The Great Lakes are still sick

By David Steinkraus

Friday, December 9, 2005 2:03 AM CST

The problems may not be as visible as they were 30 years ago, but the Great Lakes are still sick, and they need help now, says a group of scientists whose report was issued Thursday.

The group - from a variety of government and academic positions - based its report on their experience and research done over the past decades. The report has been endorsed by about 60 other scientists, including the directors of the region's Sea Grant institutes established to study the lakes, according to the Healing Our Waters - Great Lakes Coalition.

On Thursday the coalition hosted a teleconference with some authors of the report who said that while there are problems, they have agreed on one specific action to take.

That action is concentrating on restoring the near shore waters of the lakes - the wetlands, river habitats, and connecting channels that are home to most of the wildlife and breed most of the fish in the ecosystem and serve to filter out contaminants flowing off the land.

Timing The coalition report comes four days ahead of the release in Chicago of the formal restoration plan from the Great Lakes Regional Collaboration. This group was set up at the order of President Bush to study how to restore the Great Lakes ecosystem. In late October, news outlets reported that the administration was reluctant to commit additional, special funds to lake restoration, as has been done for the Everglades in Florida.

What the coalition report is intended to do, teleconference speakers said, is to underscore the need to act now, and to circumvent the delay caused when policy makers want still more scientific studies before implementing changes. This is a critical time, said Andy Buchsbaum, director of the National Wildlife Federation's Great Lakes office and co-leader of the Healing Our Waters - Great Lakes Coalition. Congress will be key. "We need to see new money flowing into the Great Lakes."

Tipping over What we need to avoid, the scientists write in their report, is reaching an ecological "tipping point," an accumulation of damage so severe that the ecosystem changes rapidly and unpredictably. It's not that the lake will die if we don't solve these problems, said Donald Scavia, a professor at the University of Michigan and one of the report's authors.

"What may happen, though, what's of concern, is that you'd end up with a lake that has the biological characteristics that are not at all desirable, completely different mixes of fish species that are not the sorts of fish that society's used to enjoying and liking, beaches that are not places where you can swim safely, large algal blooms that make it undesirable to even be along the shore - so a dysfunctional sort of system, but certainly not a dead one."

The signs of this, scientists said, are not as visible as they may have been 30 years ago when rivers burned because of the pollutants in them, but there are still problems. In Lake Erie, there's a zone of water which in the summer has no oxygen (called an "anoxic zone") but where botulism bacteria can grow. That zone has grown, said Alfred Beeton, retired director of the federal government's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.

And, the scientists write in their report, fish-eating birds are dying off in the summer died apparently because the botulism toxin moves up the food chain and into them.

Our corner Although there are areas of low oxygen in the southern Lake Michigan basin off Racine County's coast, there is no anoxic zone here, Beeton said. "Historically the southern part has more impacts. That's where the big population centers are, and the southern half of the lake is also more impacted by agricultural runoff than in the northern part. So you do see more and more changes in the southern basin.

"And it's in the southern basin where there's been this big collapse of this fish food organism called Diporeia, which is an important fish food organism for the whitefish and other fishes. Where there used to be over 10,000 of these organisms per square meter of the bottom, in many areas they have completely disappeared." Decreases in the populations of this creature have been associated with whitefish population decreases in lakes Michigan and Huron, he said.

Unified effort In the past we tackled problems piecemeal, Beeton said, problems such as overfishing and the discharge of fertilizers which promote the growth of algae. "But really, what we need to do is look at what has happened in terms of ecosystem-level disruptions. That is the combination of multiple stresses that are affecting the lakes. And if we don't really start looking at it from that standpoint, the Great Lakes system may experience further, and potentially irreversible, damage."

"I think for way too long people have viewed the Great Lakes as these big, blue spots on a map," Scavia said, "when in fact they're as much the green and brown that surround those lakes. So what happens on the land ends up in the lakes, and we need to look at it as an entire system."

On the Net: If you're interested in downloading a PDF copy of the coalition report, go to

http://www.restorethelakes.org

Special Offer: Get 5 Weeks of the Journal Times for $7!