Chicago sits on
the shore of Lake Michigan,
one of the five Great Lakes.
A restaurant a short walk
from the lakefront
began serving signature seafood
dishes in the 1940s.
Shaw's gets a lot of tourist business
from around the country.
We've always served lake fish,
both whitefish and perch.
There you go.
We have two whitefish here.
These come from Lake Superior.
And then over here
are perch fillets, yellow lake
perch out of Lake Erie.
I'd love someday to see lake
trout back on our menu,
I don't know if that'll
ever happen.
The Great Lakes have a natural
organizing force for the people
of the region.
They touch on eight states
and two Canadian provinces.
The vastness of them is
really hard to convey.
When you stand on the shore
of one, it certainly doesn't
feel like a lake.
They're very, very important
to our economy.
The fact that we've got
the world's largest source of
clean fresh water.
That's why you can have tens of
millions of people living around
the Great Lakes.
The Great Lakes are really
in our DNA.
One out of five jobs is
related to water.
Kids grow up and they
have that memory.
They associate it with their
time and their summers
with their family on
the shores of
Lake Michigan or Lake Huron,
whatever is their lake.
And fishing is an integral
part of that.
The fish that swim in the water
are part of the lifeblood of
the Great Lakes region.
The fishery in the Great Lakes
is unique.
This is a way of connecting
son and daughter to dad, mom.
Great Lakes fishing
is first described in documents
dating to the 17th century,
when European explorers first
saw Indigenous people
catch tremendous quantities
of fish.
We have a relationship
with fish.
We survive because of these
relationships.
And these relationships
we can think of them with fish,
but also with the water,
with the air,
with the medicine plants.
All of creation.
So to us,
the importance of fishing
is part of that full
relationship with
the natural world.
For most of history,
people simply assumed that
the Great Lakes
were so vast and packed
with fish
that there would always
be plenty to catch.
But by the 1950s,
everything had changed.
The fish most important to
people were nearly gone.
The fish disappeared.
No one could explain it,
let alone fix it.
Whether you were in
Lake Ontario, or Lake Superior,
or everywhere in between,
it was dire.
From small towns up
to major cities,
it was people's livelihoods.
Short on hope,
some remarkable people
tackled the mystery.
Their odd discovery still
menaces the Great Lakes today.
Their battle against it
dramatically changed
how people from all walks
of life connect with these
freshwater seas.
People fish the Great
Lakes for different reasons.
Recreational fishing,
commercial fishing,
and subsistence fishing
are three very different types
of fishing, and all of them are
incredibly important
to both the history
and current realities
of the Great Lakes.
People began fishing
to survive long before the
first Europeans arrived.
The Anishinaabe people,
or the Chippewa,
bands that are in the area,
were a nomadic people.
For subsistence, they would
go out from shore and fish.
Along the shores of
Lake Superior,
they would harvest
primarily in the fall
when the whitefish or the lake
trout would come in to spawn.
The subsistence fishery provides
food to the family.
It's very important.
Subsistence fishing is
fishing for survival.
Sport fishing is more
for personal enjoyment.
From the 16th century on,
European immigrants poured into
the Great Lakes region,
and many brought
a passion for fishing.
Freshwater fishing had been
a recreational pastime
in Europe for centuries,
and a status symbol among elites
who fished for salmon, trout,
whitefish, and other
freshwater varieties.
Long before Columbus stumbled
upon the New World,
overfishing threatened lakes
and rivers across Europe,
and nobles blocked access
to prime fishing spots.
Things only worsened.
When the first European
military officers
and entrepreneurs arrived in
the Great Lakes region,
they found its tremendous
abundance
of freshwater brimming with
fish species
they favored back home.
One type of fish proved
especially enticing.
Each fall, Atlantic salmon
leave the open sea
to spawn in rivers from
Scandinavia to Spain,
and anglers have stocked
them for centuries.
They also move up
the St. Lawrence River
into Lake Ontario,
crowding into tributary
rivers to spawn.
As the European immigrant
population on its shores grew,
more and more people
targeted them.
By one account, the haul
on the North Shore in 1820
was so plentiful that,
The impressive hauls
drew other immigrants
to Lake Ontario,
who launched a boom in
another type of fishing.
Great Lakes
commercial fishing, I would
say it's always been here.
We'd always been getting fish
that we traded with each other,
that we traded with
other people.
Fishing was part of our economy.
Not a cash economy, necessarily,
but certainly an economy
of barter and trade.
Non-native people came
into the area.
They decided to figure out how
they could capitalize on it.
From the time of European
settlement in the region,
the commercial fishery
was also a major component
of the economy.
It's one reason why people
came to the region.
Salmon was fished heavily
in Lake Ontario.
They would use seine nets
along the shoreline,
across shore and bay areas
of the lakes.
As cities expanded,
spawning streams were dammed to
power gristmills and sawmills.
And commercial fishing boomed
with the swelling population.
So people used bigger
and bigger nets,
capable of snaring scores
of fish at a time.
So these were fishing operations
that reached back deeply,
deeply into the colonial period.
And the colonial period is ripe
with stories of dam building
and water diversions
and innumerable
environmental changes
that absolutely devastated
fish populations.
By 1860, Lake Ontario's
Atlantic salmon were gone.
Commercial fishermen at
the time,
simply looked at the lake
as a bounty.
They had never seen
freshwater resources
of the size and breadth
of the Great Lakes,
and they were viewed as
an inexhaustible resource.
By the time
Lake Ontario's Atlantic salmon
fishery collapsed,
European immigrants
fished every Great Lake.
The commercial fishing industry,
during the 19th
and 20th century,
was significant and embedded
throughout the Great Lakes.
Commercial fishing was
intricately tied
to the development of
the entire Great Lakes region
as we know it today.
Nowhere compared to Lake Erie.
It sat at the heart of
America's industrial boom.
Smelters, refineries,
and factories packed
the waterfronts
of its lake-shore cities,
transforming raw materials
into products
bound for East Coast
cities and Europe.
Workers from around the world
flooded into the region.
And commercial fishing boomed
to help feed the exploding
population.
At the dawn of the 20th century,
more than 100 million pounds
of fish were hauled from
Lake Erie's shallow
depths each year.
The commercial fishery
of Lake Erie targeted
a variety of fish species,
but most important
to that commercial fishery
was lake herring.
They were actually
ciscoes, or chorogonus artidae.
The reason why they got the
name herring is because
in the Atlantic Ocean there's
a native herring species
that's marine,
or salt water, and they have a
similar role that they play
as the herring in
the Great Lakes,
even though they're entirely
different species.
The fishing industries
around Lake Erie were built
on lake herring.
The shipping of fish,
the processing of fish...
It allowed cities to
be built near the water,
both in Ontario and the U.S.
