The Great Lakes
Sea Lampreys
Sea Lampreys have been a rough patch for the Great Lakes over the years. They corrupted its food chain and killed many fish. But it was brought here by humans, the ones who may really depend on the Great Lakes. As said on the Great Lakes Fishing Commissions website, The Welland canal that humans built, created a free passage for them to come in from the sea. Niagara falls used to be a natural barrier but we made them another path. When they came in, they were not preyed upon and started killing many fish. Also mentioned in the Great Lakes Fishing Commisions website, Canada and the United States, they both combined used to harvest around 15 million pounds of Lake Trout, but now only catch about 300,000 pounds, 2% of the normal…show more content… They spread so fast and according to a Nautilus article, the females can lay up to 1 million eggs per year! They also have no major predator in the Great Lakes so if millions of eggs are laid each year, then they are basically unstoppable. As said on the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute website, a single Zebra mussel can filter a liter of water each day, consuming zooplankton that many fish depend on for survival. Zebra mussels are not only a problem to the ecosystem but also to humans. The Great Lakes has spent from 1989 to 2004, around 267 million dollars, trying to control them, as mentioned on the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institutes website. The reason for spending so much is they clog pipes in clusters and they have to spend lots of money cleaning them up and trying to control them. That money could have gone to another cause but we contaminated our own waters with other organisms, costing us millions. They were supposedly brought in ballast tanks from the Caspian Sea region, when we humans were shipping our products and not worrying about our resources. We as humans brought them here, now we need to control
