The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

Egan opens Chapter 1 with narration from esteemed CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. In a 1957 broadcast, Cronkite lauds the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a widened navigation channel allowing large freighters to pass from the East Coast into the Great Lakes. “Right now the greatest concentration of heavy machinery ever assembled—over 3,000 pieces of equipment—are at work on one of the greatest projects in the history of mankind,” said Cronkite (3). Egan says that the Seaway does not end up bringing in nearly as many freighters as expected; it brings ecological destruction instead.

Cronkite was not necessarily wrong to be optimistic, because the Mediterranean Sea had once been an isolated basin. It filled with water from the Atlantic Ocean and eventually became a passage connecting civilizations and cultures around the world. The Black Sea similarly became connected to the rest of the world as the Mediterranean Sea trickles into it. Now, erosion is affecting Niagara Falls; in about 50,000 years, the waterfalls will disappear, removing the major obstacle slowing the Great Lakes’ flow to the Atlantic Ocean. These historical facts show why leaders in the U.S. and Canada were so intent on creating a Fourth Seacoast on the Great Lakes through the Seaway. They believe they are merely setting down the path that nature laid out for them.

Since their arrival to America, European explorers felt compelled to reach the Great Lakes. Frenchmen Jacques Cartier reached the Great Lakes region in 1535 when he sailed up the St. Lawrence River. He was trying to find a shortcut across North America in order to plunder the wealth of Asia, but he could not surpass the Lachine Rapids of the St. Lawrence River. Niagara Falls once served as an impenetrable barrier, preventing aquatic species from passing into the Great Lakes. This changed once the settlers began to build a commercial passage into the Great Lakes through ditch-digging in the late 1600s and early 1700s. They created navigation locks—watertight chambers with a front door facing downstream on the river and a back door facing upstream. By the time the boat enters the lock, both doors close. A gate opens allowing water to flow into the lock chamber. When the upstream doors open, the boat is now on the same water level as the upstream portion of the river, allowing the boat to float up the river. When the Lachine Rapids received their own navigation lock system, transportation of goods and people became much easier.

Egan provides an illustration showing the position of each of the Great Lakes. The order of the lakes from the furthest inland to those closest to the Atlantic Ocean is Lake Superior, Lake Michigan—and within it, Lake Huron—Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario. Niagara Falls separates Lake Erie from Lake Ontario, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean. Lake Superior flows out into the St. Mary’s River. Egan describes the enormous size of these lakes and the drops in elevation between each. For some time, no man-made device was able to breach Niagara Falls.

The geopolitical interest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in expanding settlements across the U.S. spurred a desire to create a navigable waterway through the Great Lakes. Figures like President George Washington recognized the danger in expanding west, arguing that people located in these remote areas would not be loyal to the new country. Therefore, Washington pushed for a canal connecting people in these western regions to the Eastern seaboard. Washington’s dream finally came to fruition in 1825 when the Erie Canal was built. A man named Jesse Hawley came up with the plan for the Erie Canal while serving time in debtors’ prison. New York mayor DeWitt Clinton championed the idea with state funding, garnered the public’s support, and got the canal made.

The Canadian equivalent of the Erie Canal—the Welland Canal—is also constructed on Lake Erie. As ships grew bigger, the U.S. and Canada expanded the size of the locks on the canals so that these ships can squeeze through. The locks could not expand enough, and leaders on both sides of the border began to conjure up images of a Seaway that could fit a ship of any size. President Eisenhower expressed concern over a Seaway for numerous economic and political reasons. Congress bypassed Eisenhower’s concerns and put forth thousands of workers to build the navigation locks comprising the Seaway. Reporters across the U.S. began to contemplate the Great Lakes as the Mediterranean Sea of the Midwest; they believed the Seaway would turn the lake towns into world-class cities due to goods flowing in and out of the area.

