Zebra mussels have taken the top spot in a list of aquatic invasive species that cause the most environmental and socioeconomic effects in the Great Lakes, proof that being number one isn’t always a good thing. A team of researchers used a ranked scoring system to analyze invasive species on the Great Lakes Aquatic Nonindigenous Species Information System (GLANSIS). This allowed them to nail down the ten species with most severe impacts. The list revealed a wide range of offenders, from molluscs (zebra mussels and quagga mussels) to fish (round gobies, sea lamprey, white perch, alewife, and grass carp) to plants (water chestnuts, phragmites, and Japanese stiltgrass).
The researchers found that while the top ten list featured species with unique survival strategies and places of origin, the aquatic invaders shared similarities in how they affected the Great Lakes. Some of commonalities between invaders included posing a threat to the survival of native species and causing economic impacts.
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“I get a lot of questions from the public who feel very overwhelmed by the nearly two hundred non-native species in the Great Lakes,” says El Lower, the lead author on the research paper and a GLANSIS communication specialist at Michigan Sea Grant. The questions from the public prompted Lower to search out a way to break the enormous dataset of invasive species into something accessible.
In comparing the top ten, the researchers also hoped to find shared features that could help predict future invasive species. But Lower points out that it’s really hard to pick out what the next big aquatic invader is going to be.
An example of predictions gone wrong is the case of the tubenose goby. Its relative, the round goby, is a successful invader of the Great Lakes and comes in at number nine on the list of top invaders.
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When the tubenose was introduced to the Great Lakes, people expected it to recreate the round goby’s invasive success. “Everyone went, ‘Oh no, it’s Round Goby Two: Electric Boogaloo,’” says Lower. “And then for some reason, tubenose gobies never really got established in the same way as their round goby cousins.” No one really knows why.
Doing the most recent analysis revealed “that there’s many different ways that a species can find success,” says Lower. “It just goes to show that there’s so many moving parts and factors. We need this ongoing baseline research on the national and internationally collaborative levels.”
It might surprise Ontario residents to see that white perch takes the number ten spot on the Great Lakes invaders list, given that white perch is a native species to the province. Except, “white perch are native to the St. Lawrence River, but not the Great Lakes basin itself,” Lower explains.
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Lower suggests exploring different tools to figure out what is local and native in your waterway. One resource they recommend is the Great Lakes Water Life database, where users can look up a waterbody and see the complete list of native species for that area. If you’re specifically hunting for info on invasives, then look to the Invasive Species Centre for profiles on invaders.
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