ZEBRA MUSSELS AND PURPLE LOOSESTRIFE
CONTENTS
Tuesday 29 January 1991
Zebra Mussels and Purple Loosestrife
Joe Leach
Gerry Mackie
Jon Stanley
Afternoon sitting
David W. Garton
Ministry of the Environment
Ministry of Natural Resources
Adjournment
STANDING COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT
Chair: Kormos, Peter (Welland-Thorold NDP)
Vice-Chair: Waters, Daniel (Muskoka-Georgian Bay NDP)
Arnott, Ted (Wellington PC)
Cleary, John C. (Cornwall L)
Dadamo, George (Windsor-Sandwich NDP)
Huget, Bob (Sarnia NDP)
Jordan, Leo (Lanark-Renfrew PC)
Klopp, Paul (Huron NDP)
Murdock, Sharon (Sudbury NDP)
Offer, Steven (Mississauga North L)
Ramsay, David (Timiskaming L)
Wood, Len (Cochrane North NDP)
Clerk pro tem: Manikel, Tannis
Staff: Luski, Lorraine, Research Officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 1007 in room 228.
ZEBRA MUSSELS AND PURPLE LOOSESTRIFE
Consideration of the designated matter, pursuant to standing order 123, relating to zebra mussels and purple loosestrife.
The Chair: Order, please. I apologize for the slight delay, but the first morning, I guess, there are logistical problems. If you go to your agenda for Tuesday 29 January, you will see the first item on the agenda is a staff briefing. It is customary that these briefings be held in camera, and if I can get agreement to proceed with that, then we will proceed with the in camera staff briefing. Is that agreed? Recorded as agreed, and we will proceed with the in camera briefing.
The committee continued in camera at 1007.
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JOE LEACH
The Chair: Our first witness this morning is Dr Joe Leach from the Ministry of Natural Resources at the Lake Erie Fisheries Station in Wheatley. Dr Leach's presentation will put focus on the introduction of new species into perspective with existing species in terms of competition for resources and habitats. Dr Leach, you can go ahead with your material.
Dr Leach: I plan to give you a brief overview of introductions into the Great Lakes going back to the early 1800s. This overview is based on a study which was conducted by Dr Edward Mills of Cornell University and myself. The study was in response to a request from the board of technical experts of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. I will proceed into this now with my slides.
Why are we concerned about introduced species? First of all, they create what we term biological pollution. They are difficult to eradicate. I cannot think of a single species that has become established and has been eradicated. They create new instabilities -- the sea lamprey and its impact on the upper Great Lakes is a good example of that -- and they create an uncertain ecological and economic future. The zebra mussel has us in that phase now.
We defined an "exotic organism" as a successfully reproducing species transported by human activities into the Great Lakes, and an "entry vector" as the most probable means by which that species arrived here through human activity.
How many species have come in and what are they? We do not know how many species have come in; it could be thousands. But we know that 115 species have become established since 1810. If you look at them in terms of groups, the aquatic plants make up the largest group with 28%, the algae with 23%, but the fish have made up almost one fifth of the group with 19% and the rest of them are invertebrates or fish diseases.
How did they get here? If you break down the entry vectors, you will see that ships have been the biggest vector with 34%; accidental release, 23%; deliberate release, 9%; canals, only 5%, but canals have been responsible for bringing in some of the most important invaders. We do not know how one quarter of the species arrived here.
Looking at the ship vector in a little more detail, ballast water has been the largest component of that vector with 68% and solid ballast is 23%. Solid ballast was more important in earlier days and has been responsible for bringing in some of our aquatic plant species.
What species came in in ballast water? A lot of algae species came in and some fish species and, as I mentioned earlier, some of the aquatic plant species have come in through the solid ballast mechanism and also some algae species. This is an ocean-crossing ship which is docked at Duluth taking on grain. It probably came across the ocean in ballast and removed that ballast in western Lake Superior or in Duluth harbour, and you can tell by the water line on the ship that it is riding high now. When it receives its full cargo of grain, that line will be down. Ships have quite an array of dedicated ballast tanks for taking on water to create stability. As much as a million gallons of ballast can be held in one of these on the voyage across.
