By Alice Rossignol and Rachael Gleason
Editor’s note: Great Lakes Smackdown! is an ongoing Great Lakes Echo series.
Don’t forget to turn in your brackets by 5 pm TODAY! More information here.
Round 1, Bracket 3: Alewife VS. White Perch
Something smells a little fishy in this match. Well, actually, a lot fishy, because there’s a whole lot of both the alewife and the white perch in the Great Lakes.
At six inches long and weighing in at 4 ounces, the alewife comes from the nearby U.S. Atlantic coast. First noticed in Lake Ontario in the late 1800s this fish likes to bully native fish and steal their lunch money. They‘re also communally hazardous, swarming into water intake pipes and dying in stinking masses that wash up on beaches. These herrings are known to pass toxins stored in their systems up the food chain.
Also from eastern U.S. the white, “the incredible, edible egg-eater,” white perch made its way inland in the 1950s. This big boy can grow up to 20 inches and is known for consuming minnows and zooplankton. Parenting is hard, we know, but this perch’s preferred delicacy are fish eggs – including its own. It outweighs the alewife, but is it more destructive?
Respectfully brawl and fight the good fight below.
Fighter Profiles:
Watch out for the alewife (AKA: "Vlad The Impale-wife." Photo: Shawn Good.
Alewife “VLAD THE IMPALE-WIFE”
Legal name: Alosa pseudoharengus
Home Turf: U.S. Atlantic coast and some inland areas on the east coast.
Great Lakes Fighting Debut: 1873 in Lake Ontario but some scientists claim that the fish is native to this lake. In that case, they started fighting invasively in 1931 in Lake Erie.
Agent: The fish entered the lakes through man made canals.
Preferred fighting arena: All the Great Lakes — though it’s less feisty in Lakes Superior and Erie.
Weight/Size class: 6 inches, 4 ounces.
Fighting Skills:
– These little guys love to munch on things like zooplankton, stealing food from the mouths of native fish species.
– Alewives find strength, and do damage in numbers. They clog industrial intake pipes and when they die in mass they then wash up on the beach.
– As bottom feeders, toxins build up in their systems.
Life Expectancy: Adulthood is reached between 2 and 3 years. At 5 years they see the light at the end of the water intake pipe.
Offspring: Females lay 10,000 to 360,000 eggs in one session.
Introducing the White Perch (AKA: The Incredible, Edible Egg-Eater." Photo: Douglas Facey.
White “THE INCREDIBLE, EDIBLE EGG-EATER” Perch
Legal name: Morone americana
Home Turf: U.S. east coast drainage systems
Great Lakes Fighting Debut: 1950, Cross Lake, New York
Preferred fighting arena: All the Great Lakes
Agent: man made canals.
Weight/Size class: Usually 7 to 10 inches. It weighs on average 8 ounces. Sumo-perch can reach sizes up to about 20 inches.
Fighting Skills:
– These whoppers love to prey on other fish eggs like those of the white bass and walleye. They also cannibalize eggs of their own (how quaint!).
– A surge in white perch population coincides with the collapse of some walleye fisheries.
– These voracious gluttons suck up minnows and zooplanktons that are food to native fish like the yellow perch.
Life Expectancy: They can legally vote and smoke cigarettes anywhere between two to four years and bite the dust in about ten.
Offspring: Between 20,000 and 200,000 eggs a year. Sounds like a lot, but they’re not the greatest of parents considering they eat their own eggs. They also can’t keep their fins off other fish and have been known to mate with the white bass.
Stay tuned next week when the winners are announced.
Updated for accuracy: Oct. 21, 2010.