When the Lake Erie cisco
fishery is at its height,
the commercial fishing
industry is experiencing
a lot of the same developments
that are taking place
in manufacturing.
Schooners are becoming
fish tugs.
Nets aren't being pulled out of
the water by hand anymore.
There are steam lifters.
You have these
technologies emerging,
and you have people learning
to use these technologies
in a very heavily
extractive way.
Lake Erie is much more
industrialized,
much more capitalized,
and much more resource-intensive
than the commercial fishery
was in Lake Ontario.
It's the same industry
with nicer mechanics.
In 1924, more than
32 million pounds of herring
were hauled from Lake Erie.
A year later, the catch crashed
to little more than 5 million
pounds and kept falling.
Everyone blamed everyone else.
No one had any idea what
happened to these fish.
All of a sudden,
there were no fish for those
fishermen to catch.
And this had huge ramifications,
well, for the economy.
It was really an impetus
for full-scale Great Lakes
science to begin.
Science into those fisheries
and what was going on.
We see a real investment,
particularly on the U.S. side,
from the U.S. Bureau of
Fisheries,
clearly driven by the economic
importance and value
of the fishery.
Otherwise, this investment
would not have been made.
The Bureau of Fisheries
opened a research laboratory
in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Its first director was the
fisheries biologist,
John Van Oosten.
He started out more or less
as a troubleshooter
for complaints that fishermen
had about particular stocks.
He really tried to find out
what was causing grief
to the fishermen
and to correct it.
Lab scientists began
to investigate a range
of potential causes,
from toxic dumping by
the region's factories
and chemical plants
to whether fishing nets
k*lled too many small fish
before they reached
reproductive age.
While scientists focused
on Lake Erie,
the markets moved their focus
to the upper lakes,
Lake Michigan, Lake Huron,
Lake Superior.
The commercial operations
were widespread throughout
the Great Lakes.
As you moved up the lakes,
you moved more into whitefish
and lake trout.
Lake trout are
the natural top-level predator
that once ruled all
the Great Lakes.
The largest ever taken
weighed 102 pounds.
The lake trout's probably
the most important
species of fish in
the Great Lakes.
They were a great
commercial fish.
They're large,
they yield a lot of flesh,
they're a really good return
on investment for fishermen.
It was just too easy to throw
a net in the water,
and pull money out.
That was far too easy.
Mark Rude's family
came to Minnesota from Norway
and began fishing
Lake Superior a century ago.
By the time I was 12 years old,
I was involved with going
out on the lake
and working with the boats,
maybe helping to clean fish.
By the time I was 14,
I was taking one of the boats
and going out and doing
the nets myself.
Lake trout were what
everybody was looking for.
Way back in the old days
why, fat lake trout, or as
they're called up there,
siscowets, were desired.
Ralph Wilcox grew up fishing
Lake Superior's Whitefish Bay.
They got a lot of
names for them.
They're deepwater trout,
they're siscowets,
they're a lot of things,
you know, fat trout.
There's about 10 or 12
different varieties
Grandpa and Dad used to
say out there.
It depends on your habitat
where you catch them.
They'd all look alike,
when you put your nets
in a particular area.
You move your nets
a little ways away,
now you're liable to get fish
that looked entirely different,
still lake trout.
Manitoulin Island sits across
Lake Huron's North Channel
from the rest of Ontario.
George Purvis' family
launched a commercial
fishing business here
five generations ago.
We started here
in the late 1800s.
The fish were mainly lake trout.
From the early 1900s,
where I have records,
the catch of lake trout
was approximately
350,000 to 450,000 pound a year.
A couple of times it made
500,000 pound.
Most towns on
Lake Huron's shores date
to the logging era
when timber companies built
lakeside sawmills to process
and ship white pine
from the forests
covering the region.
When the big cut or
the harvesting of timber,
which was central to that
northern part of the Midwest,
depleted the resources
and moved out of the area
and many of those companies
relocated to the south,
the commercial fishing
industry remained
a viable economic
alternative for people
that needed work and resources
in the region.
My Grandmother Mertz,
who lived in Rogers City,
owned part of the fishery
and her sons,
Clarence, Lawrence, and Louis,
my father, fished trap nets.
My dad was fishing down
in the Harbor Beach area
in 1934 when he drowned.
And then my mother took over
the fishing business.
My mother had no babysitter.
I grew up on that boat
'cause she worked on the boat
as well as my sister.
We had eight deep trap
nets that we put in
the straits here.
We used to catch a lot of trout.
Lake Huron's fish
weren't immune to problems.
Lake Trout and all three
of the upper Great Lakes
underwent long-term declines.
The trajectory of decline
steepened dramatically.
Stock collapses reached a point
where the commercial fishermen
basically had to either
quit or move.
Different types of fishermen
are fishing
different types of gear,
and it's their fault.
It's not my fault.
But then they also start talking
to their legislators,
you know,
their members of parliament
or their representatives,
and say,
"Hey, you know,
our entire community
is based on this fishery.
If we don't do something about
it, it's going to disappear."
On the U.S. side,
those politicians looked to
John Van Oosten
and the Ann Arbor Federal
Fisheries Lab for answers.
As the Lake Huron fisheries
declined toward collapse,
fisheries biologists led by
John Van Oosten recognized
that they were seeing a replay
of population declines
that had already taken place in
Lake Erie and earlier in
Lake Ontario.
Van Oosten's being paid
by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries.
He's not really looking
at fish for fish's sake
and the ecosystem,
but he's really trying to
get to the bottom of what
is happening to these
valuable species
and, you know, what can we do to
return them to their
abundance and sustain them.
Van Oosten knew
the Lake Huron catch
was declining,
but the sudden crash just
didn't add up.
After all, Lake Huron was
different from Lake Ontario
and Lake Erie.
Far fewer dams blocked
spawning streams,
and there were no major
industrial cities on its shores
with factories heavily
polluting the water.
Lumbering was the big industry
on Lake Huron,
and floating logs downstream
and across the lake
had destroyed spawning habitat.
But that wasn't anything new.
Like lakes Ontario and Erie,
overfishing was the most
obvious culprit.
It finally led to direct
involvement by federal, state,
and local political
bodies to come
together and try to address
the loss of these resources.
There was a treaty
proposed in 1946,
it gave regulatory power to
a binational commission.
Managing this
binational resource means
we have to think about things
like limiting the catch and the
size of fish that you can take
and how many you can take
and what gear you can use
and those are all sort of
regulatory kinds of decisions.
John van Oosten believed
strongly in regulations
and saw them as a way
of maintaining
the financial viability
of these fish stocks that
were being overfished.
They then ran into the very
organized political resistance
of the commercial fishing
industries themselves.
Political and elected officials
were not always in agreement,
especially after the New Deal
when some were still
you know chafing
from the great expansion
of the federal government.
Cross-border regulations were
not going to be issued.
Consistent regulations
were not in the cards.
