Lake Michigan showing signs of ecological breakdown

A rather long article in todays Duluth News Tribune highlights the problems with both Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.

On the surface, Lake Michigan remains one of the world's biggest and wildest bodies of freshwater and one of its most popular fishing destinations. But under water, it is largely a man-made production. Lake Michigan has been engineered into a system focused on producing a maximum amount of sport fish, most of which are not native to its waters. Its salmon are saltwater predators that begin life in Midwest hatcheries and are typically unable to reproduce on their own. They are born to be caught. About 13 million exotic salmon and trout are planted yearly, creating what retired Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources fishery chief Lee Kernen calls a "sportsman's paradise."

But today, it is a paradise imperiled. This year the salmon were biting on just about anything, and commercial fisherman Dennis Hickey says he knows why: They are starving. Salmon stomachs are normally packed with alewives - another saltwater species not native to the lake. Not this year. This year, Hickey says, the lake's biggest fish are swimming on empty. Preliminary numbers from an alewife survey this fall back up what Hickey has been seeing on his cutting board. The lake's population has dropped from 25 percent to 50 percent in just the past year.

The situation has created a potential showdown between those who favor cutting the fish-stocking program and anglers who have little tolerance for anything that might put a dent in their fun.

Salmon were first planted in Lake Michigan in the late 1960s with the dual goal of creating an exciting fishing experience for vacationers, and eating the ocean-going alewives that had infested the lake via the Welland Canal - the section of locks on the St. Lawrence Seaway that bypasses Niagara Falls and has established a man-made link between the upper four Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean. The alewife invasion nearly destroyed every other fish species in Lake Michigan - including the beloved perch, whitefish and chubs - by either gobbling up their young or hogging the food upon which the adults depended. In one of the world's boldest fishery experiments, biologists turned to Pacific salmon in a desperate attempt to control the alewives. The results were almost instant. Alewife numbers plummeted, salmon fishing exploded in popularity, and the lake's native species began to recover.

This year, a group of fishery experts responsible for making stocking recommendations on Lake Huron considered advocating a one-year halt to salmon stocking because of a crash in alewife numbers. Adding to that is fact that an unknown number of Lake Huron's salmon are starting to reproduce on their own in some of northern Michigan's most pristine streams. The committee backed off on those recommendations after protests from the sport fishing community.

Read the whole article as it goes into much more detail about Lake Trout, Herring and other natural lake fish. It concludes with several points that at sometime in the near future both salmon and alewives will have to be eliminated from the lakes.