This entry vector has attracted a lot of recent attention. The International Joint Commission and the Great Lakes Fishery Commission have made a joint appeal to the governments of Canada and the US to take some strong action to control this vector.
Where do these exotics come from? Almost half of them come from Europe and almost a quarter of them come from the Atlantic coast. These are the two main areas that have impacted the Great Lakes. When did they come in? About 46% of them have come in since 1960, and please remember that the Seaway opened in 1959.
We have here a time line of some of the more major species that have impacted the Great Lakes from 1810. We have picked 15 species which we think have been significant. There seem to be three groups of them in terms of invasion: an early group, including cladophora, alewife and sea lamprey in the early 1800s; a late-1800s group including the purple loosestrife, the common carp, the brown trout; and a later group including the fish diseases, Eurasian milfoil, white perch, spiny water flea, ruffe and zebra mussel.
I will go into a little more detail on some of these major species and their impacts. This is the purple loosestrife, which is a beautiful plant. Unfortunately, it displaces some of our native aquatic plants which are useful for waterfowl. The dispersion of this plant has been fairly rapid across North America. It has a unique sea dispersal method which, interestingly enough, was described by Charles Darwin back in the 1800s.
I have some maps showing the progression of this species across North America. It was first established in 1876. It utilized the canal system. See the Erie Canal here, which links to the Atlantic seaboard through the Hudson River system. It links into both Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. This was the dispersal in 1880, the dispersal in 1900, and you will see it had reached the Great Lakes. By 1940 it had become established west of the Great Lakes and by 1985 it has reached right across the North American continent.
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The sea lamprey is probably an example of one of the worst invaders we have suffered. It has been in Lake Ontario since the early 1800s. It found its way through the canal system into Lake Erie by 1921 and moved on up into the upper Great Lakes, where it devastated the lake trout and lake whitefish populations. The Canadian and US governments have spent millions of dollars in attempts to control this invader, with a certain degree of success.
The European carp. which was brought into North America as a food item, is now ubiquitous in the Great Lakes in shallow water areas. It destroys habitat and is considered to be a pest.
The rainbow smelt, which comes in from the Atlantic seaboard through the canal system, found its way into Lake Erie in 1935. The fishermen started to fish for it commercially in the 1950s. It now ranks number one in terms of tonnage harvested from that lake and number three in terms of value. On the negative side, it has impacted both lake whitefish and probably the blue pike.
These are alewives, which have a nasty habit of ending up on the beaches when they die. It is another Atlantic seaboard fish which found its way into Lake Erie by 1931 and moved on up into the upper Great Lakes, where it became very abundant, particularly in Lake Michigan, perhaps due to the lack of a top predator. The sea lamprey liquidated the lake trout. Lake managers brought in Pacific salmon as a control measure for this and these have been quite successful. The alewife now is an important forage species for salmonid fisheries, particularly in Lake Michigan and Lake Ontario.
The green scum here is a green algae, cladophora, which came in in the early 1880s. It increased quite dramatically during a period of enrichment in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. It abated somewhat in later years due to phosphorus control.
The upper one is a coho and the lower one is a chinook. These are Pacific salmon brought in to create salmonid sport fisheries and also to combat the alewife. They are two examples of successful invaders.
The brown trout from Europe, another example of a beneficial introduction, provides a good sport fishery, and a classic example is the rainbow trout. which is probably the most transplanted fish in the world. From the Pacific coast it is now all through eastern North America and provides an excellent sport fishery.
White perch, a warm-water fish from the eastern seaboard, found its way into Lake Erie in the 1950s. It became established and has progressed up into warm water embayments particularly in Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. This species can outcompete our native yellow perch and is at the present time impacting yellow perch in Lake Erie.
There is an example of a benign invader. I mentioned there were a lot of invaders that have come in and we do not know what they are. This is one that came in and we know what it is and it did not succeed. It is from Europe, originally from Asia, and it came in on ballast. We were not worried about it becoming established because its life history requires it to go down to the sea to spawn. We knew it would not become established in the Great Lakes, and it has not.