As things went from
bad to worse on Lake Huron,
word reached van Oosten
about a curious development.
On a bright spring day,
some young people hiked
to a waterfall on
the Ocqueoc River
near Rogers City, Michigan.
They arrived to find their
favorite swimming hole swarming
with strange eel-like creatures.
They hurried back to
town and told a game
warden what they saw.
The news reminded
John van Oosten of
another strange incident.
Alexander Crewe and his
brothers lived on Lake Erie's
Ontario shore.
On the morning of
November 8th, 1921,
Crewe and his helper motored
to one of several nets
he and his brothers left staked
into the lake bottom.
As they filled box after
box with whitefish,
something odd occurred.
They came across a truly
bizarre creature.
None of them in the boat had
ever seen anything like this.
Alexander Crewe lifted
up the fish
with this creature attached,
ripped it off the fish,
and put it in a jar and
sent it to the University of
Toronto to be analyzed.
The creature was identified
as Petromyzon marinus,
the sea lamprey,
a creature that's native
to the Atlantic Ocean
and not supposed to be in
the Great Lakes.
We have four species of native
lamprey in the Great Lakes.
Sea lampreys are wildly
different than our native
lamprey species.
They grow two to three times
the size of a native lamprey.
Sea lamprey were
known to be in Lake Ontario,
but Crewe caught the first
one ever found in another
Great Lake.
To understand how remarkable
that was,
it helps to know something
about Great Lakes geography.
The Great Lakes region holds
one-fifth of Earth's surface
freshwater.
The Great Lakes are really
one big system
and arguably one big slow-motion
river flowing out to
the Atlantic Ocean.
Rivers connect the Great Lakes.
The most famous landmark along
a connecting waterway is
Niagara Falls,
over which water from Lake Erie
cascades almost 200 feet
en route to Lake Ontario.
Nature split the Great Lakes
into two distinct aquatic
ecosystems.
Fish and other aquatic
creatures migrated freely
from Lake Superior to Lake Erie.
They also migrated between Lake
Ontario and the Atlantic Ocean.
But Niagara Falls was
an impassable barrier.
Niagara Falls would have
stopped anything from
getting into Lake Erie.
Nothing could make it
over those massive falls.
At least before
Alexander Crewe's odd catch.
Crewe caught his sea lamprey
200 miles upstream
of Niagara Falls.
Despite the curious location,
no one paid much
attention to it.
The sea lamprey wasn't seen as
being particularly dangerous
when it first appeared.
Six years passed
before another sea lamprey
turned up in Lake Erie.
And this time latched onto
a whitefish near Sandusky,
Ohio in Lake Erie.
John Van Oosten himself went
to confirm this sea lamprey
sighting.
He'd studied reports
about damage they'd caused
in Lake Ontario
and New York's Finger Lakes.
One report from 1897
called sea lamprey...
Having fastened itself,
it rasps away with the saw-like
teeth on its tongue
until it has worn through
the thick skin or scales
of its victim.
Then it has nothing to do but
to remain attached to the fish
and be carried around by it,
sucking blood when it's hungry
and occasionally rasping away
at its raw flesh,
making the hole deeper
and deeper,
if its victim has any
blood left.
Or if not,
it seeks another fish.
They're very primitive,
jawless fish that resemble eels.
But unlike eels,
they don't have paired fins,
jaws, or bony skeletons.
Lampreys are native
to the Atlantic Ocean.
They co-evolved there with
much larger host-species,
attaching to hosts that are far
larger than anything we have
in the Great Lakes.
So, in the Atlantic Ocean,
they act as parasites.
In fact, they're imperiled
in the Atlantic Ocean.
In the Great Lakes,
they are much larger than their
hosts in a relevant sense.
And when they attach
to the host,
they actually serve more
as a predator than a parasite.
There were some individuals that
were very alarmed at the start.
They were the ones that actually
knew the most about
the sea lamprey.
John Van Oosten was one of them.
He knew that the swarming
mass at the Ocqueoc Falls
swimming hole
could spell catastrophe for
the already struggling fishing
families on Lake Huron.
But ten years had passed
since he identified the
Sandusky sea lamprey,
and no more had been reported
until the previous year,
when a skipper walked
into the Milwaukee Museum
carrying one attached to
a Lake Michigan lake trout
he'd caught.
As the fish swims,
logically you would
think the next step for
the invasion would be
through the Detroit River
into Lake Huron
and maybe through the Straits
of Mackinaw, around that area.
That is not at all what happened
and it's quite strange.
The next lamprey that was
detected was found all
the way over
in Lake Michigan near Milwaukee.
It shocked everyone at the time,
and no one could explain
how this jump happened.
A museum biologist,
T.E.B. Pope identified it
as the first sea lamprey
found in a Great Lake
upstream of Lake Erie.
Pope alerted the noted
ichthyologist Carl Hubbs
who helped him pen an article
delivering an ominous warning.
John Van Oosten
asked the Michigan Department
of Conservation
to have its game wardens look
out for them in other streams.
Another squirming horde
spotted near a cider mill
in Rochester, Michigan,
20 miles inland
from the nearest
Great Lakes waterway,
confirmed his worst fears
that something
alarming was underway.
As the wriggling
creatures were spotted
in more and more tributaries,
fishing families began
seeing a new kind of carnage.
The first sea lamprey
that they saw here,
apparently they say they
brought it to shore in 1934.
They played with it, thought
this was a real oddity,
and didn't know what
to think of this thing.
By 1944, the fish were dead
on the bottom of the lake,
especially in the fall
when they were spawning.
If you swept your nets a
bit on the bottom when
you're pulling them up,
it tugs and stinks so bad,
you couldn't stand
to be on the boat from
all the big fish laying
on the bottom.
I was about seven when I saw
my first sea lamprey
on a whitefish,
and I remember workers
on the boat told me
that was going to be my job
to take care of those,
and so I had
the knife in my hand
and I cut that sea lamprey
in about four or five pieces
before he threw it back in.
So that was that.
The Michigan
Department of Conservation
built a device on the Ocqueoc
River to trap sea lamprey
and gauge the size of the
spring spawning run there.
They caught over 3,400
spawning phase sea lampreys.
The Great Lakes Basin has
thousands of tributaries,
so 3,400 sea lampreys in one
small river like the Ocqueoc,
that's a huge red flag.
This was looking like a massive
infestation for the Great Lakes.
But why Lake Huron?
Two great lakes lie between
the sea lamprey's
natural habitat,
the Atlantic Ocean,
and Lake Huron.
Why didn't sea lamprey cause
a similar level of
destruction there?
The sea lamprey needs
access to high-quality water
upstream in every
river where it spawns.
It was in Lake Ontario
for quite a while,
did do a lot of
damage initially.
Its spawning habitat
was really depreciated.
