Great Lakes Echo (https://greatlakesecho.org/category/wildlife/page/10/)
This broad category encompasses fish. It is further divided on the main menu with tags for mammals, insects, amphibians, birds, mussels, invaders and endangered wildlife.
It’s October, and the stink bugs are moving into my house for the winter. So many things stink in a deliberate attempt to be repulsive. Other things stink to be attractive, but because they’re not trying to attract us, we may not like their aromas.
It’s a dish fit for a queen, and now a king.
For the past 10 years or so, entomologists have been looking for a way to control the population of spotted wing drosophila, a fruit fly that feeds on healthy cherries and blueberries. They say they may have found their answer in releasing the samba wasp, which kills fruit flies by laying its eggs inside them.
In July, the International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the monarch butterfly as endangered for the first time in history. Potter Park Zoo in Lansing, Michigan, first installed a pollinator garden in 2018. With the recent news of the monarch’s decline, the zoo is encouraging people to build wildlife habitats of their own.
An Ohio man who admitted fatally shooting a bald eagle will be banned from hunting for five years and has agreed to pay $20,000 as part of his sentence. Half the money will go to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a nonprofit funder of conservation projects, as restitution. The other $10,000 is a fine.
Michigan’s only venomous snake, the eastern massasauga rattlesnake, has been suspected or proven responsible for at least 75 bites reported in the state from 2003 through 2020, according to the most comprehensive tally ever of such incidents.
Since the early 2000s fewer young whitefish have been making it to adulthood. Understanding the decline of lake whitefish recruitment is important for fishery managers and regulators as they approach the deadline to update a 2000 consent decree that regulates recreational and commercial fishing in Lake Huron and Lake Michigan.
The impact that quagga mussels have on the Great Lakes food web gives deep meaning to the saying, ‘food for thought.’ These prodigious filter-feeders are implicated in the decline of many Great Lakes fish species, well beyond those with commercial and recreational value.
The food web in lakes Michigan and Huron has changed in ways that jeopardize age-old fishing traditions and raise questions about how we’ve managed them. Now negotiators are updating a legal settlement that spells out where and how much lake whitefish and lake trout can be harvested.
In our newest TikTok, Echo reporter Genevieve Fox talks about this year’s bird flu outbreak and gives a tutorial on how to clean your birdfeeder.