal point for keeping the carp out is the Brandon Road Lock and Dam on the Des Plaines River. While there are currently mechanisms in place to prevent the carp from getting past this juncture, they are a semi-coordinated effort. There have been plans for a more extensive project in the state and federal assessment and pipeline phase for several decades. 

What’s the recent good news?

In June, the Brandon Road Lock and Dam project’s funding plan was confirmed and approved to the tune of $1B and construction will start soon. The states of Illinois and Michigan will share 10% of this cost. This is a very low state cost-share and is critically enabling the project to move forward. The federal government, specifically the US Army Corps of Engineers, will cover 90% of the costs. 

The project will include air bubble curtains, electric barriers and acoustic deterrents. I heard a description from an expert at the Alliance for the Great Lakes and it literally sounds like a crazy elementary age child’s brainstorm – First we smother the fish with bubbles! Then we zap them with an electric shock! Then we deafen them with horrific noises!

But a science fair project this is not. What’s at stake is the $7B Great Lakes fishing industry as well as the tourism and recreation industry of the region. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and recognize with appreciation this enormous effort from our federal government to protect Great Lakes waters and people. 

If this storyline interests you, I highly recommend this article from Detroit Free Press about the danger of Asian carp and the Brandon Road Lock and Dam project.

Over Labor Day weekend I accomplished another item on my Great Lakes summer intentions list. We were in Chicago for a family event but had a gap in the schedule Saturday afternoon and I made it to a Chicago area beach. We were in the northern suburbs so the closest beach was Tower Road Park and Beach in Winnetka. It was a beauty for sure. Colorful umbrellas and shade coverings dotted the wide swath of sand while boats puttered out into Lake Michigan from a nearby marina. There was a generous swimming area and playground on the beach.

Chicago’s size and expanse always impresses me whenever I visit. So much highway. So many surface roads. So many diners. There are just a heck of a lot of people living in and around the city (2.6 million in the city; 8.9 million in the metro area). All these people require a lot of built infrastructure to live, including clean water and sanitation systems. 

How Chicago managed to develop both of these for its growing population at the turn of the 20th century is one of the greatest engineering feats of its time. The flow of the Chicago River was fully reversed to prevent water polluted by industry and sewage from moving into Lake Michigan, which has always been Chicago’s drinking water source. I’m going to share the story this week because it’s incredible – but it also sets up my next post, which will be about one of the most important recent developments for the Great Lakes.

Prior to white settlers in the Chicago area, the Chicago River was a slow, somewhat unremarkable river that flowed through a soggy wetland. Two branches merged about a mile from Lake Michigan before flowing into the lake. In a twist of geographical fate, there is a ridge running north and south through what is now the Chicago metro area that created a subtle but crucial divide. Waters on the east side flowed east into the Chicago River and out into the lake and on the west side down into the Des Plaines River and eventually out to the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico.

Starting in 1840 and extending through the Civil War, Chicago grew rapidly. Growing in parallel was Chicago’s enormous meat-packing industry. This industry contributed substantially to the pollution flowing into the river and out into Lake Michigan. By the 1880s, the situation was horrific. The river’s stench, drinking water contamination, and epidemics were constantly present. In 1886 a Citizen’s Association formed the Commission on Drainage and Water Supply. Eventually the Commission made several proposals to improve the situation, one of which was approved by the Illinois Legislature in 1889.

The proposal centered on building the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. The canal would pull large amounts of water from Lake Michigan and, using a series of locks and dams, would shift the direction of the Chicago River, sending sewage out towards the Mississippi watershed while also creating a wider and deeper shipping channel that the Commission hoped might appease those downstream who were likely to be unhappy with the project.

The engineering required to build the canal throughout the 1890s is  beyond the scope of this post but it would not be too much to say that it was transformational. Equipment, tools and techniques developed in the process were replicated the world over, including in the construction of the Panama Canal. But the manpower required was also astronomical, and without question exploitative of recent immigrants and Blacks who were recruited or lured from the South to do the dangerous work. 

On January 2, 1900, a new century had dawned and with it came the initial intentional breach of a small dam holding water between the Chicago River and the new canal. It took two weeks for the canal to fill. On January 17, 1900, the controlling gates at Lockport, IL were opened, the Bear Trap Dam was lowered, and the river changed its course. The project had taken eight years from first shovel and had removed over 42 million cubic yards of soil and rock.

Technology can enable amazing things, like preserving drinking water for millions. But man-made solutions are not without environmental impacts, including sometimes wildly unexpected ones. Stay tuned for the next post to explore one directly related to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and the health of all of the Great Lakes.

Much of the content of today’s post came from a terrifically informative six-page write-up on the Chicago River’s history from the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of the City of Chicago.

As a native of the Washington, DC area and relative urban and suburban life, until recently, my depth of familiarity with maritime life, resources and economies was truly slim. I will be honest in having a hazy understanding of the word fishery, hatchery, or what was meant when mentioning the work of fish management. While my knowledge is still not deep, I have learned much more through my Great Lakes exploration of the past three years.

Here is the mission of the Fish and Aquatic Conservation program of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: We are committed to tackling the nation’s highest priority aquatic conservation and recreational challenges to conserve, restore, and enhance fisheries for future generations.

My lack of clarity around the word fishery is actually understandable. The word is used in a number of different, and sometimes inconsistent, ways. According to Wikipedia, Fishery can mean either the enterprise of raising or harvesting fish and other aquatic life or, more commonly, the site where such enterprise takes place (a.k.a., fishing grounds). Commercial fisheries include wild fisheries and fish farms, both in freshwater water bodies (about 10% of all catch) and the oceans (about 90%).