If you look at old maps,
you'll see that
every river had 10, 12,
15 mill dams on it.
The next lake it got
in was Lake Erie.
A lot of the Lake Erie
streams, they were polluted.
They were marginal
for the sea lamprey
to really expand its population.
The lake trout, which
was the primary prey,
was already essentially
gone from Lake Erie.
It exploded in Lake Huron next.
In 1940, more
than 2,726,000 pounds
of lake trout were caught in
Lake Huron and Georgian Bay.
By 1946, the catch had dropped
to only 760,000 pounds
and kept falling.
By 1944, the lake trout
were pretty well gone,
and then we started fishing
whitefish on a regular basis
to try to make a go of it.
When we fished out here,
especially in the fall,
we would get a washtub full
of lamprey every day
attached to the whitefish,
and it was really bad.
We would just see all the fish
on the bottom of the lake dead
with the lamprey marks on them
and it was pretty obvious
what was gonna happen,
that it wasn't going to
be only a matter of time.
The late 1940s is
when we start seeing
lamprey mentioned at
congressional hearings
and parliamentary debates.
Fred Bradley,
the congressman representing
Rogers City, Michigan,
persuaded his colleagues
to hold a hearing about
the catastrophe
devastating Great Lakes
commercial fishing.
The head of the Michigan
Fish Producers Association
testified before
the House Committee.
Even some of the most diehard
anti New Deal-ers out there
would say in the
congressional hearings
that there is no way we're
gonna tackle the lamprey problem
until we work across borders
and we have
the federal government
with its resources step
in to deal with the problem.
The hearings convinced Congress
to fund research on ways
to control sea lamprey
in the Great Lakes.
The allocation was a mere
$20,000 per year for 10 years,
the equivalent of about 270,000
per year in current dollars.
John Van Oosten's federal
lab led the effort.
Van Oosten understood
that no one had a clue
about how to control
sea lamprey, and that
had to change.
He needed someone tenacious
with innovative research skills
and a dogged attention to detail
to discover their
vulnerabilities.
A University of Michigan
graduate student caught
Van Oosten's attention.
Vernon Applegate grew
up in Queens, New York,
and served in the army
during World w*r II.
His mil-spec discipline
and determination
impressed Van Oosten
who offered him
the chance to earn his PhD
by developing the intel needed
to wage w*r on sea lamprey.
Vern Applegate is
a big part of this story.
He's a pioneer researcher
in the sea lamprey world.
Van Oosten sent
Applegate to Rogers City
to set up shop at a former
Depression-era
Civilian Conservation Corps camp
with an earshot of
the Ocqueoc River.
He tapped its ready
supply of sea lamprey
to launch the most
detailed study ever made
on the animal's lifecycle.
Vern Applegate was
a relentless researcher
and a hard worker.
It was actually said he lived
on cigarettes and coffee.
He applied a military
mindset to his new mission.
Applegate assembled
a team of conservation
workers and locals.
Cliff Kortman hired
on as a handyman.
I come here and asked
for a job and Dr. Applegate
gave me a job.
So I stayed on for 33 years.
Over the next three years,
Applegate's team measured
the sea lamprey invasion
and studied the organism's
behavior and spawning streams.
In December 1949, Applegate
delivered an alarming report.
Where the first
Ocqueoc River weir
caught 3,466 adult sea
lamprey migrating upstream,
five years later, new weirs
there trapped more than 24,000.
Commercial fishing
families were only too aware.
When the sea lamprey come along,
we were running two gill net
tugs and a trap net operation.
As the fish got fewer and fewer,
we had to go down to one
boat, lay off two crews.
We stopped fishing
entirely in the mid-'50s.
Whole operations of commercial
fishing boats moved
through the straits
into Lake Michigan,
and then they contributed
to an already
serious decline there
by adding even
more fishing effort
and mortality onto those stocks.
And then some of
the fishing operations
moved over to Lake Superior.
Stuart Sivertson's family
was already well
established there.
My grandfather came here
with two brothers in 1892.
He came to Duluth
emigrating from Norway.
He was in it for good.
I don't think he ever did
anything other than fishing.
And they learned about
opportunities at Isle Royale
and he raised
children who wound up
getting involved in the
commercial fishing industry.
They managed to garner
a fairly large fraction
of the catch from Isle Royale.
We first heard about the lamprey
at Isle Royale in the 1940s.
This terrible thing had
happened in Lake Michigan
where the annual
catches of lake trout
had gone from 6 million pounds
annually to 400 pounds
within a stretch of
about three years,
A catastrophe has been visited
upon these fisheries
by the invasion
of a voracious marine predator.
Commercial catches
diminished as this parasite
multiplied in
unbelievable numbers.
And then tragically
and abruptly,
the lake trout fisheries
of Lakes Huron and Michigan
collapsed completely as the
fish all but disappeared
from the fishermen's nets.
We were warned by fishermen
from down on the lower lakes.
I remember, as a youngster,
seeing a magazine.
It was Stag magazine
that had a picture
of a fellow staggering out of
the waters of Lake Michigan
with lampreys
hanging on his chest
and a horrified
look on his face.
Newspapers dubbed sea lamprey
"Dracula of the Lakes,"
spreading the hysteria.
The question was,
is this problem gonna hit us
here in Lake Superior?
We were at a loss as to
what we were going to do.
Vernon Applegate presented
his doctoral
dissertation in 1950,
providing the first
scientific description
of the sea lamprey's
remarkable life cycle
in the Great Lakes.
It all begins when lake
water warms in the spring
and adult sea lampreys
venture from deep open water
to gather near shore,
where streams drain the land.
They anxiously roam there
until the water warms
to just the right temperature,
signaling optimum
conditions for procreation.
Then, under the
cover of darkness,
the lampreys move inland,
squirming their way
upstream in search
of suitable river beds where
they spend days building nests.
Once all is ready, males and
females move onto the nests
and intertwine in wriggling
embraces that mix male sperm
with tens of thousands of
eggs released by each female.
Their writhing kicks
up small pebbles
and sand grains from the nest
to which a sticky substance
on each egg's surface adheres.
The pebbles and
sand carry each egg
back into the nest,
anchoring them there.
Lamprey repeat
their mating dances
again and again over
the course of a day or two.
Then with nothing left
to give, they die.
Within two weeks,
hatchlings appear.
Lamprey larvae are
called ammocoetes.
The lampreys live
as harmless larvae
in the tributaries
and filter microscopic
organisms from the water
as feed
and grow from almost
microscopic size
up to about five to six inches.
You'd never know they're there,
but hundreds of thousands
of larval sea lamprey
can live under the muck
in an infested river.
After about four
years, ammocoetes metamorphose
into free-swimming juveniles
called transformers.
Their mouths become
spiny fish clamps,
and their digestive tracts
convert to handle
different food.
