From the basement of the Sandusky library, page 29 of the book Sandusky of To-Day proclaims the town to be the \u201clargest fresh water fish market in the world\u201d. Two pages later, an image of the lake whitefish, referred to as \u201cSandusky\u2019s pride\u201d, takes up the entire page.<\/p>\n
But the book was published in 1888.<\/p>\n
Lake whitefish was a delicacy in this part of North America for centuries. Indigenous communities centered their lives and traditions on the fish.<\/p>\n
By the mid-1800s, settler communities on the southern shoreline of Lake Erie such as Sandusky cashed in on the demand for lake whitefish, building their economies around its popularity as a food source.<\/p>\n
But then, beginning in the 1990s, it started to vanish, at first puzzling fishers and researchers who began observing fewer fingerlings and juvenile whitefish in Lake Erie.<\/p>\n
The huge fall<\/a> in the number of the lake whitefish has since been attributed to the slow, implacable march of invasive mussels across the Great Lakes region, and the disappearance of diporeia, an oil-rich, shrimp-like crustacean typically found in cold water between 100 and 400 feet that whitefish fingerlings gorge on.<\/p>\n The arrival of freshwater quagga and zebra mussels, which reached the Great Lakes having hitched a ride in the ballast of transatlantic ships, led to their removing phytoplankton, tiny algae and bacteria that the diporeia feed on, setting off a calamitous chain reaction further up the food chain.<\/p>\n While the proliferation of quagga and zebra mussels, which now carpet entire lakebeds for hundreds of miles in any direction, have helped clean the lake system of phosphates and other damaging agricultural and industrial pollutants, their huge numbers are eliminating whole regions of phytoplankton growth.<\/p>\n Now, biologists who completed an extensive survey<\/a> of the fish here in western Lake Erie, the findings of which were released last year, are warning that the species could disappear<\/a> from parts of the Great Lakes in the next five years.<\/p>\n For William Ortiz of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, the decline of the lake whitefish has been little short of disastrous.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the biggest source of income for the tribe\u2019s fishers. We rely on whitefish probably more than anything,\u201d he says. Ortiz started commercially fishing for whitefish off the north-west shores of Lake Michigan in 2015.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s been a steady decline even since I started. From 2015 to 2020, there was a noticeable decline. I did it full-time for nine years, but it\u2019s hard to make a living when there\u2019s not a lot of fish out there.\u201d<\/p>\n Kenneth LaCosse, 75, fishes the shoreline of Lake Michigan near his home town of Munising, Michigan. LaCosse has been fishing Michigan waters for 70 years and has seen a great increase in the existence of zebra mussels in area streams in recent years. Photograph: Star Tribune\/Getty Images<\/p>\n In the US waters of the Great Lakes commercial fishing for whitefish on a regular basis has fallen off a cliff. While about 200,000 pounds were harvested in Ohio<\/a> in 2009, last year about 185,000lb were taken from Lake Erie as a whole. The majority of that is harvested late in the year by commercial fishing operations based in Ontario.<\/p>\n Ortiz says that where whitefish spawn along the shoals and shallows of the Great Lakes, zebra mussels have eliminated the diporeia that whitefish fingerlings eat after hatching, \u201cso they\u2019re starving out before they get to a size where they\u2019re moving up in the food chain.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s heartbreaking what\u2019s happening. It\u2019s a treaty right; we used to be able to make a living, make enough money from spring till fall to hold yourself over through the winter. Now, it\u2019s hard if not impossible to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n In Lake Superior, the largest, deepest and most northerly of the Great Lakes, invasive mussels have thus far struggled to become as widespread as in the warmer neighboring lakes. But rising temperatures globally that have fueled the warming of Lake Superior mean that could change in the coming decades.<\/p>\n The overwhelming spread of the mussels has sent scientists and conservationists scurrying for solutions.<\/p>\n Recent research suggests that the freshwater drum or sheephead, a fish with powerful molar teeth, eat the mussels and can potentially control their numbers at a local level.<\/p>\n A study published<\/a> in June found that in the waters around Sandusky and western Lake Erie, \u201cfreshwater drum were estimated to consume between 611 and 2799 tonnes of dried, digestible dreissenid material [quagga and zebra mussels] annually during 2013\u20132023\u201d.<\/p>\n Above water, conservationists and researchers are beginning to act upon the challenge, too.<\/p>\n In Ohio, the department of wildlife has deployed large tarps secured to the lake bottom under which carbon dioxide is injected to kill the mussels, and used high-pressure water jets to destroy mussel colonies.<\/p>\n \u201cBoth methods were very effective, but as you might imagine the scale and cost of effectively treating extremely large areas is a significant challenge,\u201d says Travis Hartman of the Lake Erie Fisheries Program at Ohio\u2019s department of wildlife.<\/p>\n Quagga and zebra mussels shells, along with other shells and debris, clutter the dunes area at Montrose Beach in Chicago in 2021. Photograph: Chicago Tribune\/TNS<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s fair to say that we are finding ways to be successful, but we have not found cost-effective large-scale ways to meet the needs at a Great Lakes scale.\u201d<\/p>\n