Alewives are a Great Lakes invasive fish that baffle native fish reproduction but give imported Pacific salmon — the target of a profitable fishery — something to eat. What’s a Great Lakes fishery manager to do?

By Jeff Gillies, jeffgillies@gmail.com
Great Lakes Echo
Sept. 4, 2009
Editors note: This is the final story in a three-part series about the challenges of managing non-native fish in the Great Lakes.
Managing invasive alewives in the Great Lakes is like walking a tightrope.
Too many stymie native lake trout reproduction. Too few cripple the profitable salmon fishery.
And some biologists say it is an impossible task.
“You can’t manage on that fine of a line,” said Mark Ebener, fish assessment biologist with the Chippewa Ottawa Resource Authority. “It’s an impossible tightrope to walk.”
But the state agencies …

(OH) Cleveland Plain-Dealer – Fifteen feet above the pavement at Broadway and Orange Avenue, a white-metal battalion of computerized monitors is measuring and analyzing our dirty downtown skies as never before.

By Jeff Gillies, jeffgillies@gmail.com
Great Lakes Echo
Sept. 3, 2009
Editors note: This is the second of three stories in a series about the challenges of managing non-native fish in the Great Lakes.
Pacific salmon, the big money species in the multi-billion dollar Great Lakes fishery, need a feast of alewives to thrive.
But alewives are an invasive species that harm lake trout, a native fish that biologists have been trying and failing to re-establish for decades.
Alewives keep lake trout down in two ways, said Mark Ebener, fish assessment biologist with the Chippewa Ottawa …

(MI) The Bay City Times – State and local officials involved with the Saginaw Bay Coastal Initiative are looking at the Truxor, an amphibious vehicle, to clear muck that gathers at the shoreline and remains suspended in the water at the public beach in Bangor Township.

(MI) Michigan Tech News – The Great Lakes are many things: bodies of water, sources of life, a story and a poem. “Waterlife,” a film that follows the flow of the water in the Great Lakes from the Nipigon River to the Atlantic Ocean, captures the significance of the Great Lakes and the Great Lakes ecosystem in a compelling, feature-length documentary.

(MI) The Flint Journal – They came, they saw…and they ate the cherry tomatoes. More than 160 people showed up at the Flint Farmers’ Market Tuesday night to pack a caravan of buses for a free tour of Flint’s booming urban agriculture movement.

By Jeff Gillies, jeffgillies@gmail.com
Great Lakes Echo
Sept. 2, 2009
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of stories about the challenges of managing non-native fish in the Great Lakes.
Fishery managers have made little progress in restoring lake trout, the Great Lakes’ dominant predator until the species collapsed in the 1940s and 1950s.
Most of them agree that alewives, a non-native fish, are a big part of the problem. They invaded the lakes from the Atlantic Ocean after the Welland Canal opened in 1932. Alewives eat young lake trout and disrupt chemical …