When these changes complete,
transformers migrate
to open water
and enter what Vern Applegate
called the lake phase.
They're now
fish-seeking missiles,
ready to spend up to 18
months latching onto fish
and draining them of
their bodily fluids.
Each lamprey can destroy
40 pounds of fish
in about 12 to 18 months while
they're out there feeding
in the Great Lakes.
So in a very short
period of time,
you can have huge
numbers of lamprey
and each lamprey is
k*lling or devastating
a large amount of fish.
After serving their destructive
term of gluttony, lamprey
answer nature's springtime call
to move shoreward and
await the water temperature
green light to head into streams
and pass the torch
to a new generation.
Vern Applegate's studies
learning the natural history
of the sea lamprey to look for
the points in the life cycle
where control could be feasible,
that was critical.
When Applegate
delivered his dissertation,
few lake trout remained in
Lake Huron and Lake Michigan.
Economic losses
have been severe.
On Lakes Huron and Michigan,
entire fleets have been tied up.
Equipment and buildings have
been abandoned to the elements.
How did such
a destructive invader
get past Niagara Falls?
Most blame the Welland Canal,
which bypasses the falls,
lifting ocean-going
vessels more than 200 feet
from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie.
The canal opened
for shipping in 1829,
so if it's to blame,
why did almost a century pass
before Alexander Crewe
caught the first sea Lamprey
known to have entered Lake Erie?
Today's Welland Canal
is not the first configuration.
The Welland Canal
was not much more
than a glorified
ditch in the 1800s,
and it was fed
from a water source
in the middle of the
Niagara Escarpment
and created the Welland Canal
channel that split two ways,
so there was no unified flow
through the canal from
Lake Erie into Lake Ontario.
When the canal was upgraded
to handle larger vessels,
the original water source
proved incapable of providing
the increased flow required.
Engineers tapped Lake Erie,
whose water began
flowing downstream
through the entire canal.
For sea lamprey, that
made all the difference.
Sea lampreys are
programmed adaptively
to move into rivers through
something called positive
rheotaxis.
What a lamprey does is feels
the current with its face
and it instinctively
swims upstream.
After the turn of the century,
when that Welland Canal was
modified, deepened,
and began to flow from Lake Erie
directly into Lake Ontario,
we essentially turned that
canal into one giant river.
Sea lampreys
moved through into Lake Erie
and just continued
right upstream
through connecting
channels from lake to lake
and up the thousands
of tributaries
that feed those Great Lakes.
The economic devastation
spurred the US Congress
to approve emergency funds
to expand the fight
against sea lamprey.
A lot more changed that year.
John Van Oosten retired
and turned the Ann Arbor
Federal Lab over
to James Moffet,
who shifted focus from
studying sea lamprey
to finding ways
to eradicate them.
He hired Applegate
to lead the as*ault
and laid claim to an abandoned
US lifesaving service
lifeboat station on
Lake Huron's Hammond Bay,
near the mouth of
the Ocqueoc River,
where Applegate devised
a new battle plan.
Prevention of spawning through
the blocking of the stream,
the destruction
of larva lampreys
before they emerge from
the mud and silt flats,
and the destruction of
the newly transformed migrants
on their way to the lake.
Of the three approaches,
the first
and third appear to offer
the greatest promise.
He focused on those.
When they found a stream
teaming with lamprey larvae
they built barriers there.
They started
mechanical weirs first,
fences across the stream,
and then the cart
worked on those fences
and they were
stopping the lamprey.
All it would take
would one breakdown,
and if it occurred
during a spawning run,
you had a spawning population
of lampreys upstream.
Mechanical
barriers came up short,
so Applegate tried
something else.
These were
the electrified barriers.
It was his big ticket idea,
almost like a silver b*llet
that he thought was gonna save
the Great Lakes fisheries.
Crews strung
gauntlets of electrodes
from bank to bank powered
by a gas generator.
There was a world
of problems with these.
That electrified field wasn't
selective against any type
of fish or animal whatsoever.
Anything that got into
that electrical current
would be shocked and k*lled.
They quickly realized
that these were not
gonna be the silver b*llet they
thought they were gonna be.
Mechanical
or electrical barriers
didn't validate
Applegate's first strategy,
so he devised versions
to test the third.
But catching
transforming lamprey,
moving from streams to
the lake didn't work either.
Three years in, commercial
fishing on four of the five
Great Lakes was all but dead,
and Applegate still had no
way to stop sea lamprey.
Some in Congress grumbled
that it was a hopeless
waste of money,
but James Moffet
refused to surrender.
Moffet shifted focus away
from blocking those migrating
adult sea lampreys and over
to the larval sea lampreys
that were living
burrowed in the stream.
At the time, there was a lot
of new technologies
coming forth,
especially in
the chemistry world.
There had been chemicals
used for pest species,
things like
controlling mosquitoes
or controlling toxic
invasive plants.
But really nothing had
ever been discovered
to selectively k*ll
a vertebrate animal before.
Moffet backed the research
of a University of
Michigan doctoral student
named Philip Sawyer
to try something new.
He set up shop at Hammond Bay.
They helped him set up a little
bioassay station all to himself.
What Philip Sawyer
did was to look at
all kinds of groups of chemicals
that might have selective
toxicity to lampreys.
He found that some of
the chemicals he was testing
were k*lling lamprey before
the other creatures in his jars,
and he also noticed that they
had this weird nitrophenol
group to them.
So he was starting to put
together these patterns.
Sawyer moved
to the East coast
after earning his doctorate,
but his work with
chemicals showed promise.
So Moffet and Applegate
transformed Hammond Bay
into a full-blown
chemical research lab.
It was a tremendous long shot
to try to find this chemical
that would selectively k*ll
sea lamprey without harming
other aquatic animals and
organisms in the stream.
It also couldn't harm animals
that drink from those streams.
It couldn't interfere
with crop irrigation,
human activity in those
streams, people swimming.
It had to be completely safe
and selective to
k*lling sea lamprey.
They followed
Philip Sawyer's lead
using 10-liter glass jars.
They would fill 'em
with five liters of water.
I'd weigh up the chemical
and put in each jar,
and we'd put two larvae
and two fish in each one,
and then every hour
on the hour, we took
the observation
and most of the time,
it'd k*ll the fish it didn't
k*ll the sea lamprey.
We simply tested any chemical
that would dissolve in water.
Chemical after
chemical was tested,
but 1953 ended without
reason for hope.
After more grueling work,
1954 did, too.
1955 was more of the same.
The number of chemicals tested
climbed into the thousands.
Meanwhile, lake trout fishing
was officially declared dead
on lakes Michigan and Huron,
and Lake Superior
showed troubling signs.
Grandfather and his
brother and my dad
fished long lines
for Lake Trout.
Lampreys started showing up
and all of a sudden the trout
that you were getting
up were so ate up
that buyers in Detroit,
Chicago where they would ship
most of them, didn't want
'em all marked up like that.