Now I come to the three most recent invaders, which came in in the 1980s: the ruffe, the spiny water flea and the zebra mussel. The spiny water flea is found now in all the Great Lakes. It is quite abundant. There was a considerable amount of concern that it would impact fisheries through alteration in the food web, and it perhaps has done that in Lake Michigan. However, we find in Lake Erie that it is preyed upon quite severely by yellow perch and other species and seems to be held in check, so that we do not think it will be as serious a pest as originally considered.
The ruffe, the European perch-type fish, which was found in Duluth harbour in the 1980s, came in on ballast undoubtedly and spread into parts of western Lake Superior and has not moved much from there. However, there is a lot of shipping from Duluth down into the lower Great Lakes and we suspect that it could be carried in on that route. We are concerned about it because it can outcompete yellow perch. This is what happened in Loch Lomond in Scotland when the ruffe invaded there in the early 1980s. The purple bars indicate the increase in ruffe and the green bars indicate the decline in the abundance of yellow perch.
Finally, the zebra mussel, which was first found in June 1988 and has spread quite dramatically. You will be hearing a lot about the zebra mussel in the presentations that follow mine and I will not say much about it. It found a vacant niche in the Great Lakes. There is no other bivalve organism and it has become superabundant, particularly in Lake Erie and Lake St Clair.
Just to sum up, the Great Lakes have been subject to invasions from at least the early 1800s. One out of every 10 exotic species has significant ecological or economic impact. Almost half of them have become established since the opening of the St Lawrence Seaway and about a third of them have entered the Great Lakes through ship activities.
That ends my presentation.
The Chair: Thank you, Dr Leach. Questions?
Mr Waters: You have shown us all these infestations that we have had in the past. Is there any way of predicting what is going to be coming in the future, and if so, when?
Dr Leach: That is a very good question. I wish I had a good answer for you. It is virtually impossible to tell you what will come in. What have come in and been successful are usually those species which are similar in climatic and adaptive requirements from their native situation. I cannot say much more than that, other than it will probably be a small organism, it will probably come in ballast, but what it would be, we have no way of knowing. These are always unknowns.
Mr Waters: At present there is probably something in Europe travelling around. I was just wondering if there was anything that seems to be spreading in Europe that we could be expecting in ballast water in the future -- that is basically it -- that we do not have at present.
Dr Leach: Marine traffic in Europe has been going on for a long period of time and there is very likely less opportunities for new invaders to become established, new situations in Europe. This problem with introductions is a global thing. We are going through a period now of homogenization of biota on a global basis and it is largely because of the increase in shipping traffic through all areas of the world.
Mr Ruprecht: From your perspective. do you think the department has sufficient data on the zebra mussel, its problems and the extent to which it will cause damage in the future? Do you have enough data on all of that?
Dr Leach: I would not think so, no. This is a recent invader. It is a new situation. We are finding already that it is not following the same patterns as in Europe in terms of growth. I would think we need to study this organism more intensely.
Mr Ruprecht: Mr Chairman. if that is the case, I would think that what you would want to do is to ensure that sufficient resources are made available to the department so that we can have data in order to work quite quickly to overcome some of these problems.
In terms of the process of determining the problems and getting the data, is the department prepared to act quickly on any of the new invaders or any of the new species that come into Ontario, especially in this case into our waterways, which will then affect not only the fish life in the water but also the fauna and other aspects of new species that are introduced into the Great Lakes basin?
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Dr Leach: I think some of the presenters following me will be in a better position to answer that than myself. Just looking at the zebra mussel problem, when we first uncovered it in the summer of 1988, we acted very quickly to get as much information as we could about it in terms of what happened to it in Europe. Also, we followed its progress quite quickly, in Lake Erie particularly.
Mr Ramsay: Dr Leach, at the very beginning of your presentation, you listed for us five potentially negative consequences of the introduction of exotics to the ecosystem in Ontario. I take it from that that also applies to the voluntary introductions, not just the involuntary ones.
Dr Leach: Most of the voluntary ones have been beneficial invaders. The rainbow trout is a classic example of a very beneficial invader which was deliberately brought here and has reproduced successfully and has become a very important component of the sport fisheries. When I was talking about impacts, those 15 species I listed, I was talking in terms of significant economic and ecological impact and I was including some beneficial invaders as well.
