Obama's new budget is proposing $3 million in cutsto the $18 million dollar lamprey eel control program: the only thing keeping the lamprey eels from devastating fish stocks in the Great Lakes again.
These are the same eels that collapsed the fish populations in the Great Lakes in the space of just 9 years.
Sea lampreys feasted on lake trout...
Lake trout were the staple of the great Lakes commercial fishery before sea lamprey invaded. Anglers harvested some 15 million pounds of lake trout each year in Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior. By the early 1960s, the lake trout catch dropped to 300,000 pounds. The lake trout harvest in Lake Huron dropped from 3.5 million pounds in 1935 to 1000 pounds in 1949. The catch in Lake Michigan dropped from 5.5 million pounds in 1946 to 402 pounds in 1953. In Lake Superior, the catch dropped from an average of 4.5 million pounds annually to 368,000 pounds in 1961. An unsightly fish with no commercial value was making quick work of the most valuable sector of the Great Lakes commercial fishery, lake trout.
-- Jeff Alexander, Pandora's Locks
We're way beyond the point that the Great Lakes are going to have a naturally ocurring ecological balance resembling what it originally was. It's too late for that. In the past 100 years we've let in hudreds of invasive species, we've created locks and channels and joined the Great Lakes watershed with the Mississippi watershed.
There's no going back to what things once were.
All we can hope for now is to make it something that we like, and something that gives native species a good sporting change of surviving. As it happens, we have managed to achieve something resembling a balance through hard work and constant investment, and it yields a 7 billion dollar per year fishing industry.
Dropping our guard to lamprey eels could end all that very fast. Lamprey reproduce like crazy and there is no getting rid of them. They're here forever. All we can do is control them. Without constant vigilance and water treatments every single year to keep their populations down they'd be right back at at destroying the inhabitants of the lake.
Reducing funding for lamprey control is a huge mistake, and will cost the region and the nation far more than the cuts save.
Each female sea lamprey can lay up to 100,000 eggs, according to the fishery commission, and each adult lamprey can destroy 40 pounds' worth of predator fish, such as salmon and lake trout.
Lose big numbers of predator fish, the reasoning goes, and the numbers of prey fish like the pesky alewife will explode.
Such was the case for the Great Lakes until the federal researchers designed a lamprey-specific poison in the 1950s. Gaden said the balance for the lakes that lamprey control workers have established is a tenuous one, and if the government loosens its chokehold on the eel-like creature, fish populations are bound to suffer.
"This will have a huge impact on the Great Lakes, the fishery and the economy," Gaden said of the proposed budget.
Gaden said about 90% of the fishery commission's budget goes toward lamprey control.
The proposed cut "reflects the current trend right now for belt tightening," said a State Department official on Tuesday.