Wildlife

Alewives: The trouble they cause and the salmon that love them

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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 Resources Authority.

Wildlife

Alewives: Should Great Lakes managers kill ‘em or keep ‘em?

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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.