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Battling, defeating invasives a group effort

“History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of man — Godzilla,” — Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser

Their names and characteristics sound like those of wrestling villains, or the arch enemies of super heroes or closer yet, perhaps, the pantheon of classic movie monsters spawned out of the 1950s — Godzilla, Rodan, King Ghidrah and the like.

But these monstrous adversaries are real and they fiercely attack features of our natural world we’ve come to rely on for food, recreation, economic and other benefits.

They’re flying in the skies, crawling on the land, moving through the water or killing silently and insidiously — the threats are seemingly everywhere.

Some of these creatures have insect faces, mouths and other features. They stow away on family camping trips, hiding craftily within stacks of firewood, catching free passage to a zone void of their kind, where they set up shop and start proliferating, often damaging or destroying valuable forest resources worth millions of dollars.

In the deep underwater realm of the Great Lakes, lives a dark and serpent-like creature that spawns in local streams. This voracious parasite has a circular mouth ringed with sharp teeth that plunge into the flesh of lake trout, sucking out bodily fluids, and in the end, killing or wounding countless numbers of prized commercial and sport fish.

Other invading fish, arrived in North America from the distant shores of Asia, bred in captivity and freed from their pens by rising floodwaters, they flourished in the dank, muddy rivers of the south.

Moving farther north each year, some varieties of these fish hurl themselves out of the water when disturbed by the sounds and vibrations of motorboat propellers. Inching ever-closer to the Great Lakes, these large, insatiable fish threaten to displace lake trout and other native species by out-competing them for food.

Meanwhile, an insidious killer is also among us, a deadly fungus that wakes bats from their quiet winter slumber, forcing the insect-eating bats to deplete their stored food sources and die in the snow outside their caves.

Then there’s the twisting water plant infamous for choking the life from numerous Michigan lakes. Surviving on nutrients, shadowing native plants and looking like an underwater Medusa with a thousand or more snake heads, this mean competitor means business. Treatments to battle this foe can cost more than $1 million per lake.

If this weren’t enough, certain bivalve mollusks native to Russia and Ukraine, escaped from the ballast water of trans-oceanic ships, have multiplied dramatically within the Great Lakes ecosystem. Multitudes of these creatures have been attaching themselves to water intake pipes, clogging flow and creating problems for power plants, irrigation systems and fire protection equipment. Their strange biological filtering functions can clear important algae and plankton from healthy lakes.

Others on the long list of unwanted guests in the invasive rogue’s gallery include sharp-finned egg-eating perch-like fish, strong, competitive bivalve feeders and some predatory plankton-eaters with sharp-toothed spines.

Unmasked, these sinister aggressors are the emerald ash borer, sea lamprey, silver carp, white-nose syndrome, Eurasian watermilfoil, zebra mussel, ruffe, round goby and the spiny water flea.

And there are so many more — non-native, invasive species wreaking havoc on Michigan’s world-class natural resources, often with few, if any, predators to counter these attacks.

In the examples provided here, humans have been involved somehow in the introduction of these scary monsters to our beautiful Michigan ecosystems.

To defeat them — like in those 1950s movies of monsters often created by human atomic and other experimentation — we often look to science to find a silver bullet, chemical agent or superhero foe with extraordinary capabilities for success.

This case is no different.

However, ordinary citizens can also do their part to take bold and brave action to help keep our natural resources protected. The first step is learning more about these persistent threats and what can be done to help keep them at bay.

Visit www.michigan.gov/invasives.

Editor’s note: Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.

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