Great Lakes Echo (https://greatlakesecho.org/category/wildlife/page/64/)
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.
What do cologne and Indiana’s great blue herons have in common? They both contain chemicals that are increasingly worrisome to Great Lakes officials. A list of contaminants of emerging concern includes synthetic musks and perfluorinated compounds, or PFCs. Musks are a key ingredient of perfume. PFCs have had a bevy of industrial uses including fire-fighting foams and stain-resistant Scotchgard.
By Alice Rossignol
Nov. 3, 2009
As a boy, David Radaich’s father shot wolves that wandered onto the family cattle farm in northeast Minnesota. Now a beef cattle producer himself, Radaich tries to deal with wolves in a legal and ethical way. But it’s not easy. “The challenge seems to be increasing in the last couple of years,” Radaich said.
By Jeff Gillies
Oct. 20, 2009
While Great Lakes officials beat back the voracious Asian carp at the gates of Lake Michigan, they still wrangle with another nasty fish that snuck in at least 90 years ago. Sea lampreys, eel-like parasitic fish native to the Atlantic Ocean, use a mouthful of teeth and a bony tongue to latch onto and scrape through fish flesh. Scientists debate whether the lamprey is native to Lake Ontario, where it was discovered in 1835. But it invaded Lake Erie by 1921 and the rest of the Great Lakes by 1946.
(MI) Detroit Free Press – White-nose syndrome, thought to be caused by a fungus previously unknown in the United States, settles on the noses and wings of hibernating bats. It has destroyed as many as 97% of the bats in some caves in the Northeast. The telltale white fungus was first noted on dead bats in New York in 2006 and has claimed more than 1 million bats in nine states since then, scientists say. More
By Shawntina Phillips
phill465@msu.edu
Oct. 13, 2009
State and federal officials are considering a fish poison as a way of pushing back a front of hungry carp that are advancing toward the Great Lakes. Recent DNA testing indicates that Asian carp are now within a mile of an electric barrier designed to keep fish out of Lake Michigan. They already have reached the Des Plaines River, a body of water that runs parallel to the barrier. That’s worrisome said John Rogner, the assistant director of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
By Jordan Travis
Great Lakes Echo
Oct. 4, 2009
LANSING – The bobcat hunting and trapping season in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula will start three months later because of an apparent drop in the bobcat population. The UP season will be shortened from four months and a week to two months. The start date for the trapping season, originally Oct. 25, is now Dec.
(MI) Grand Rapids Press – Beekeepers tend farm and backyard hives for the honey, to help pollinate gardens to earn cash and because they like bees. “Bees are so industrious. They work from sun up to sun down. It’s interesting to watch them go in and out of the hives and do their different jobs,” said businessman Chris Raphael, a Saugatuck resident who started beekeeping two years ago. More
(IL) Chicago Tribune – They’re metallic green, can fit on a penny and are now a threat to the thousands of ash trees in the Village of La Grange. According to Ryan Gillingham, La Grange’s director of public works, multiple adult Emerald Ash Borers were found in one of the six traps the village has maintained for detecting the beetle. More
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? Sept. 2, 2009
Alewives: Should Great Lakes managers kill ‘em or keep ‘em? Fishery managers have made little progress in restoring lake trout, the Great Lakes’ dominant predator until the species collapsed in the 1940s and 1950s.