Lake Ontario

Turmoil in Lake Ontario
November 21, 2003
By J. Michael Kelly
Staff writer

Although he's been studying it intensively for 32 years, Bob O'Gorman lately
feels like he knows less than ever about Lake Ontario.

"I've never seen such a period of instability in the lake," he said.

O'Gorman, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey's Biological Field
Station in Oswego, said the lake's food chain is in ferment from top to
bottom. Here are some examples: Near the low end of the food web, diporeia,
the shrimp-like creatures that fed Lake Ontario forage fish for eons, have
virtually disappeared from the water column in the past decade.

The decline of diporeia means that the alewives and other small fish that
subsisted on them now have to get their calories elsewhere, most likely from
another tiny critter called the mysis, or possum shrimp.

Rainbow smelt, once one of the two or three most numerous forage species in
the lake, now are so scarce that Geological Survey trawlers can barely
collect enough for study purposes. O'Gorman suspects the smelt swoon is tied
to the shortage of diporeia.

With smelt all but absent, alewives are the only significant remaining
source of food for the lake's world-famous chinook and coho salmon. Ontario
alewives also appear to be stressed. Although the sardine-size fish had
back-to-back successful hatches in 2001 and 2002, O'Gorman frets that 40
percent of all alewives in the lake are now age 5 or older.

"Those fish are going to start dropping out of the picture pretty soon," he
said.

Meanwhile, O'Gorman noted, the alewives collected by USGS trawlers last
spring "were in the poorest physical condition of any we've seen since we
began checking them in 1978." Alewives gathered in a follow-up autumn
netting were more robust. O'Gorman thinks alewife numbers dropped sharply
between the two surveys, leaving more food for the surviving fish.

With smelt rare and alewives skinnier than usual, there are early
indications that Ontario salmon may be slenderizing, themselves. At an even
33 pounds, the grand-prize chinook salmon taken in the 2003 Lake Ontario
Counties Fall Salmon and Trout Derby was the smallest winner in the
contest's eight-year history.

What's going on?

O'Gorman suspects the turmoil in the Ontario fishery eventually will be
traced to the exotic species that have invaded the entire Great Lakes
system.

Specifically, he thinks it is no coincidence that the dramatic changes he's
seeing have taken place since zebra mussels and then quagga mussels migrated
from Europe to this side of the Atlantic.

Both species hitchhiked to North American in the ballast tanks of cargo
ships in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Zebra mussels and quaggas are filter feeders that compete with larval fish
and other small organisms for a finite food supply of plankton. While
"zeebs" are confined mainly to hard-bottomed, near-shore environs, quaggas
thrive throughout Lake Ontario.

"They're just creeping out deeper and deeper, as if a doggone carpet was
being rolled out from the shores," O'Gorman said.

Diporeia used to be thick as fleas in the areas now dominated by quaggas.
One theory holds that the mussels have simply crowded the inch-long possum
shrimp out of their old habitats.

"There are a few deep-water areas where diporeia persist," said O'Gorman.
"Why, we don't know. Frankly, we're scratching our heads."

With the future of diporeia in doubt, researchers here and in Canada have
stepped up their studies of mysis.

Several weeks ago, a Geological Survey vessel netted thousands of bait fish
in order to analyze their stomach contents. Basically, they want to know
what alewives, smelt and sculpins are eating in place of diporeia, and if
they're getting enough of it.

A similar gut-check in 2002 produced a puzzling result.

"In that study, we found that the numbers of mysis were down in alewife
stomachs, but were not significantly lower in the stomachs of smelt or
sculpin," said O'Gorman. "Once again, we were left to wonder why. Could it
be that mysis are for some reason less accessible to alewives than to smelt
and sculpins? At this point, we just don't know."

Along with such unanswered questions, researchers must deal with a new
ecological wild card.

Two years ago, the state Department of Environmental Conservation confirmed
that a small, perch-like fish called the round goby had shown up in Lake
Ontario.

The finger-length, European-native gobies are prolific breeders that thrive
just about anywhere.