Mr Ramsay: As we become more aware, though, that we are obviously very susceptible here in Ontario and North America to invasive species, are we taking more care in our voluntary introductions into the environment? Do we have a regime of class environmental assessments, for example?
Dr Leach: Yes, we have, and some of the speakers after me are in a better position to give you full details of that process.
Mr Arnott: Dr Leach, if we look at this thing in a historical perspective, it appears that the enhancement of Great Lakes shipping from international ports of origin is generally creating an invasion of species that are giving us problems. Is it fair to say that in absolute terms, as Great Lakes shipping is increased through national trade patterns, I suppose, in the future, we are going to be faced with more and more invasive species of the sort?
Dr Leach: Yes, certainly the potential for more invaders is there and unless there is some change taking better control of the management of ballast, that would definitely be subject to further invasion.
Mr Cleary: Would you care to touch a bit on winter or summer temperature of water and things like that that zebra mussels survive best in?
Dr Leach: Yes. The ecological requirements of zebra mussels are fairly well known. Temperature requirements: They will cover a wide span of temperature and in Europe they do in fact cover quite a wide latitude. When you transport that latitude to North America, the potential for invasion is quite substantial, right across North America based on temperature alone. There are other ecological requirements, such as calcium and Ph, which also affect the dispersion.
The Chair: There being no further questions, thank you very much for your presentation, Dr Leach, and thank you very much for coming this morning.
GERRY MACKIE
The Chair: Our next witness is Dr Gerry Mackie from the department of zoology, University of Guelph. Dr Mackie has been working on the zebra mussel problem since it was first recognized and he will summarize current research findings and suggest priorities for future research needs.
Dr Mackie: I just gave a presentation at the University of Alberta -- in fact, two presentations -- so the handout that you are getting now has two abstracts on those two talks. Basically, what I have done is take slides from each of those talks and combine them into this one presentation, so you will not find the slides in any particular order with respect to your handout. However, I think the story will unfold as we go along.
This is actually the first specimen that was turned in, to me at least. I am not sure if it was the first one found, but it was the first one turned in to me. This is the one that I identified as Dreissena polymorpha, easily characterized by the zebra stripe pattern; that is, alternating yellow and black bands in a zigzag pattern. The animal below is called a unionid clam, or one of our native clams. As it turns out, the zebra mussel is having a devastating impact on this group and I will give you some data to illustrate that in a minute.
The only other Dreissena that we have in North America is a brackish water species that belongs to another genus called mytilopsis. It is currently restricted to the east coast of North America and in fact originated in the southeastern states, Florida, the Carolinas and so on, and has since migrated northward and is now in the North Atlantic states──that is, New York and so on──and we expect that both Dreissena and this species are going to meet. Both are very characteristic in that they are tenacious. They attach to almost any kind of substrate. I have shown here an unionid clam, or one of our native clams. basically to give you some idea of how big the zebra mussel is. You can see in this slide that the zebra mussels are confined to the rear end of this unionid clam and it is the rear end only because the rest of that clam sticks in mud and is not exposed to infestation by the zebra mussels.
This is a cross-section through a zebra mussel. This area here is the foot. On each side here are the gills. This pinkish structure right in the middle of the foot, where there is a canal right dead centre, is called the byssal gland and it is this gland that secretes a liquid that solidifies in contact with the water.
These threads that are attached to a substrate need a firm substrate to attach to. Zebra mussels cannot survive in mud or sand. They must have a hard substrate to survive. They can secrete as many as 12 threads a day, according to the European literature, and we have found adults that have as many as 200 threads attaching a single zebra mussel to the substrate. Those threads can be attached directly to the rock it is on or to neighbouring individuals as well.
For example, I have shown here in a sketch one zebra mussel shown on the end, and that is with the stripe down the centre. There is a smaller one in the middle and one on its side. You can see all those byssal threads. Some are attached to the rock; some are attached to the neighbouring individuals. When those individuals die, they do not leave the substrate; they stay there because those byssal threads are holding each other in place.
