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by Dan Egan | Source: Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

The salmon fishery has collapsed on Lake Huron, and it happened in just a few years. In 2003, Michigan’s 10 busiest ports on Lake Huron saw about 1.2 million recreational fishing hours, according to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Last year, that number dropped to approximately 300,000 - a decline of 75%.

And the effects of that collapse have crashed onto the streets of Deaton’s Harbor Beach, a town of about 1,800 along Michigan’s Lake Huron coast.

“As you’re driving through town, just look side to side,” says tackle shop owner Art Farden. “We’ve lost three grocery stores in the last five years.”

…it’s no stretch to say the salmon collapse has been catastrophic to the local economy.

The problem is the little fish that sustained the big salmon have disappeared.

…The worry now is the troubles will spill into the much more heavily populated - and heavily fished - Lake Michigan.

It might already be happening. The numbers of forage fish that sustain the salmon on Lake Michigan are dropping like the cannonball-sized sinkers that charter boat captains use. The estimated volume of forage fish in 2007 was at a record low of about 31,000 tons, a 93% decline from the late 1980s.

“I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m really concerned,” says Dan Thomas, president of the Great Lakes Sport Fishing Council.

… Six summers ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers explored the idea of expanding the St. Lawrence Seaway to accommodate bigger oceangoing vessels to attract more business to the underused nautical highway.

The agency scoffed at worries that opening the Great Lakes to more overseas freighters would lead to more ecological chaos.

“The most dramatic impacts to the ecosystem have likely already occurred,” the Corps stated in a nearly 500 page report released in June 2002.

Those words proved ludicrously wrong.

Just five months after the report was published, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee discovered a fistful of suspicious mussels during a fish survey on the lake’s open waters, about 20 miles northeast of downtown Milwaukee.

The cluster of fingernail-sized shells turned out to be the scientists’ first encounter with the previously obscure quagga mussel, yet another invader that made its way into the Great Lakes as a stowaway aboard an ocean freighter.

In just six years, those filter feeders have gone from a curiosity to a cancer, smothering the lake bottom in a manner the zebra mussel never came close to doing and forever changing the way energy flows through Lake Michigan.

Asked how the lake could recover to something resembling its natural state, UWM senior scientist and quagga mussel expert Russell Cuhel responds:

“It can’t. It’s a new lake.”

Charts, photos, much more to this critical story at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel >>