Wildlife

Fish guts show changes on the Lake Huron menu

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Alewives were once an important food source for top predators and popular gamefish such as salmon and lake trout. But Great Lakes populations of the small fish started to decline in the early 1980s.

Recreation

Alpena, Mich. “Sanctuary of the Great Lakes”

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The Lake Huron city of Alpena, Mich. has adopted a new slogan to promote the community as a place of peace and rejuvenation for visitors. The slogan, “Sanctuary of the Great Lakes,” came out of an effort to develop a brand to attract more tourists, according to city officials. Alpena is home to the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, an underwater preserve sheltering an estimated 116 shipwrecks dating from the nineteenth century to the present. “Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary is unique in the world,” said Deb Pardike, executive director of the Alpena Convention and Visitor’s Bureau.

Echo

Satellite watch: Animated Lake Huron ice breakup

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Worry wanes over the chance of flooding brought on by the melting ice bridge at the southern tip of Lake Huron. But a few freighters heading through the St. Clair River have gotten stuck in ice chunks that are gathered up like “sand bunched in an hourglass,” Tammy Stables Battaglia writes in the Detroit Free Press. The hourglass metaphor is apt. You can see it in action here:

Animating the Lake Huron ice bridge breakup

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A huge mass of ice at the southern tip of Lake Huron has the Canadian Coast Guard worried, according to the London Free Press and Port Huron Times Herald. Ice builds up there every year, but a warm spell could break up the mass into chunks too big to flow through the St. Clair River. That happened in 1984 and caused big problems.

The Times Herald has a cool interactive panoramic photo of the ice from the Blue Water Bridge. But suckers for satellite imagery should check out NOAA’s Great Lakes Coast Watch for a bird’s-eye view.

Echo

Lake Huron sinkholes give clues to ancient life

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By Sarah Coefield
Coefield@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo
July 15, 2009

The scientists studying the Lake Huron sinkholes know the colorful bacteria they host have a prehistoric ancestry, but a major question remains: Where did it all come from? The purple cyanobacteria mats in the Lake Huron sinkholes resemble mats found in ice-covered Antarctic lakes.  Bopi Biddanda, a research scientist with the Grand Valley State University Annis Water Resources Institute, suspects they may have a similar ancestry.  This suspicion relies on a theory that microbial life is already distributed across the planet, and comes out of hiding when conditions are just right, he said. The Lake Huron mats provide clues for how ocean and lake currents could have spread the bacteria.  Microbial gases in the sinkhole sediment force portions of the cyanobacteria mats to protrude like purple fingers pointing toward the lake’s surface.  The protrusions sometimes tear off and float away on the currents. “I think it is one of the ways (the bacteria) get distributed to other distant regions where groundwater may be coming out,” Biddanda said.  “And if they land there, they can populate with the same kind of microbes.” If the bacteria spread on currents, it likely happened long ago.  “We think they’re survivors of the past, that upon conditions returning to favorable conditions they were able to thrive and reestablish and keep going,” Biddanda said.

Echo

VIDEO: Lake Huron discovery is a window on the past and future

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By Sarah Coefield, coefield@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo
July 14, 2009

Lake Huron’s depths hide a colorful, ancient world that holds keys to the planet’s history and clues for new cancer treatments and antibiotics. The locals in Alpena have long known about sinkholes just offshore from their northeast Michigan community.  But it will take researchers several years to unravel the local diving spots’ mysteries. The story of the Lake Huron sinkholes and their exotic ecosystems begins on a ship.  While surveying shipwrecks in the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in 2001, Steve Ruberg and his colleagues were surprised to detect underwater basins 300 feet below the surface.  To their trained eyes, the basins looked like sinkholes. The discovery warranted further investigation. “Looking at the data and understanding what was going on, we actually came back and revisited the sites in 2003,” Ruberg said.  Ruberg is an engineer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory and a project leader for the sinkhole research.

Echo

Two series highlight trip around Lake Superior, fisheries in Lake Huron and Lake Michigan

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By Jeff Gillies
Great Lakes Echo
June 25, 2009

Here are couple of recent and on-going series on Great Lakes topics. Dave Spratt of Great Northern Outdoors has written a good three-part series that tells the story of shifting food webs in lakes Huron and Michigan. Parts one and two look at the collapse of Chinook salmon and the rise of walleye in Lake Huron — changes driven by the impact of zebra and quagga mussels on the once abundant alewives. Part three heads to Lake Michigan, where alewives are down but haven’t disappeared, and competing interests from five resource departments in four states make consensus on fish sticking decisions tough. The story is the third one listed on the Great Northern Outdoors main page.