Biologists are now warning that the lake whitefish, a fish so central to Great Lakes identity that an 1888 Ohio town literally called it their pride and joy, could disappear from parts of the Great Lakes within five years. The culprit is a pair of invasive mussels that hitched a ride in the ballast water of transatlantic cargo ships decades ago, and have been quietly dismantling one of North America's most important freshwater ecosystems ever since. We had warning. We had decades of it.
How You Starve a Fish Without Touching It
The mechanism of destruction here is almost elegant in how ruthless it is. According to The Guardian, quagga and zebra mussels — both invasive species that arrived in the Great Lakes via transatlantic shipping ballast water — have spread across entire lakebeds for hundreds of miles. They eat phytoplankton: the tiny algae and bacteria at the base of the food chain.
That phytoplankton feeds diporeia, a small oil-rich crustacean that lives in cold, deep water. Diporeia, in turn, is what lake whitefish fingerlings gorge on after hatching. No phytoplankton means no diporeia. No diporeia means the baby whitefish starve before they're big enough to move up the food chain and eat anything else. The mussels never touch a single whitefish. They just quietly remove the floor from beneath them.
This isn't a new problem. The Guardian reports the decline started becoming visible in the 1990s, when fishers and researchers began noticing fewer juvenile whitefish in Lake Erie. That's thirty-plus years of watching a slow-motion collapse and not finding a solution big enough to stop it.
A Treaty Right, A Way of Life, Now a Memory
William Ortiz of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians started commercially fishing for whitefish off Lake Michigan's northwest shores in 2015. He did it full-time for nine years. The Guardian quotes him directly: "It's hard to make a living when there's not a lot of fish out there."
For Indigenous communities in the Great Lakes region, this isn't an economic inconvenience. It is the unraveling of something foundational. "It's a treaty right," Ortiz told The Guardian. "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's hard if not impossible to do that."
Lake whitefish has been a food source and a cultural cornerstone for Indigenous peoples in this region for centuries. Settler communities built their own economies on top of that — Sandusky, Ohio, was once calling itself the largest freshwater fish market in the world. All of that, centuries of human life organized around this one fish, is now teetering on the edge of collapse because of organisms that arrived in the bottom of a cargo ship.
The Numbers Are Ugly
In Ohio waters alone, about 200,000 pounds of lake whitefish were harvested in 2009. Last year, according to The Guardian, approximately 185,000 pounds were taken from the entirety of Lake Erie, with the majority of that caught by commercial operations in Ontario. Read that again: the whole lake now barely produces what one state was pulling out seventeen years ago.
The western Lake Erie survey results, released last year, are what pushed biologists to issue the five-year disappearance warning for parts of the Great Lakes. That's not a projection from a model run in someone's office. That's researchers who went out on the water, counted the fish, and came back with bad news.
Lake Superior, the deepest and coldest of the Great Lakes, has so far kept the mussels somewhat at bay. But The Guardian reports that rising water temperatures from climate change could change that in the coming decades. So the last refuge is also under threat, just on a slower timeline.
The Solutions Are Real. The Scale Is the Problem.
Scientists are not completely out of ideas. The Guardian reports that freshwater drum, a fish with powerful molar teeth that can actually eat the mussels, may be able to control mussel populations at a local level. A study published in June found that drum in the waters around Sandusky consumed between 611 and 2,799 tonnes of mussel material annually between 2013 and 2023. That's a fish doing what fleets of humans cannot.
Ohio's Department of Wildlife has tried tarps secured to the lake bottom with carbon dioxide injected underneath to kill the mussels, and high-pressure water jets to destroy mussel colonies. Travis Hartman of the Lake Erie Fisheries Program told The Guardian both methods work. The problem is the scale. "We have not found cost-effective large-scale ways to meet the needs at a Great Lakes scale," he said.
Last year, a pair of Michigan congressional representatives introduced a bill that would put $50 million per year for a decade into finding scalable solutions. The Guardian reports the bill is currently before Congress. Given that Congress has struggled to pass a budget on time for most of the past decade, the whitefish might want to make other plans.
The Silver Bullet Nobody Found in Time
Greg McClinchey of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission drew the comparison to the sea lamprey, a parasitic invasive species that devastated Great Lakes fisheries in the mid-twentieth century and took decades of coordinated research to bring under control. "Just as was the case with lamprey back 70 years ago, invasive mussels will take a huge amount of research, work and cooperation to find a control solution," he told The Guardian.
The lamprey comparison is instructive but only goes so far. The lamprey crisis prompted swift federal action, significant investment, and genuine political will. The mussel crisis has been visibly developing for three decades. What we have right now is a bill sitting in Congress and some tarps on the lake bottom.
Meanwhile, the mussels have now carpeted entire lakebeds for hundreds of miles. They have restructured the water chemistry of one of the world's largest freshwater systems. They have done this completely indifferent to our timelines, our budgets, and our congressional schedules.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to look at the Great Lakes mussel crisis and see a complicated environmental problem that nobody could have predicted. That is not what this is. Quagga and zebra mussels were identified in the Great Lakes in the late 1980s. Scientists watched them spread. They watched the diporeia disappear. They watched the whitefish populations start crashing in the 1990s. The five-year warning biologists are now issuing is not a surprise announcement. It is the bill coming due on thirty years of inadequate response.
The cruelest part of this story is buried in the middle of it. The mussels have actually cleaned up phosphates and agricultural and industrial pollutants that humans dumped into the Great Lakes for generations. They are solving a human-made pollution problem while simultaneously creating a human-made extinction problem. We have somehow managed to create an ecological crisis that cleans up after our previous ecological crisis. That is a genuinely impressive level of dysfunction.
A $50 million per year bill is sitting in Congress right now. That is not a huge ask for a system of lakes that holds twenty percent of the world's surface fresh water and has supported human civilization in this region for thousands of years. Whether it passes depends on whether legislators who have spent the last several years staging political theater and gutting science agencies can suddenly locate the attention span to care about a fish. The whitefish cannot wait for the next election cycle. It is not clear the fish has until the next Congress.
Comments