Sadly the same consequences in Lake Ontario with the same time
frame,scenarios and species.Thanks for enlightening us Wolfgang.Marty
"Wolfgang" wrote in message
...

"Tim Lysyk" wrote in message
news:te91i.7991$g63.2980@edtnps82...
Wolfgang wrote:

The encouraging news is [insert encouraging news
here......someone.....anyone].

Wolfgang

The encouraging news is that epidemics (epizootics in this case) are
usually self limiting, the media tends to greatly over-exagerate the
effects of such outbreaks, etc.

You're right, one tends to become numb and different, but how many
disasters have been said to be about to befall us, and nothing really,
come of them?

True enough, bad news sells and that's reason enough to amplify. And,
yes, many epizootics have established themselves in all corners of the
world to such an extent that most residents don't know that they aren't
natives (but then, they don't know whether or not the natives are natives,
either), and without causing economic or environmental upheavals.....that
most people noticed. But this is by no means always the case.

Precisely what the cost has been (and continues to be) is difficult to
determine in large part because the value of what is lost is not
universally (or even widely) agreed upon even when a figure can be put to
it, and because the changes generally take long enough that most people,
who aren't paying attention anyway, scarcely notice. The current concerns
about a possible collapse of the Great Lakes ecosystem due to the
introduction of VHS is a good example of how these things work, I think.
Odds are that it won't kill every fish in the lakes. Many.....perhaps the
vast majority.....will probably survive. On the other hand, this COULD be
the exception to the rule. There are only so many empty chamber in the
gun. Meanwhile, most people, even including those who cry doom at each new
invasion, are blithely unaware that the Great Lakes ecosystem already HAS
collapsed.

I grew up, and have spent most of my life, within a few miles of Lake
Michigan. The changes that have occurred within the last half century are
staggering. Today, there is just a pitiful remnant of a once thriving
commercial fishery. As a boy, I participated in an annual summer-long
slaughter of yellow perch from the lighthouse jetty in the Kenosha harbor
that would have made the proud authors of three hundred dead fish per day
adventures in the trout streams of old New England blanch. In those days,
you could, if you were enterprising and had the rare luxury of a large
freezer, feed a family for the year on the catch in the yearly spring run
of smelt, itself an introduced species. If you could afford a nickel for
a beer you could gorge yourself on free fried fish in any of a hundred
local taverns. Lake trout, perch, whitefish and chubs were sneered at by
anyone with a decent income because they were so cheap that they couldn't
possibly be any good. Granted, the demise of this seemingly inexhaustible
larder was not due entirely to the introduction of exotics. In fact, the
smelt alone is a strong argument to the contrary. Pollution and
over-harvesting also played an obvious and major part. But there is no
denying that the sea lamprey did incalculable damage to the large
predatory fishes by the time it peaked in the 50s and the alewife
population exploded as a result. Anyone who spent time on (or within a
mile of) a Lake Michigan beach on a hot summer day in the 60s should have
a keen appreciation the possible consequences of epizootic invasions.

In the last decade or so, the effects of the zebra mussel have come....or
at least started to come....to fruition. Despite encrusting every solid
surface, including, importantly, such things as water intakes (thereby
reducing their effective diameter....which can be a serious problem in
applications like cooling a power plant) and changing the composition of
beaches and lake bottom, and changing the chemical composition of the
water through uptake of carbonate ions....despite all this, it looked for
a while (at least to the casual observer) like they might actually prove
to be somewhat beneficial in that they were highly efficient at filtering
the water and thereby improving its clarity vastly. Well, that's the
trouble with the casual observer. They increased water clarity by
filtering out (among other things) much of the food that forms the base of
the Lake's food chain. This is a bad thing....very bad. To make matters
worse, the increased light penetration has also triggered algal blooms
that currently leave the beaches piled high with a reeking mass of rotting
vegetation that must strike a nostalgic chord in the heart of anyone who
remembers millions of tons of putrescent alewives and stupendous hordes of
flies and maggots fondly.

There's more......LOTS more.....but, you get the picture.

Just this parting thought, though. All of this would have been a lot
easier to deal with if it had just happened a bit sooner. In the 50s, the
beach was a wonderful place to go and play in the water (despite the
crowds.....which no longer exist there), but it wasn't necessary to go
there to beat the summer heat. One could have sat in the cool shade on
the front porch along any of thousands of elm roofed tunnels that used to
be the urban streets in this part of the world and been philosophical
about all of it. Anyone who has seen those streets then and now has a
visceral understanding of what the word "hideous" means.

Wolfgang