Canada Fishing Info

The filter-feeding mussels are fueling an explosion of the sunlight-loving cladophora, which grows on the lake bottom, washes ashore and rots in front of her house - and on untold miles of shoreline across the Great Lakes. Preliminary results from a federally funded study under way at the University of Notre Dame estimate that the economic loss tied directly to 57 exotic species scientists believe were delivered to the lakes by overseas vessels is costing us about $300 million a year - more than a million dollars a day for every day the Seaway is open (it closes each winter because of ice). The vast majority of Great Lakes shipping is done by the freshwater “laker” fleet that hauls bulk commodities such as iron ore, salt and cement from one Great Lakes port to another. Cladophora outbreaks aren’t uniformly coating Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan shoreline - where they land depends on the wind, the waves, the shape of a shoreline and whether there is nearby rocky lake bottom on which the bright green stuff can grow. They can be found across the lake at Michigan’s Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, where the decaying cladophora on the lake bottom has been implicated in botulism outbreaks that have killed thousands of birds in the past two years. read more

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