Invasive species are a top concern. What is the best way to handle incoming aquatic invaders?

Given the billions of dollars spent to combat alien invasive species, and the horrendous ecological damage they have caused to the Great Lakes basin, we really need to have a zero tolerance policy for anything new entering the system via ballast water. 

Leave it up to the private sector to figure out how best to do that, just set the bar and don't lower it.  Verification should be carried out by a bi-national entity, and their work must be transparent.

It's not an easy or cheap task, is it?  Neither was building the Soo Locks, Welland Canal, dredging shipping lanes, breaking ice, or any of the projects that were completed to get us into this mess.  Once again, Pogo was right.  "We have met the enemy and he is us!!"

JP

I agree with instituting necessary controls to limit the impact of the next threat.  These need to be balanced against the impact region-wide, not just the Lake Michigan watershed.

Some  industry somewhere will be negatively impacted no matter what we attempt.  The bigger concern is perhaps not how much commerce will be lost through shipping, "swish and spit" ballast cycling, commercial fish declines, diminished recreation and tourism, ...whatever.  The issue should perhaps be the benefit of the Lakes and the greater ecosystem as a global resource. 

Through the nature of being an international boundary as well as one-fifth of the world's available fresh water it defies any one state or country from being able to act unilaterally in regards to impacting the waters that reach us all.  The world at-large is impacted through the actions impacting the waters of the Great Lakes in one way or another.

I live upriver from the Lakes and probably won't see an Asian carp for quite sometime.  We make most of our products (corn and beans, industry) that rely on the shipping and transportation industries to get to the rest of the country and the world.  In other words, this region will be more negatively impacted than the rest of the Lakes region by limiting the shipping and access to international waters and markets.  Nevertheless, I am a firm advocate of instituting limits on the waterways, albeit reversable, to save the overall ecosystem.

Somewhere in the course of instituting reversable measures, we open the door to innovation again.  To put it glibly; "adversity builds character-but without adversity, who needs it?"  I'm sure there will be plenty of folks more clever than I willing to step up to the task of meeting and solving the temporary limits on the waterways.

Human nature got us into this problem, yes, but we know it is that very nature that is capable of finding a reasonable solution with some benefit for everyone.

In the meanwhile, don't mess with my walleye!

Thanks for being interested. 

I am all for stopping ballast water etc... Other special interests problems are right under our noses. The Asian Carp control plan calls for a healthy native fish population among other things, this makes a fishery more resistant to invasive species. However Lake Michigan has been managed to protect the Alewives which has made it safe for all invasives, proven by the healthy invasive population, Gobies are now being caught in the Trout streams, we have predators to eat most of the invasive's including Asian Carp however they also eat Alewives which are protected by our in house special interest groups, Salmon charters and the DNR's.

The barrier will stop nothing, Google common carp control using native predators, the principle is the same.

Native fish are restricted so the lakes are wide open to invasion.

Tom Matych Twin Lake Mi.