The Whitefish Aren't Laughing Anymore

When we fail to prevent disasters

Jane Elder

Lake Whitefish - Catch of the Day - Michigan Sea Grant Photo

My mom grew up in Marquette Michigan, but like so many others, she re-located to southern Michigan for jobs during World War II. She loved the Upper Peninsula, so there were family trips to the U.P. when my brother and I were little. I remember the road signs for Laughing Whitefish Falls on the northern route to Marquette, and puzzling over whether or how a whitefish could laugh, but we’d bypass the side trip to the falls in order to get to Au Train and Marquette sooner.

Decades later, I had the time and made the effort to follow the signs to the park where the Laughing Whitefish River tumbles over and fans out over a 100-foot sandstone cliff through the deep forest. It’s a lovely place. The lore behind the name is that, viewed from Lake Superior, the Ojibway described the mouth of the river as looking like an open, “laughing” mouth of a whitefish and the name stuck.

Mom used to serve whitefish for dinner often when I was growing up. I can picture the Pyrex baking dish coming out of the oven, holding those pale filets dusted with paprika, some dabs of butter, and sliced lemons. I can almost smell it now. Little did we know then that we were foolish to take those tasty fish for granted.

In the Great Lakes region, we’ve known for some time that invasive quagga mussels have converted most of the underwater rocky reefs in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron to shell-encrusted carpets of quagga mussel colonies. These are the same reefs where whitefish like to feed and breed. Following the invasion of their cousins, the zebra mussels, the quagga were first detected in Lake Erie in 1989. Like zebra mussels, they were inadvertently scooped up in ballast water taken on by ships in the Black or Capsian Seas, and then discharged thousands of miles away into the waters of the Great Lakes when ships offloaded the ballast water weight to take on Great Lakes cargo. Without natural predators in this new neighborhood, quagga mussels reproduced and claimed habitat with a frenzy.

The zebra mussels have been a big and expensive nuisance, but the quaggas became the biological equivalent of a horror movie that just keeps spawning grim sequels. Quaggas exploded across lake bottoms in the 1990s, and have kept going, to the point where they represent 90% of the biomass (the living biological presence)  at the benthic level (bottom) of the Great Lakes.

Lake Superior is low on calcium (needed for all that shell-making) and a bit chilly for the invasive mussels. As a result, while they are present, quagga mussels aren’t a major disturbance in Lake Superior. That’s not the case for Lake Huron and Lake Michigan—which historically have had some of the best whitefish habitat. In the former haunts of the whitefish, the quagga mussels filter out and feast on the tiny plankton and micro-organisms that have sustained whitefish fry (the babies) and adults for perhaps 12,000 years.

As filter feeders, the quagga mussels also increase water clarity when they pull out all those tiny bits from the water, which means ultra-violet light can penetrate deeper than in pre-quagga times. It turns out that whitefish fry are very sensitive to UV light, and it can do them in.

Last spring I was able to attend Great Lakes Day at my alma mater (Michigan State University) and listened to a presentation on the shocking decline of whitefish in the Great Lakes, and some of the heroic efforts to help them. While the reefs are particularly important for whitefish productivity, in a few areas, they do spawn in streams.

Kris Dey, the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians’ hatchery manager, spoke about the Great Lakes fisheries research the Bands are undertaking as part of their commitment to restore native fish species. He shared their methods and early findings from an experiment to see whether they could encourage whitefish stream spawning in the Jordan River, a clean and beautiful stream in Michigan’s northwestern lower peninsula.

From the difficulties of finding adult female whitefish from which they could harvest eggs for hatchery fertilization, to predation by other fish when fry were released in the stream, it’s an enormous challenge, and there are no celebrations yet. Learning that at this stage, most of the fertilized fish eggs simply weren’t making it in the stream tugged at the heart. Elsewhere, researchers are experimenting with scraping  the mussels off the lake bottoms and pursuing other efforts to give the Lake Michigan/Huron whitefish a chance for revival. One wants to be hopeful, but turning around a biological disaster at this scale is Herculean.

This was all preventable, but as a society we didn’t prevent it. We could have learned from the lamprey invasion that ocean-going ships needed vigilant regulation before entering or discharging ballast water in the Great Lakes. In too typical fashion, our policy-makers waited for a nightmare to flourish and then said, “huh, maybe we should have done something sooner.” While we now have ballast management rules in place, it took a long time to get there—too long, perhaps, for the whitefish.

The International Joint Commission (IJC) is in the final days of its public consultation period, gathering feedback on how the U.S. and Canadian governments are doing on living up to the terms of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. Neither the recently released Progress Report of the Parties (how the governments assess their own progress) nor the State of the Lakes Report gave much of a mention to the whitefish challenge, nor did they say much about prevention of future threats to the lakes. The public survey on the findings of these reports will close on April 11. Here’s the link. https://glperspectives.ijc.org/en/progress-reporting-questionnaire. Try to find a few minutes to fill it out. An ounce of prevention is worth millions of dollars of attempted cure. And we still don’t actually have a cure.

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