Last post I shared about the infamous, massive alewife die-off of 1967 in Lake Michigan waters and shores. I ended with the question: What did they do about it?

In this case the “they” ends up being the Michigan Department of Conservation. And what they did was initiate one of the largest bioengineering endeavors of all time. States around the Great Lakes agreed to introduce coho and Chinook salmon from the Pacific Ocean into the lakes to bring the alewife population under control. It was a successful effort to redesign the Great Lakes fishery. Alewives were back to more controlled numbers by 1971.

Introducing salmon was the brainchild of Dr. Howard Tanner. In The Life and Death of the Great Lakes, Dan Egan writes a riveting chapter about Tanner – his environmental management expertise, his love for Michigan and the Great Lakes, his vision, and his streak of independent decision-making fostered by his time as a soldier in World War II.

As head of the Michigan Department of Conservation, he led the effort to introduce salmon in 1966. Biologists had already recognized the overpopulation of alewives by that time. Just one year later, by the fall of 1967, millions of salmon offspring appeared in Lake Michigan. The salmon grew large and heavy on the alewife diet. It created a frenzy of recreational fishing. Egan describes it memorably: “It was as if all the skiers in Michigan awoke one morning to find that their little hills had been replaced by the Rocky Mountains.” Recreational fishermen who had dreamed of one day fishing out West for salmon literally found them leaping out of the waters of Lake Michigan. Word spread of “coho fever”. Beyond successfully controlling the alewife population, the effort created a recreational boom in sport fishing and a new constituency of people invested in the Great Lakes. 

The Great Lakes have been known as a world class salmon fishery ever since. However, some danger signs have been flashing over the past thirty years. Nature constantly brings our attention back to cycles and interconnectedness – and sometimes seems to enjoy a little irony on the side. The alewife population is now dwindling.  And in dwindling, it may take the salmon with it given that they rely almost exclusively on alewives as their diet. That much despised little silver fish has been revisited, recognized, and respected for its role in the Great Lakes fishery.

In early July 2022 we drove to Northern Michigan to drop our older daughter off at summer camp for two weeks. For the weekend we stayed at a house about 25 miles east of Ludington. My husband and I drove up into Ludington State Park on the shores of Lake Michigan. As we drove in, gorgeous white sand dunes lined the road. It was early evening, so a transition time with beachgoers emerging from trails through the dunes, colorful umbrellas, chairs and towels in hand, headed back to their cars.

We parked and got out of the car to walk out on the beach. We were immediately greeted by what I can only describe as, frankly, a strong, unpleasant odor. Putrid is too strong a word, but it was fishy, and rotten. We walked over a dune path and emerged on the beach. The view was incredibly picturesque – gorgeous wide white sand beach and cottonball clouds. But a quick stroll closer to the water revealed the source of the smell – there was a band of dead, washed up small, silver fish stretching down the beach in both directions.  

These fish are alewives, and wash-up like this is, somewhat unfortunately, not an uncommon occurrence on the shores of some Great Lakes. The history of the issue is well-explained in Dan Egan’s book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes that I refer to time and time again. It’s a story of ecological imbalance.

River herring are a species well known to east coast North Americans for centuries. They hatch in the rivers flowing into the Atlantic and then head into saltwater for much of their life before heading back to the freshwater to spawn. 

River herring were first found in Lake Ontario in the late 1800s. It’s unknown how they got there – whether they made their way on their own through the St. Lawrence River or accessed it through the canals dug at the end of that century. For several decades they lived in some ecological balance as the Atlantic salmon and lake trout were natural predators. But once the evolving commercial fishing industry ramped up and overfishing of salmon and trout became an issue, the river herring became massively overpopulated. By 1931 they had been found in Lake Erie and by 1954 in the waters of all Great Lakes. 

The Great Lakes river herring quickly evolved to be a smaller, toothless version of the East Coast river herring. They lacked natural predators, and quickly came to dominate the fish mass of the lakes, especially Lake Michigan, where by 1965 they were likely 90 percent of the lake’s fish mass. By this point they had also come to take on another name – alewives. 

My dad was living in Chicago in the summer of 1967 when the city experienced the most infamous alewife happening of all time. There was essentially a massive die-off of alewives that dumped billions of fish carcasses on the shores of Lake Michigan around Chicago. 30 miles of shoreline were “smothered”, as Egan writes, by piles of decaying fish sometimes shin deep. The cost of management and clean-up in Chicago was pegged at $50 million – $350 million in 2017 dollars. The price tag across the entire summer and all the shores impacted: close to $1 billion in 2017 dollars. 

To most people, the die off was seen, and smelled, along the shore. However, in the water, there were reports of piles of carcasses at the bottom of the lake over 6 feet high and live schools of the fish were so thick that boaters described running into one being like running into a snowbank.

What happened?  

The reason turns out to be to be biological maladaptation. The fact that the alewives, originally saltwater fish, were able to live in the freshwaters of the Great Lakes didn’t mean that they were able to thrive. Their bodies simply didn’t work well due to the lack of salt. They experienced kidney stress, stunted thyroid activity, and an inability to handle the dramatic water temperature changes the Great Lakes can experience. But their mere survival had thrown Lake Michigan completely off-balance with no real predators to keep the population in check.

So what did they do about it? Stay tuned for Part 2 of the story in my next post. 

Photo from Whiting Robertsdale Historical Society