"This spring we found them in the lake out to 450 feet deep," said O'Gorman.

Gobies are expected to compete with bottom-dwelling sculpins for habitat.
Along with zebra mussels, gobies eat the eggs and fry of other small species
of fish.

The goby's taste for shellfish worries health officials because mussels take
up chemical contaminants from lake sediments. If gobies ingest mussels, and
game fish eat gobies, there's just one more step to the creatures at the top
of the food chain - you and me.

Click Here to read the article in the Post Standard.

--
James Ehlers

Outdoors Magazine
www.outdoorsmagazine.net

this is an interesting piece......the Great Lakes have undergone considerable
biological shuffling since man started his imprint upon things. One we anglers
tend to overlook is the introduction of Pacific Salmonids to the picture. Way
more fun to catch than, say, Zebra mussels, but an invasive species
nonetheless. Now, the radical way to return Ontario or the other Great Lakes to
their "original" status is to eliminate human habitation along the shoreline to
a huge degree, end all motor transportation across these lakes, physically
remove all non-native species and hope for the best. Anyone out there think
this will happen soon??
Tom

Tom,
Not likely. Lake Champlain is facing similar issues. Non-native is an
interesting concept. At point in history do we decide is the demarcation
point between native and non? Playing the devil's advocate, brown trout are
non-native. Apple trees are non-native. Do we eradicate apple trees from
the landscape and brown trout from our lakes and streams? I definitely do
not know the answer to this one, and I spend an awful amount of time
thinking about it when I am fishing and hunting. Geez, most of us are not
native.

Definitely one of greatest challenges of this generation. Our progress has
caught us looking ahead.

--
James Ehlers

Outdoors Magazine
www.outdoorsmagazine.net



"Tom Littleton" wrote in message
...
this is an interesting piece......the Great Lakes have undergone
considerable
biological shuffling since man started his imprint upon things. One we
anglers
tend to overlook is the introduction of Pacific Salmonids to the picture.
Way
more fun to catch than, say, Zebra mussels, but an invasive species
nonetheless. Now, the radical way to return Ontario or the other Great
Lakes to
their "original" status is to eliminate human habitation along the
shoreline to
a huge degree, end all motor transportation across these lakes, physically
remove all non-native species and hope for the best. Anyone out there
think
this will happen soon??
Tom

Jim E asks:
At point in history do we decide is the demarcation
point between native and non?

exactly my point

Tom

Tom Littleton wrote:
Jim E asks:

At point in history do we decide is the demarcation
point between native and non?


exactly my point

Tom



The preservation of native species is something that is important to me
as is the preservation of natural environments.

The definitions of what constitutes a native species and natural
environments are basic foundations for preservation. I've given this
quite a bit of thought and it seems to me that both definitions need to
be based on the absence of man's influence. There seems to be a problem
with some people on ROFF accepting these definitions. For native, I
think I'll start using indigenous hoping that will be more understood.
But for a "natural" environment, I don't have another word to substitute.

The reason I bring this up is that it's fruitless to discuss an issue if
there aren't commonly held definitions. Without common definitions, the
essence of the discussion becomes lost.

Here's a challenge to you guys that have a problem with the definitions
of native and natural being based on mans' intervention:

Come up with a meaningful definition for either that doesn't specify an
arbitrary, specific time. I don't think you can do it without your
definition logically leading to accepting genetically engineered animals
as native or a nuclear wasteland as natural. Maybe for some of you a
genetically engineered animal could be native and a nuclear wasteland is
a natural environment. If so, we're on different planets when we're
having discussions using these words.

Willi



Willi

On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 13:11:07 -0700, Willi wrote:



Tom Littleton wrote:
Jim E asks:

At point in history do we decide is the demarcation
point between native and non?


exactly my point

Tom



The preservation of native species is something that is important to me
as is the preservation of natural environments.