It went downhill so fast just
in a three or four year period
that you went from catching
a ton or ton and a half
of lake trout in
a day right down to
catching hardly nothing
the next spring.
My mother and father
would write regularly back
and forth when he
was at Isle Royale.
It was the only
communication available.
There was no telephone
or radio at that time.
I remember seeing my
mother crying one day
while she was reading
a letter from my dad,
and I asked her what was wrong,
and she said, "The lamprey
have reached Isle Royale."
It turned out to be
the beginning of the end
of the Lake Trout fishery for
many families at Isle Royale
and along the North Shore
and throughout all
of Lake Superior.
The fishery was collapsing.
The economic results
were terrible,
and the condition of
the resource was appalling.
There was no end in sight.
Hammond Bay
technicians soldiered on.
After nearly four years
of frustrating work,
a Dow Chemical company
product named Dowlap
finally showed promise.
The team tested it in
a stream near the lab.
It k*lled nearly 96%
of the sea lamprey
in the stream without
harming any other organisms.
But it proved to
only be effective
in really large concentrations.
So you just needed too much
of it to get the job done.
So Cliff Kortman
weighed scores more chemicals
and lab technicians tested
them in glass containers.
While Applegate and the
Hammond Bay chemistry team
searched for a miracle,
James Moffet worked
on Congress.
He had help from commercial
fishing industry leaders
and a growing number of
legislators in Congress
and the Canadian Parliament.
In 1955, after years
of stubborn resistance,
the United States Congress
and Canadian Parliament
ratified a bilateral agreement
establishing the Great
Lakes Fishery Commission.
The two nations formally
joined forces to eradicate
or minimize sea
lamprey populations
and ensure
the maximum productivity
of fish of common concern
to the two countries.
Though it really took 'til we
were in pretty dire straits
to get sort of a milieu,
or a time
where US and Canada
could come together
on the Convention for
Great Lakes Fisheries,
and even then, the fishery
commission that was created
under that convention is not
given regulatory authority.
They're given authority to
manage sea lamprey populations,
but they don't have
any authority over
managing any other fish.
In 1957,
five years into the search,
Cliff Kortman weighed
another nitro-group compound
used to make color dyes
for the textile, print
and paint industries.
It surprised him.
Where Dowlap was
k*lling sea lamprey
at a concentration of
around 13 parts per million,
the new chemical
was k*lling sea lamprey
at around two parts
per million,
so substantially less,
and it was significantly
more selective
at k*lling those sea lamprey.
Its name was a mouthful.
...so the Hammond Bay crew
dubbed it TFM for short.
On May 14th, 1958,
James Moffett
and Vern Applegate
watched the first
application of TFM
in Michigan's Mosquito River.
It gave off a vivid
yellowish-green color
when it was applied
to the river,
which made it easy to analyze
so that we knew what
their concentrations were.
They placed mesh cylinders
filled with sea-lamprey
larvae downstream
to measure how the
chemical's k*lling power
diminished as it traveled.
Inside the cylinders,
all of the larval
sea-lamprey were dead,
all the way downstream,
so they knew right away
that they had something
big going on here.
The first test worked
better than anticipated,
prompting a second on another
Lake Superior tributary.
Again, it exceeded expectations.
The team applied TFM
to eight more Lake Superior
tributaries that fall.
In 1959, a full decade after
Vern Applegate began,
the strategy he assumed
least promising,
attacking larvae in streams,
looked like it might succeed.
And the Great Lakes
Fishery Commission
approved an all-out as*ault.
Everyone focused
on Lake Superior
at the beginning of
sea lamprey control,
because lake trout had not
disappeared completely.
There were remnant populations
scattered around the lake,
unlike Lake Michigan and Lake
Huron, where they were,
for all intents and purposes,
were gone completely.
Hammond Bay teams
applied TFM to 28 streams
on the American side
of Lake Superior...
While Canadian teams
treated nine streams
on their side of the lake.
When winter ended the first
round of TFM applications,
the Great Lakes Fishery
Commission faced a decision.
Their impact on the
sea lamprey population
couldn't be assessed
for two years.
That's how long any larvae
that survived the treatment
and transformed into adults
would be in open water
before returning to the
treated streams to spawn.
Should the Commission
suspend treatments
until their effectiveness
was confirmed?
Or should they continue
the full-scale attack?
They forged ahead.
By the end of the
following autumn,
American and Canadian
teams applied TFM
to all Lake Superior tributaries
infested with sea
lamprey larvae,
as well as some streams
flowing into Lake
Michigan and Lake Huron.
The early results were
far from encouraging.
Instead of dropping,
the spawning run count
the following spring
almost doubled.
They were still
catching huge amounts
of migrating sea lampreys,
and some chalked this up to,
"Well, maybe there
are tributaries we
don't know about yet.
reproduction that's happening
in rivers that we're not in,"
others chalked it up to the fact
that we just aren't
k*lling enough,
and this just wasn't gonna work.
Undeterred,
the Commission relied
on Moffett's and
Applegate's assurances
that the story would be
different the following year.
Eighteen months later, when the
Great Lakes Fishery Commission
met at Ottawa, Ontario,
the future of Great Lakes
fishing hung in the balance.
If hordes of adult sea
lamprey had returned
to treated spawning
streams again,
the 13-year battle to
save Great Lakes fish
would be a failure...
And a fundamental aspect of life
deeply rooted in the
history of the region
would likely be lost forever.
The Commission chairman
took the microphone.
TFM devastated
the sea lamprey population.
And there were no reports of
harm to people or animals.
The first spawning runs
after the initial treatments
demonstrated, without a doubt,
that the lampreys had been
reduced in significant numbers.
TFM accomplished
the Great Lakes Fishery
Commission's first mission,
to control sea lamprey,
freeing it to focus
on its second.
Sea-lamprey control was
the necessary first step
to restore
the Great Lakes fishery.
Without lamprey control,
fish in the lakes would
not have a fighting chance
to survive old
enough to reproduce,
or to be caught by humans,
or to lead a natural
life in the system.
Government-run fish
hatcheries had been
around since the 1800s,
and most people assumed
that hatchery-raised fish
would restore things to
how they were before
sea lamprey arrived.
After sea lamprey
control proved effective,
officials looked to
hatcheries once again.
The general assumption
was that the native fish
were gonna be restored
to revive these commercial
fisheries that were at
the docks and idle.
Lake trout were
the principle focus
of all of the effort to
restore fish populations
after sea lamprey control
was proven to be effective.
The idea was to put the native
species back in the lake,
and hopefully, that would
lead the whole system
back towards its original state.
The effort invested
in lake trout recovery
is probably the largest-scale
species recovery program ever.
It exceeds, by quite a margin,
the amount of federal
effort invested
in any other species-recovery
in the country.