However, there’s a hitch: The Seaway was built only to be 80 feet wide and around 760 feet long, meaning that as ships grow in size in the future the canals will not be able to support them. Malcolm Purcell McLean is largely responsible for the increase in the size of the freighters, which begin to ship more goods in what are now known as shipping containers. As a result, after the Seaway’s installation in 1959, considerably fewer ships entered the navigation locks than originally anticipated. Ships going through the locks often suffer damage due to narrow chokepoints. In the late 2010s, the biggest ships are twice the size of the navigation locks in the Seaway.

Although not nearly as many overseas freighters end up using the Seaway for shipping, the passageway proves useful when shipping products like iron and ore inside the country. Some industry leaders want to rebrand the Seaway as a regional shipping hub, but due to ice freezing over the Seaway in the winter, the waterway cannot compete with railroads and trucks. There are, too, other, more human costs of the Seaway: 6,500 residents were effectively evicted in the 1950s to make way for the construction of the transportation corridor. Few people think about the long-term ecological repercussions of the Seaway, but an eighth-grader named Pat Kenney was one of them. Kenney wrote a letter regarding the matter to President Eisenhower, who passed it on to the Seaway boss. The Seaway boss downplayed Kenney’s concerns. Large numbers of foreign entities do make their way into the Seaway; they’re not ships but something dangerous that can’t be bought or sold. 

Egan offers a brief summary of how the Great Lakes formed out of retreating ice cover as glaciers from previous ice ages melted and left behind enormous basins filled with the melted glacial water. Around 2,500 years ago, other waters surrounding the Great Lakes basin dried up, leaving the lakes connected to the Atlantic Ocean only by the river system flowing through Niagara Falls. Aquatic species could flow from the lakes out into the ocean, but not the reverse. The introduction of invasive species—particularly the three fish in this chapter’s title—unravels “a delicate ecological tapestry that had been thousands of years in the making in just a couple of decades” (38).

The Great Lakes food chain—actually more of a complex web—comprises plantlike life that feeds zooplankton, which feed mollusks and crustaceans. These mollusks feed little fish, who, in turn, feed medium-sized fish like perch, or bigger fish like whitefish and lake trout. The trout, weighing up to 70 pounds, can thrive in tough conditions and eat most anything in the lakes. They have few natural predators. There are numerous kinds of trout stock; a tyrannical Mormon leader, James J. Strang, attempted to classify them in the mid-1800s. In the years following Strang’s death, trout fishing took off in the Great Lakes, which became a coveted national treasure. However, around the 1940s, lake trout populations, along with those of other native species like whitefish, plummeted. The decline in population is due to overeager fishermen as well as the arrival of a non-native, invasive species: the eel-like, blood-sucking lamprey.

In 2005, a young paleontologist in South Africa discovered a fossil of the lamprey’s ancient ancestor. The ancestors of the lamprey survived for hundreds of millions of years—even when the dinosaurs did not—up to the present day. A lamprey kills its prey by latching onto it with its suction-cup teeth and using a toxin to drain the creature of its blood. There are species of native lamprey that co-exist with other aquatic species; however, the invasive sea lamprey threatens the Great Lakes’ native fish. The first sea lamprey was found in Lake Ontario in 1835; it likely came to the lake by way of the Welland Canal from rivers on the East Coast; the lamprey only arrived in the lake following the opening of the Erie Canal. Over the course of the next century, the lamprey made its way to Lake Erie and Lake Michigan. In 1950, a researcher for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Vernon Applegate, wrote an extensive dissertation on the lamprey. He intensely studied the lamprey’s breeding patterns and life cycle. He developed a goal to eradicate the sea lampreys living above Niagara Falls. After testing out numerous industrial poisons, Applegate found a poison that will kill the lampreys while leaving the fish’s native species intact.

The lamprey is not the only invasive fish to make its way to the Great Lakes; the invasive river herring is another. The river herring competes with native fish for food and consumes their young. The river herring is also known by the name alewives. The alewives, which number in the billions, began to die off in large numbers in the late 1960s, and their carcasses wound up on the shores of Chicago and Lake Michigan. The city of Chicago deployed bulldozers to remove the millions of fish. The problem is that alewives breed very well in the Great Lakes, but they do not survive for long there. There are no natural predators to dispatch the alewives. Applegate plans to restore the native trout populations to reintroduce a local predator to curb the alewife population. Another scientist, Howard Tanner, has other ideas. 

