Purple Loosestrife: an invasive

Over 180 invasive species have entered the Great Lakes and their wetlands.  Pictured is purple loosestrife, a European plant that will take over a wetland like the Mafia takes over a neighborhood.

 Native species do not stand a chance against it.  Wetlands serve as natural filters for pollutants and help prevent floods.  The species of plants that evolved around the Great Lakes serve an important purpose in their ecology. 

Read more on this topic in my book, The Dynamic Great Lakes.

Review of the Dynamic Great Lakes by Barbara Spring

U.S. Water News - Peter Wild


Are dinosaurs cruising the benthic depths of the Great Lakes even while we go about our daily tasks? Not exactly. Yet sturgeon, fish weighing up to 300 pounds and similarly plated with armor,are nosing around down there. Occasionally you can see the monsters appear, making their spawning runs up rivers and surfacing like submarines in the pools beneath waterfalls... The five Great Lakes, holding nearly twenty percent of the earth's fresh water, are quite young. Gouged out by glaciers, they assumed their present shapes a mere 3,000 years ago. For that, they are a dynamic shifting system, still changing and exhibiting surprising differences. Lake Ontario, for example, the easternmost, although smallest of the bodies, holds more water than Lake Erie, its shallower nearby sister. Here's a handy primer for all such things, from the interaction of phytoplankton and calcium carbonate that gives a white cast to these inland oceans come August and helps clean the water to the charming ice volcanoes spouting chilly "lava" in the winter.

This is intriguing stuff for adults, but the straightforward presentation also lends itself to use in schools, beginning about the sixth grade and up. And yes, we get the latest news on the zebra mussel, the tube nose goby, and other threats to the natural scheme of things. Also good news; how since the banning of DDT in the 1970's, the bald eagles have come back.

Love Potion for Lamprey Eels

MSU researchers hope man-made love potion can save state's fish
BY TINA LAM • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER • May 17, 2009
As the sun begins to sink along the Little Manistee River in northern Michigan, researcher Nick Johnson is excited and a little nervous. There's a lot riding on what he's about to do.
It's spawning season for the sea lamprey, a prehistoric creature that invaded the Great Lakes 80 years ago, and Johnson is injecting a love potion into the river to lure female sea lampreys into traps.
The eel-like lampreys are one of the Great Lakes' most destructive invasive species, devouring native fish by sucking out their innards. They invaded the lakes in the 1920s, wiping out lake trout in some lakes by the 1950s. A chemical developed to kill lampreys has helped lower their numbers to about half a million in the lakes, but it is expensive and there still are too many lampreys.
Scientists at Michigan State University have developed a man-made copy of a love scent male sea lampreys emit during spawning. Now, they are testing it in 10 Michigan streams.
"It has shown a dramatic impact on the behavior of lamprey," said Mike Siefkes, lamprey control specialist at the Great Lakes Fishery Commission in Ann Arbor.
If the pheromone works, it could be a breakthrough in the battle against lamprey in the Great Lakes.
Read more about invasive species in The Dynamic Great Lakes