Pandora's Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway

08/ THE RECKONING

105 105 The zebra mussel has had perhaps the most profound effect on the Great Lakes ecosystem, second only to human beings. —Stephen Brandt, director of Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, 2005 08 THE RECKONING L ake Erie was the Rodney Dangerfield of the Great Lakes: It got no respect. Once derided by comedian Johnny Carson as “the place fish go to die,” Erie struggled to escape the stigma of a lake that was so polluted in the 1960s, some people mistakenly declared it dead. A half century later, Erie supported the most vibrant fishery among the five lakes. It contained just 2 percent of the six quadrillion gallons of water in the Great Lakes, but was home to about half the fish (by weight) living in the freshwater seas in 2000. To those unfamiliar with the bounty of aquatic life in its pale green waters, Erie was like the short, homely kid in a family of beautiful children with sleek bodies, straight teeth, and perfect hair. The perception was entirely different among people who understood the enigmatic lake. To them, Erie was a phoenix that rose from the ashes of environmental ruin. Its dramatic 106 C H A P T E R 8 106 recovery from the gross pollution of the 1950s and ’60s lured droves of people back to the lake by the 1980s. But just as Erie was approaching the apex of its recovery, an army of invaders from distant waters launched a biological assault that would test the lake’s resilience and, once again, bring the lake unwanted international notoriety. Erie’s transformation from industrial cesspool to recreational paradise was in full bloom in the mid-1980s, when Frank and Sandy Bihn built their dream on the shores of the lake’s western basin. For Sandy, building within a stone’s throw of the lake and Maumee Bay State Park was the ultimate homecoming. It was in Erie’s waters that she had learned how to swim and catch perch. Its shoreline was where she had fallen for her future husband, Frank. The love-struck couple had often ended their dates on Erie’s shoreline. Given a romance that was nourished by the lake, it was only fitting that they oriented their new house in a way that made Erie the center of their visual universe. The beach in front of the Bihns’s new house was narrow but sandy, a lovely place for barefoot strolls. The water in Maumee Bay, which had an average depth of just five feet, was relatively clean but murky—ideal conditions for perch and walleye. Gone by 1980 was the era of rampant water pollution, when massive algae blooms fueled by phosphorus-laden detergents formed huge fluorescent green mats on the lake’s surface. Lake Erie had been the poster child for water pollution in the 1960s. By the late ’80s, Erie was gaining a reputation for supporting one of North America’s best walleye fisheries. For the Bihns, their first year of living at the lake—1987—was about as good as life could get. But their honeymoon with the lake would be short-lived. The next year, fingernail-sized mussels with jagged brown stripes on their shells began washing up on the shores of western Lake Erie. None of the locals had ever seen that kind of mussel in their treasured lake. Since its stripes resembled those on Bengal tigers, someone proclaimed the mysterious creatures “tiger mussels.” The name stuck, for a while. The Bihns didn’t have the slightest inclination that tiger mussels were the first hint of a biological plague sweeping across the bottom of Lake Erie. They were on the leading edge of an environmental catastrophe that would spoil thousands of miles of Great Lakes beaches, bring an American city to a standstill, and trigger global efforts to battle a new form of pollution that had nothing to do with chemical discharges or oil spills. Biological pollution, caused by foreign species invading new territories, would prove to be far more vexing and damaging 107 T H E R E C K O N I N G 107 to Great Lakes ecosystems than decades of sewage spills and toxic chemical discharges. The Great Lakes Fishery Commission convened a workshop in May 1988 to examine the possibility that transoceanic freighters were inadvertently dumping foreign species into the lakes when discharging ballast water. Members of...