In this chapter, Egan introduces the large, silver coho salmon—an invasive species that revitalized tourism on the Great Lakes in the late 1960s. Unlike other invasive species, the salmon comes to the Great Lakes through the intentional manipulation of mankind. These salmon are introduced to the Great Lakes by a group of biologists who decide to ignore Vernon Applegate’s desire to restore lake trout and instead install a predator to hopefully boost tourism on the lakes; the salmon serve mostly as entertainment for the fishermen, as commercial fishing of salmon is outlawed on the lakes.

Howard Tanner, a fisheries biologist, irrevocably alters the ecosystem of the Great Lakes. Egan describes Tanner’s background and his “build-it-yourself approach to ecosystem management” (81), which is not concerned with restoring native species and treats the body of water as a blank slate to be repopulated with new fish—like the coho salmon. Tanner has high ambitions for his position as chief of fisheries in Michigan.

When Tanner takes on the job, invasive lampreys are on the decline due to Applegate’s lampricide poison. The invasive alewives stubbornly thrive in the lakes. Tanner doesn’t concern himself with restoring the lakes’ native trout, because they are not fun for fishermen to catch. Tanner deploys his second-in-command, Wayne Tody, to find another predator that will cause a stir among fishermen. Tody comes back with the idea of introducing Pacific salmon into the Great Lakes. Tanner obtains one million coho salmon eggs from biologists in Oregon. Egan notes that introducing exotic predators has been a controversial idea well before Tanner became involved with the Great Lakes.

Tanner is zealous about this idea and plans to stock the lakes with salmon for three years, capturing them at the end of the third year to harvest their eggs and sperm for a breeding program. It’s an uncertain, risky move, as the salmon swim out of the lakes to live in rivers and streams, and it’s unclear whether they’ll return to the Great Lakes. Mother Nature does Tanner’s work for him when, after only a year, the salmon return to and spawn in the lakes without his intervention. These salmon consume the invasive alewives and grow fat. Tanner plans to hatch chinook salmon—another variety of Pacific salmon, like the coho. Fishermen flock to northwestern Michigan to catch salmon, boosting tourism in that area. The idea is implemented on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan to great success, solidifying Lake Michigan’s image as a fishing hub. 

However, because commercial fishermen legally cannot fish salmon, they instead begin to harvest the alewives, which scientists encourage so that the lake’s native trout population will be able to recover with fewer alewives around. Tody—Tanner’s second-in-command and successor on this project—opposes this plan; the growing salmon consume not the native lake trout, but the alewives instead. Programs intended to boost the trout population are shut down. Dead alewives scatter the beaches around the Great Lakes in 1968; by the following summer, there are no dead alewives on the beach, leading the public to conclude that the salmon are eating them. Tanner rebukes the idea that the salmon introduction was responsible for the collapse of the alewives, chalking it up to a coincidence. Some state biologists develop a vested interest in protecting the invasive alewife and salmon populations, much to the chagrin of the commercial fishermen who depend upon the harvest of native fish like perch fry, whitefish, and trout for their livelihood.

State biologists like Tanner and Tody get their comeuppance when the salmon population suddenly crashes, decimating tourism on the lakes. Egan explains that the crash occurs due to the excessive breeding of salmon when there are not enough alewives to feed all of them. The alewives also suffer a decline in plankton—their food source—due to invasive mussels cropping up in the area. Modern biologists don’t blame Tanner and Tody, because their idea was a clever one and it reignited public interest in the Great Lakes. Scientists have a keener awareness now about their ability—or lack thereof—to manipulate the Great Lakes. 

Lake St. Clair is part of the river system that connects Lake Huron to Lake Erie—not far from Detroit. Young university researchers stumble upon a surprising creature at the bottom of Lake St. Clair. The researcher presents this newly found specimen to more experienced professors, who send it to a laboratory. The laboratory identifies the specimen as a zebra mussel, which is native to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The zebra mussel can attach itself to nearly any surface like boat bottoms and swimmers’ feet; it has already infested Western Europe prior to making its way to the U.S. in the ballast tanks of freighter ships from abroad.