From the start,
there were problems.
No matter how many lake
trout they planted,
the populations in
Lake Huron and Lake Michigan
just wouldn't increase.
Sea lamprey weren't
targeting young lake trout,
because they really can't
target that small a fish,
something else was going on.
In the midst of being optimistic
about sea lamprey control,
we got invaded by another
species in the Great Lakes.
The alewife is a small prey fish
native to the Atlantic Ocean
that first appeared above
Niagara Falls in 1931.
From there, it spread to
Lakes Huron and Michigan,
catching the public's attention
when mounds of smelly dead fish
washed ashore in
the early 1960s.
I remember, all up
and down Lake Michigan,
no one was going to the beach,
no one could could go swimming.
It turned what was, you know,
paradise into hell, basically.
Sea lampreys
facilitated alewives
by eliminating predators that
might have stood in the way
of alewives, or at least,
impeded their progress.
95-or-more percent of
all the fish biomass
in Lake Michigan was alewives.
They kind of threw our plans
for lake trout restoration
a curve ball, because they
turned out to be not that great
for lake trout either.
Alewives are a double-edged
sword for lake trout.
When lake trout are
smaller than alewives,
they're vulnerable to
being eaten by alewives.
But the reverse is true when
alewives are smaller than
lake trout.
So alewives were probably
one of the reasons
why lake trout could not
reproduce successfully.
Alewives prayed on
lake trout eggs and larvae,
threatening the recovery
that TFM made possible.
Beyond that, lake trout
takes several years
to reach maturity.
So it might be a decade
before hatchery-raised
lake trout that survived
could dent the
alewife population.
But what could be done?
Howard Tanner was
the Chief of Fisheries
for the Michigan
Department of Conservation.
While most people saw
alewives as a problem,
Howard saw a tremendous
opportunity.
When Howard first came
to be Chief of Fisheries,
there had been a 10-year decline
in fishing license sales,
which was the only
source of revenue
for the department
for fisheries work.
The then-director,
Ralph McMullen, said,
"You know, things
aren't going well.
You need to try
some things new."
Ralph called me into the office,
we had a long conversation,
and he ended my
conversation with,
he said, "Do something.
And if you can
make it spectacular,
why, please make
it spectacular."
What Howard Tanner did
dramatically changed the
future of Great Lakes fishing
and made sea lamprey
control more crucial
than anyone ever imagined.
Tanner knew something
about the kind of fish
that excites sport anglers.
He also knew what
those fish like to eat,
and alewives were
definitely on the menu.
The state's
Department of Natural Resources
chose the coho salmon.
A million coho eggs
were flown from Oregon.
Dr. Howard Tanner tells
why this salmon was picked.
You want a fish that's big
and beautiful and grows fast
and eats alewife, and is
attractive to the sportsman,
and one that he likes to catch,
one that fights well,
one that's beautiful,
one that tastes good.
And I guess you'd have to
ask one that's kind of dumb,
because after all,
you want the fishermen
to be capable outsmarting
him and catching him.
Before Michigan put
salmon into the Great Lakes,
anglers mostly fished smaller,
more tranquil inland lakes.
The big lakes were for
commercial fishing.
Salmon changed that.
They drew fishing fanatics
to the big lakes in droves,
and not just from local towns.
Sport anglers from
around the world
traveled to fish
the Great Lakes.
And you saw all kinds of boats.
I mean, small row boats,
speed boats, pontoon boats,
going out of the
beyond the break walls,
dangerously into open water
with very little freeboard
on many of these skiing
boats to fish for salmon.
They were that excited,
and they were catching fish.
You could go out
there without trying
and not having
a ton of knowledge
and catch a lot of
fish and quality fish,
and it was consistent.
They call it salmon
fever for a reason,
because once you start catching
salmon, it's hard to stop.
Salmon fight like crazy.
They roam
the entire water column,
so you don't always
have to fish deep,
and they return to
streams to spawn,
giving landlubbers the chance
to get in on the action.
Most importantly,
for fisheries managers,
salmon grow much
faster than lake trout
and they eat
alewives voraciously,
so they quickly put a big dent
in the alewife population.
Every state with
a Great Lake shoreline
got in on the action,
planting salmon
in their own streams.
So did Ontario, making it
an international effort.
Salmon made the Great Lakes
a world-renowned fishing
destination,
launching a multi-billion
dollar industry
that revitalized struggling
lake shore towns.
Lots of salmon early on
had scarring and-or had
sea lamprey attached,
so without the
prospect of control,
we would've never
introduced salmon.
Before the
recreational fishing boom,
TFM was never applied
to tributaries
feeding Lakes Ontario and Erie.
That changed when Ontario,
New York State, Pennsylvania,
and Ohio began stocking salmon.
It was a very high wounding
rate, so the folks down
there decided
that there was no sense of
us putting in fish if
they're not gonna survive.
So we started our original
survey work down there
in the early 70s,
and then picked up
on the treatments.
The recreational fishery
opportunities in
the Great Lakes
were really unexploited
at that time
and offered tremendous
opportunities.
The salmon introduction
kind of paved the way
for looking at the Great Lakes
as a source of recreational
fishing opportunities,
more so than it had ever
happened in the past.
Sea lamprey control
made it all possible.
Salmon are just as susceptible
to sea lamprey attacks
as lake trout are,
and so people came
back to the water.
There was a new thing
to come back to.
It was salmon fishing,
it was sport fishing.
Even fishing for lake
trout became popular again,
and still is today.
As they have
since Vernon Applegate's day,
crews still inspect streams
for sea lamprey larvae.
And treatment teams deploy
to where troubling
numbers are found.
People think that the
sea lamprey problem
was dealt with years ago.
They don't realize that
it's an ongoing program.
TFM remains the foundation
of the Great Lakes
Fishery Commission's
sea lamprey control program.
TFM stood the test of time.
It has been studied
and followed.
Once it reaches the
open water of the lakes,
it dilutes to concentrations
that cannot even be measured.
TFM is very selective.
It's not persistent
in the environment,
it doesn't bioaccumulate,
and it's really one of the
safest pesticides there is.
Obviously, you don't
want chemicals in water,
you don't want chemicals
in the Great Lakes,
but chemicals are a form
of pollution that dilutes,
that disperses.
Invasive species are a
pollution that reproduces.
If you can find a way to
contain that expl*sive growth
of this living, reproducing
awful pollution,
then you gotta take
a serious look at doing that.
Sea lamprey management
and the use of chemical controls
has been going on for so long,
and it has been successful.
And so I think by and large,
people in the
environmental community,
members of the public,
don't actually think too much
about the fact
that it's going on.
We have to be
exceptionally careful
with what humans
put in the water.
I don't think that means
the method has to be stopped,
but I think a lot of
thinking needs to go into,
how can we ensure
that there continues
to be no material
deleterious effects
by introducing these chemicals
into the water system?
