From the Duluth News Tribune
As the St. Lawrence Seaway reopened Friday for the 2005 shipping
season, environmentalists called for stricter regulations to cut off
the flow of invasive species into the Great Lakes.
The National Wildlife Federation and Great Lakes United on Thursday
urged U.S. and Canadian governments to tightly control ballast water
that ships bring into and move around within the Great Lakes.
As ocean-going ships arrive in Great Lakes ports to pick up grain
and other materials, scientists say they may be carrying exotic
fish, mussels or organisms that could wreak havoc here -- following
invaders such as zebra mussels, spiny water fleas, goby and ruffe.
At least 40 species in Western European ports are candidates to make
the move across the Atlantic with little regulation in place to stop
them, said Anthony Ricciardi, an exotic species researcher at McGill
University in Montreal, who focuses on the invaders likely to do the
most damage here.
Ricciardi looks at species that have invaded and taken hold in
Western European ports, often the last ports visited by ocean-going
ships in the Great Lakes. Two of those exotics are freshwater
shrimp, including one large one nicknamed the "killer shrimp."
"It likes to take bites of many different things, like it's in a
buffet. It's one of the few things in nature that will kill much
more than it needs to eat, and that makes it far more destructive,"
Ricciardi said.
Another shrimp that might already be here in small numbers builds
mud tubes for nests on top of rocks, killing native insects that
fish eat and covering spawning habitat. In some cases, more than
100,000 of the tubes cover a square meter of rock.
Not only are these exotic species a financial and ecological
problem, Ricciardi said, but their collective presence is causing a
crisis. For example, there's been an outbreak of a new strain of
avian botulism killing thousands of loons and other birds in eastern
Great Lakes in recent years. Those birds are eating exotic round
goby, which are eating the exotic quaga mussels, which are carrying
the botulism, which may have come from Europe.
"People think we've seen it all. But we haven't seen the half of it
yet. That's why it's important to keep the next species out...
because of all the potential disruption they can cause when they
interact with what's already here," Ricciardi said. "We've had 180
species invade the Great Lakes, and the impacts continue to rise.
The chance of a serious problem increases exponentially with each
species that we add."
The issue of ballast controls hasn't moved far in Congress, but it
is advancing on two fronts. The U.S. Coast Guard began reviewing
ballast rules last year and will hold a public hearing on the issue
in Cleveland in May.
The Coast Guard has been requiring ships to exchange ballast at sea
for more than a decade. But many ships, if they have only small
amounts of water in their tanks, are exempt. And other species
aren't being killed in the exchange because some residual port water
always remains. Several new species, such as the fishhook water
flea, made it into the lakes after the 1993 rule took effect.
State lawmakers in Michigan, frustrated at the lack of federal
action, proposed tough new state laws on ship's ballast earlier this
month.
Industry officials have been working for years on testing onboard
ballast cleaning technology, including at the Seaway Port Authority
of Duluth since 1989. But officials say there is no practical or
affordable technology to clean ballast water onboard ships to a
level that would remove zebra mussel larvae, for example.
Ray Skelton, environmental and government affairs director for the
Port Authority, said a combination of filtration and chemical
treatment may be the ultimate answer. So far, filtration can remove
items about the size of a human hair, although the size of the
filters remains prohibitive to install them on ships, he said.
Other efforts have focused on chemical treatments. But most
chemicals that can kill small organisms, such as chlorine, are
harmful themselves. Skelton said the next breakthrough will be an
inexpensive chemical that breaks down in the environment after
killing organisms in the ballast.
"We're getting closer," he said, noting tests on such a chemical
will be conducted in the Twin Ports this summer.
The federal government must phase-in regulations first and then help
fund research to find that technology for ships, the Nature
Conservancy's Jordan Lubetkin said. If not, the next new exotic
species may be the one that topples the region's sport and
commercial-fishing industries.
Ballast water from foreign ports is considered the most likely
pathway for foreign species to enter the Great Lakes. Ships use
water in their ballast to aid in steering, especially when they are
not carrying cargo. But not all foreign invaders come in ships. The
sea lamprey swam into the lakes when the Welland Canal was rebuilt
in 1919. And Asian carp may be coming to the lakes from the
Mississippi River system.
Still, since the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959 allowing foreign
ships access into all the Great Lakes, the National Wildlife
Federation says an average of one new exotic species has established
itself in the Great Lakes every eight months, and 70 percent is from
ships' ballast.
About 1,200 ships visit the Twin Ports each year, about 100 of which
are salties. Exotic species brought into other parts of the Great
Lakes also can be moved around within the lakes by Great Lakes
freighters.
The Great Lakes commercial and sport fishery is valued at $4.5
billion annually, and the annual economic impacts from fishing in
the Great Lakes states total $7 billion, according to 2001 data from
the Fish and Wildlife Service. By comparison,$7 billion in economic
benefit is attributed to the movement of bulk goods such as grain,
iron ore, coal, steel and other cargo across the Great Lakes
navigation system during the 2003 navigation season.