The function of a ballast tank in steadying ships is important to understand. Bars of iron were previously used to balance ships, but as ships grew in size, they required heavier ballasts. Water was a free resource that weighed eight pounds per gallon, so navy men used water in their ballast tanks, which are “basically floating ecosystems, swarming with life sucked up from ports across the globe” (113). Prior to the mussels’ arrival, many other invasive species turned up in the Great Lakes, including the spiny water flea, which decimated much of the zooplankton and many smaller native fish. References dating back to the 1800s that shows many influential scientists were aware of the potential danger of ballast tanks in bringing the mussels overseas. However, in recent decades, ability to tackle potential invasive species has been constrained due to the limitations of the Clean Water Act.

In the 1960s, pollutants contaminated the Cuyahoga River outside of Cleveland, causing the river to burn. In 1972, Congress bypassed President Nixon’s veto and pass the set of environmental regulations known as the Clean Water Act. The Act requires that polluting companies install the latest water-treatment systems. The Clean Water Act significantly impacts the country by making lakes and rivers safe for fishing and swimming, and even creating a healthy enough environment for 60 species of fish to live in the Cuyahoga River.

The EPA—which oversees enforcement of such environmental regulations—exploits the law and tacitly puts forth an exemption allowing the pollution of America’s lakes and rivers through the ballast water from ships sailing into the U.S. This exemption will gravely endanger the Great Lakes over the next few decades. The EPA cannot order ships to refrain from using ballast water, as that would endanger the ships themselves—as was the case in the sinking of the S.S. Eastland.

After the researcher’s discovery of the mussels, mussels begin cropping up all over the Great Lakes, threatening water supplies as they choke up pipes and plague ships with their ability to stick to surfaces. The mussel has no natural predators in the Great Lakes to curtail its population growth; the mussels also consume plankton and filter nutrients out of the water, leading to a massive disruption of the watery ecosystem as phytoplankton populations plummet. The loss in phytoplankton leads to a drop in the fish that consume them, such as the alewife, which was also an invasive species. The loss of the alewives impacts the salmon fisheries, as well. The mussel crisis cost the Great Lakes economy billions of dollars over the last 25 years.

However, the layperson’s ability to comprehend the threat of the mussel is limited due to the fact that the mussel mostly hides under the water’s surface. Some fish, like the invasive round goby, manage to survive by adapting their bodies to feast on the mussels. If invasive fish are better able to adapt to the mussels than native species, that, too, is a problem. Additionally, the mussels filter out nutrients, making the water clearer and leading to an immense growth in sunlight-consuming green algae. Green algae, though, eventually dies off and deprives the lake of oxygen and creating “dead zones” as the algae decays.

The algae decay leads to a growth in poisonous bacteria, which moves up the food chain through the mussels, the gobies, and the birds that eat the gobies, leading to birds dying en masse. Shortly after scientists discover that there are as many as 500 billion water fleas in nearby Lake Mendota. A zooplankton expert explains the concept of tardigrades—microscopic creatures that are nearly indestructible; defeating the tardigrades is crucial when drawing up plans to combat invasive species in the Great Lakes. Scientists believe it is only a matter of time before a new invasion begins.

Conservationists take the EPA to court; in 2011, the EPA agrees to require treatment for ballast water in overseas ships entering the U.S. The conservationist groups sue again in 2013, claiming that the EPA does not require the best ballast treatment available. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agrees with the conservationists and requires the EPA to impose tougher regulations on the shipping industry. Although the EPA tries to skirt this by finding a safe number of invasive organisms that could be released along with the ballast water, this is simply impossible; even a single species can have catastrophic impacts on the ecosystem—not just in the Great Lakes, but throughout the continent. The seemingly obvious solution is to stop the overseas ships—or “salties”—from entering U.S. waters and instead have their freight offloaded via trains into the Great Lakes region.