Sea lamprey control
is constantly evolving,
and this is really important.
It's evolving both
with technology,
but also to a changing society.
The goalposts are moving on us.
The problem is going
to be to find a way
to control sea lampreys
when actually the Great
Lakes have been made
much more hospitable to them.
Water flows from
Lake Superior into Lake Huron
through the St. Mary's River.
Canadian and American cities,
both named Sault Ste. Marie,
straddle the rapids
where whitefish spawn,
drawing Indigenous people
long before Europeans first
came to the Great Lakes.
By the 1950s, much of
the river was transformed
into a canal and lock
system for ships,
and whitefish no
longer came to spawn.
In the 1960s, Dr. Jim Tibbles,
the director of the Sea Lamprey
Control Center at the time,
referred to the St. Mary's
River as a biological desert,
meaning that it didn't
support life of any kind.
It was highly polluted and
very little usable habitat.
The Canadian Parliament
and US Congress passed
major environmental laws
that dramatically cut pollution.
When the water cleared,
whitefish returned to their
historic spawning grounds.
But they weren't alone.
We saw a gradual increase
in the abundance of larval
sea lamprey in the St. Mary's
to the point where it was
probably the number one source
of parasitic sea
lamprey in Lake Huron,
if not the Great Lakes.
Their numbers
rocketed so dramatically
in Lake Huron, they threatened
to destroy the fisheries
that took so long to rebuild.
There are certain rivers
that can't be effectively
treated with TFM
because of their size,
water volume.
When you get down into the
bigger connecting channels
down in the St. Clair, down in
the Detroit River area and that,
they're just so huge and so vast
that TFM wouldn't be the answer
at all to try and treat.
As the streams tributary of
the Great Lakes clean up,
there's more and more
habitat for sea lamprey.
We need new technology
that's less costly
and can work on
these big rivers.
Lamprey are not
going to go away.
They are here to stay.
They're part of the Great Lakes
and every fishery management
decision that has been made
since the lamprey invasion
has to take sea lamprey
into account.
This is very much about
countries working together,
states working together,
communities, tribes working
together, local communities.
Sea lamprey are not only ugly,
but they're ugly for the lakes.
Don Dubin lives
near Chicago, Illinois.
Fishing is my life.
I started fishing
as a young kid,
probably, oh, five,
six years old.
My grandfather took me
out to the Chicago parks.
His basement is
a museum to his passion.
As a young kid, I dreamed of
someday catching a big
trophy fish
and putting it on my wall.
And I learned
taxidermy on my own.
Today I have all the fish
that I really tried to catch.
I became a woodcarver.
So I have become an activist
because fishing in
the Great Lakes is
such a valuable
resource for people.
Sportfishing in the Great
Lakes is one of the reasons
that people live here.
We pull people in from
all over the country
who think this is a great
fishery and come to fish.
This is a fisherman's dream.
Joe King retired
from the insurance business
and launched a hunting
and fishing club
in Indianapolis, Indiana,
that teaches inner-city
children to fish.
How do you think it's
about what you wanted?
It's about any other
fish in the world.
They are some tough fish.
Every fall,
he brings mentors from his club
to Michigan to fish for salmon.
Over 30-some-odd years
I've been coming up here.
But you see young adults.
You see women and you see
men and they're all fishing.
They just enjoy it.
It's just a beautiful place
and a true outdoorsman,
this is heaven.
Commercial fishing came back too
and is an important
economic engine again
for First Nations,
tribal communities,
and small towns on both sides
of the US-Canadian border.
But the history of Great
Lakes fishing teaches us
that nothing can be
taken for granted.
It takes a lot of effort
to control the sea lamprey.
But without that control,
there wouldn't be any
fish in the Great Lakes.
Without sea lamprey control,
we couldn't talk about restoring
Great Lakes native fishes.
We wouldn't talk
about lake trout.
We really wouldn't talk about
invasive species control at all,
because there just would be
no fishery out there
to talk about.
One side is good,
this side is bad.
The lamprey eel was on it.
The Hammond Bay
Laboratory still stands
on the Lake Huron shore.
In a dusty corner of
a storage shed there,
stand some forgotten cabinets
filled with index cards,
each cataloging a chemical
that was analyzed at the lab
in the search for a weapon
to defeat sea lamprey.
Vernon Applegate's
team tested thousands
of compounds acquired
from chemical companies,
universities, and other
sources around the world.
The 5,209th compound tested
proved to be the needle
in the haystack
that no one knew
would ever be found.
k*lling fish is
not that difficult.
There are chemicals out there
that will k*ll fish effectively.
What is difficult is
k*lling exactly the fish
that you want to k*ll
and not harming the fish
that you want to leave in
the river or in the lake.
I remember talking to
Louie King,
and he told me of the pit
that he had in his stomach
when he arrived in northern
Michigan for the first time
and looked out at Lake Huron
and just saw all this water
and thought, "How in
the world are we going
to control a species in
this vast body of water?"
It's been described
as a moonshot.
They took a long time,
very methodically,
to figure out exactly where
the ch*nk in the armor was
in this devastating species.
It's truly a remarkable thing
to find something that
could be so selective.
If we hadn't discovered TFM,
the whole economy of the Great
Lakes would probably look
dramatically different
than it does now.
Even today, in invasive
species control science,
sea lamprey is looked at
as one of the biggest
success stories in existence.
It's one of the only cases
where a very destructive
invasive species was
completely brought under
control, held under control,
and has allowed an ecosystem
to recover and function.
It's an amazing program.
Who could have guessed
that you could actually
control these things?
The important lesson here is
that government investment
and science benefit the economy
and benefit us in our small
communities on the coasts
who really enjoy and
need the Great Lakes
as part of our culture.
The management of
sea lamprey has granted
the Great Lakes region
a second chance to bring back
a thriving, naturally
reproducing native fishery,
and that's got benefits
written all over it
for Great Lakes communities
across the region.
It required US and Canadian
ingenuity and expertise
to work together
to find the solution
and then to implement it and
to continue that program.
So we need to work together,
not just on sea lamprey,
but on other invasive species,
on other common
challenges in the region.
We don't know what other
species may be coming.
And often those mix
of other things,
we don't know how they'll
relate with each other
and with what we're
living with now.
We want to celebrate
the success of the sea lamprey
control program,
but we also want to
take it as a reminder
to try to focus on preventing
new invasive species
from getting into the Great
Lakes in the first place.
We don't want to have to rely
on technology silver b*ll*ts
or the need to continually
control a species
in order to protect
the Great Lakes
for the people who live here.
The best solution is not
allowing the invasive species
to get into the Great Lakes
ecosystem in the first place.
It's so important.
We don't want to lose this.
We've got to protect it.
I want to make sure we
have this in the future.
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