The definitions of what constitutes a native species and natural
environments are basic foundations for preservation. I've given this
quite a bit of thought and it seems to me that both definitions need to
be based on the absence of man's influence. There seems to be a problem
with some people on ROFF accepting these definitions. For native, I
think I'll start using indigenous hoping that will be more understood.
But for a "natural" environment, I don't have another word to substitute.

The reason I bring this up is that it's fruitless to discuss an issue if
there aren't commonly held definitions. Without common definitions, the
essence of the discussion becomes lost.

Here's a challenge to you guys that have a problem with the definitions
of native and natural being based on mans' intervention:

Come up with a meaningful definition for either that doesn't specify an
arbitrary, specific time. I don't think you can do it without your
definition logically leading to accepting genetically engineered animals
as native or a nuclear wasteland as natural. Maybe for some of you a
genetically engineered animal could be native and a nuclear wasteland is
a natural environment. If so, we're on different planets when we're
having discussions using these words.

Willi




Many species are invaders without having been introduced by humans.
Indigenous can simply mean (in reference to humans) the original
inhabitants or those who have been there the longest, considering that
the original inhabitants may be long gone. I don't think it is a term
that works well in the non-human world. Humans are part of the
natural world and they have been shaping it even at the prehistoric
level. The indigenous populations of North America were shaping the
flora and fauna well before Columbus showed up. Perhaps some brought
animals (dogs?) across Beringia -- we don't know. We can't just look
at human intervention as a recent, Western thing, though obviously the
rate of extinction and introduction has greatly accelerated with the
spread of Western industrialized society. But it is just that, an
acceleration, not a beginning.

For the sake of conservation, we can adopted the label of "native" --
meaning not introduced by humans. It was there before human arrival
and intervention (or more popularly, before the coming of the white
man). We can choose to focus on the time span after the start of the
Industrial Revolution as before that period, human intervention
happened at a much slower rate. For example, the development of corn
from its tiny, original wild state to the large, domesticated cob
today, took the indigenous peoples of North America centuries to
accomplish. Modern genetic manipulation today could achieve the same
thing over a decade or so.

That said, it is a worthwhile thing to preserve native species just
from the diversity aspect alone. While some would try to place value
on some native species and not others (favouring brookies over an
endangered sucker), we should not do so. It is ironic to read the
whining that recently introduced species are harming other introduced
species that we happen to like.

Peter

turn mailhot into hotmail to reply

Visit The Streamer Page at http://www.mountaincable.net/~pcharl...ers/index.html

"Willi" wrote in message
...

...Here's a challenge to you guys that have a problem with the definitions
of native and natural being based on mans' intervention:

Come up with a meaningful definition for either that doesn't specify an
arbitrary, specific time. I don't think you can do it without your
definition logically leading to accepting genetically engineered animals
as native or a nuclear wasteland as natural. Maybe for some of you a
genetically engineered animal could be native and a nuclear wasteland is
a natural environment. If so, we're on different planets when we're
having discussions using these words.

Definitions are beautiful and terrible things.

A definition of anything as "native" or "natural" that takes human
intervention into account may seem simple at a glance, but it ain't so.
Looking at North America (with which I am most familiar) for example, the
hasty will be willing enough to declare anything that predates Columbus as
native. Aside from the obvious introduction of humans anywhere from about
20,000 to 100,000 years ago.....I think that pretty much covers the spectrum
of estimates.....there is also the problem of whatever microflora and
microfauna they brought with them, in addition to the possibility of larger
species. While this may seem like a niggling detail as compared to the
wholesale introductions that occurred in the 15th through the 20th
centuries, anyone familiar the basic principles of epidemiology will
understand its significance.

Language is always fraught with slippery and often hard to detect biases.
"Genetic engineering", as the term is generally understood today, typically
refers to various techniques...recombinant DNA being the most
familiar...developed over the past few decades. IF the term is used with
that in mind, some of the obstacles to understanding and agreement may be
removed, but others remain in place, and most stubbornly so. In fact,
humans have been actively and very busily engaged in genetic engineering of
another sort for thousands of years.....compare teosinte with modern hybrid
corn (aka maize) for one of the classic examples. Human induced selective
pressures are so pervasive, in fact, that virtually NO important vegetative
food crops can be considered "natural" in the sense that they are free of
human meddling. Basmati rice, apples, sweet corn, cauliflower, Carpathian
walnuts, Peruvian purple potatoes, tomatoes, wax beans, Bing cherries, and a
host of other things we take for granted simply didn't exist 50,000 years
ago. Animal species, for reasons that should be obvious (think motility,
for instance) have been somewhat less tractable than plants, in the main,
but the principle holds nevertheless.

The best we can hope for, and it really isn't too complicated (which is not
at all the same thing as not too difficult), is to find a definition for
terms that is simple enough to work with within a given context and for a
specific purpose. Unfortunately, and as is virtually always the case, the
best we can hope for is always more than we can reasonably hope for. The
barrier to fruitful discussion is not a matter of a dearth of useful
definitions, but rather a plentitude of agendas to which mutually acceptable
definitions are anathema.

So, the by now bored reader might wonder, what does all this pompous
pedantry lead to? Well, the CAREFUL reader will have noted that the terms
"understanding" and "agreement" were used above in a manner that suggests
they go hand in hand but, more often than not, people looking for one are
working at cross purposes to those interested in the other. For people
striving toward agreement, understanding is a gross impediment, while those
for whom understanding is the goal must eventually come to the conclusion
that agreement is a chimera.

Wolfgang
who would be happy enough to supply useful definitions......if it weren't so
much fun to watch people thrash each other over things that are
comprehensible to none of them.

Outdoors Magazine wrote:

Turmoil in Lake Ontario
November 21, 2003
By J. Michael Kelly
Staff writer
...

For the record, J. Michael Kelly is a staff writer for
The Post-Standard of Syracuse, New York not Outdoors Magazine.

Posting that entire article here is a copyright violation.
Posting it here without proper attribution is plagiarism.

Just what kind of sleazeball outfit are you running up
there anyway, Ehlers ?

http://tinyurl.com/x2u0

--
Ken Fortenberry

Mr. Fortenberry,
I encourage you to read the entire post again where you will find the proper
attribution.

I encourage you to control your dislike for me, at least here in ROFF, as it
leads to you making foolish statements. If you want to send me hate mail
.... Feel free: but let's keep this one on
topic. Do you have anything constructive to add to the issue of Great Lakes
exotics? It is an important issue for Lake Champlain, as well, and any
insight you can offer would be appreciated.

Are you available for copyright and trademark counsel? I did not realize
you were an expert in the field. We might be able to utilize your services
on future publishing projects.

--
James Ehlers

Outdoors Magazine
www.outdoorsmagazine.net



"Ken Fortenberry" wrote in message
.com...
Outdoors Magazine wrote:

Turmoil in Lake Ontario
November 21, 2003
By J. Michael Kelly
Staff writer
...

For the record, J. Michael Kelly is a staff writer for
The Post-Standard of Syracuse, New York not Outdoors Magazine.

Posting that entire article here is a copyright violation.
Posting it here without proper attribution is plagiarism.

Just what kind of sleazeball outfit are you running up
there anyway, Ehlers ?

http://tinyurl.com/x2u0

--
Ken Fortenberry

Outdoors Magazine wrote:

Mr. Fortenberry,
I encourage you to read the entire post again where you will find the proper
attribution.

There was only this:

Click Here to read the article in the Post Standard.

That line was not proper attribution. You obviously did a cut and paste
from a source that did give attribution in the form of a link, but what
you posted here was text only. You dropped the URL, you friggin' moron.
You can Click Here until your ****in' finger falls off and there will
be no attribution.


If you want to send me hate mail
... Feel free: ...

I have no reason to correspond with you, but speaking of email, QUIT
sending it to me ! I don't need your fruitcake ramblings in my email.

... We might be able to utilize your services
on future publishing projects.

In your dreams, you stupid whackjob.

--
Ken Fortenberry