With no time to spare, Michigan hatches a Great Lakes whitefish rescue plan

With time running out to save the Great Lakes’ whitefish from a deadly mussel invasion, Michigan officials have a moonshot plan to pluck fish from Lake Michigan and breed them in captivity.

With sustained money, effort and luck, the fish’s offspring could one day help repopulate the lake after humans quell the mussels that have pushed the lake’s wild whitefish to near-collapse.

“It’s really about saving those genetic stocks right now,” said Doug Craven, natural resources director for the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians. “If we don’t do it this year, there may not be enough wild fish in those stocks” to do it in the future.

Armed with $350,000 from the recently passed state budget and nearly $900,000 from the Great Lakes Fishery Trust, state and tribal scientists will fan out from Naubinway to Saugatuck this fall to collect the spawning fish.

For now, the mission is limited in scale, targeting the bloodlines most in danger of disappearing. But those involved in the “genetic rescue” mission told Bridge Michigan they hope it sets the stage for a major whitefish recovery program.

That’s a marked change from just a year ago, when beyond some small-scale experiments led by Native American tribes, there was no coordinated plan to intervene as zebra and quagga mussels from Europe steadily eradicate whitefish from the lower Great Lakes.

The filter-feeding mussels now dominate the food web in every Great Lake except Superior. They strip away the plankton baby whitefish eat and leave behind water so clear the hatchlings risk deadly sunburns if starvation doesn’t kill them first.

So far, nobody has found an effective mussel control strategy — and whitefish don’t have long to wait.

In some areas of lakes Michigan and Huron, almost no hatchlings have survived to adulthood for two decades. Commercial harvests have plummeted from 6.9 million pounds in 2009 to less than 2 million pounds last year, and the geriatric fish that remain will soon die of old age.

Michigan’s collapsing whitefish

For now, rescue efforts led by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians will be focused on Lake Michigan, where the crisis is particularly dire.

“For the southern Lake Michigan stocks, the only fear I have is, I hope we’re not too late,” said DNR Fisheries Chief Randy Claramunt.

After retrieving wild adults from several distinct bloodlines, scientists will attempt to incubate their eggs at the Wolf Lake State Fish Hatchery and then transfer the survivors to hatcheries across the state.

Ideally, those refugees would remain in human care for years or even decades until the mussel invasion subsides.

But money remains a barrier.

There are 18 unique whitefish populations in lakes Michigan and Huron, and most of them are imperiled. Current funding will cover only a couple of years of hatchery space, fish food and other expenses for only some of those populations.

Great Lakes Fishery Trust Manager Dan Lord said leaders of the effort hope to recruit deeper-pocketed partners, such as neighboring states and the US and Canadian governments.

For context, the federally funded recovery of Great Lakes lake trout has taken decades and hundreds of millions of dollars — and the work is not yet done.

Hoping to be prepared if the money materializes, state, federal, tribal and nonprofit scientists are developing a menu of options for broader rescue efforts that could involve hatcheries, inland ponds and lakes or new attempts to spawn whitefish in rivers.

“We’re looking comprehensively at all the places where we could possibly create (a refuge) for fish,” said Matt Herbert, a senior conservation scientist with the Nature Conservancy in Michigan.

The species’ long-term survival in the Great Lakes depends upon efforts to curb the mussel invasion.

A Bridge Michigan analysis found those efforts are so meagerly funded that scientists build research equipment out of scrap metal while worrying whether their work can continue another year.

In the wake of that reporting, US Reps. Debbie Dingell and Tim Walberg, both of Michigan, cosponsored legislation that would devote $500 million to mussel control research over the next decade. So far, the bill has shown no sign of momentum, prompting mounting calls for Congress to act.

“Whitefish are the canary in the coal mine,” Craven said. “They’re not the only species being affected by quagga mussels. So it’s important to address this for the sake of those ecosystems and those other fisheries, too.”

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This story was originally published by Bridge Michigan and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.