Anything in the water will be attacked by the zebra mussels, or at least infestations will occur on almost anything, except copper plate. Concrete bricks or blocks, cement walls and so on are particularly common substrates because of the calcium in those substrates. There is a unionid clam or native clam in the middle here. You can see some zebra mussels on it. We have done several experiments to see if there are any kinds of materials that will resist zebra mussel infestations. We have tried all kinds of plastics, including Teflon, and they attached to Teflon. The only material that resists them is copper, and that is after one year of experimentation. That experiment is going on now and it will be two years old at the end of next summer.
This is a cross-section through the female gonad. The zebra mussels are separate sexes. There is a female individual and a male individual and you can see all the eggs within these follicles. There are several follicles or tubes. If you can follow this arrow here, that is one follicle, and within that follicle are several eggs. One female can produce as many as 30,000 eggs in its first year of reproductive life and up to 40,000 each of its second and third years.
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That was in May. By the end of September all of the eggs are released. So you see all of these follicles are empty. The reproductive period runs from about June -- we saw the larvae as late as November this year -- so the window is roughly May to November for the presence of zebra mussel larvae.
As far as the males are concerned. the testes are enormous. This is a very ripe male and the gonad in this particular specimen covered about 50% of the animal. Again, by the end of September all of the sperm have been released, so you do not find any sperm in the sperm ducts.
The life cycle has been very well described in the European literature and we are looking at it now and developing the times between each of the stages shown here. This is the whole life cycle. It goes through a planktonic stage, that is, a stage where the larvae swim in the water column, and this is the way they are oriented in the water. They have a structure called a velum, which has cilia. Those cilia beat and help to maintain the animal's position in the water column. Over time, and that is about a week from that point down to this point, that velum is lost, it is resorbed and forms structures called siphons, which are used to bring water into and out of the animal.
As that structure is absorbed, it loses its ability to swim, so it begins to settle out and we call that the post-veliger stage. This settling stage represents the stage where it no longer has the ability to maintain itself in the water column and it settles to the bottom, secretes a thread very quickly under proper conditions and then develops into the adult. That whole event may take anywhere from two weeks to four weeks and it is inversely related to temperature. The warmer the water, the faster the development time; the colder the water, the longer the development time.
We find very different seasonal distributions of the larvae throughout all of the Great Lakes, and for this reason you have to monitor the populations of zebra mussels not only within each lake but in each location on the lake. For example, this is Lake St Clair. We found the peak abundance of larvae in about the first week of July. In the Welland Canal, at Quebec and Ontario Paper Co, it was in the middle of August, and just 15 kilometres downstream it was a week later, in about the third week of August. In Lake Ontario it is later yet. We found a huge peak in the middle of September, and we are not sure if this is noise or not.
One of the problems with Lake Ontario is that it has severe internal seiches; that is, there is a cold layer in the water column and it can rock like this. Any industry that has its intake structure, say, at this position, if that thermocline tips that way, that layer tips that way, then the cold water suddenly comes in. We think that process is limiting the settling rate of zebra mussels in the Eastman Kodak facility.
On the Ontario side, at Lake Ontario Cement, we only began to see the larvae appear this year and the numbers really did not get much higher than 100 per cubic metre. So next year we expect to see huge increases in the numbers at Lake Ontario Cement, which is not far from Kingston.
Not only do we see differences in spatial distribution -- that is, the seasonal abundance spatially that is different at places along the lake -- but seasonally as well. This is Ministry of Natural Resources data by Joe Leach for 1988 and 1989. You can see that there were two peaks in each of those years, and the peaks differed as well in each of the years. So it is really important that each of the industries that is trying to control zebra mussels monitors the abundance of the larvae in the water column, because they occur at different times in the year from one year to the next, and there may be only one peak instead of two.
We have measured the growth rate of the larvae and one of the things we look for of course is the settling individuals. Individuals tend to settle beyond 200 microns in length, so as soon as we start seeing histograms appearing at 200 microns and beyond, then we know they are in the settling stage. That is the critical point. The larvae at this size swim in the water. They really do not do anything as far as industries are concerned. However, they may have an impact on the ecology of the Great Lakes in that they may be filtering some of the food out of the water.
You can go throughout the summer just looking for those longer-length classes to look at the degree of settling. This is October and November. We were seeing larvae, for example, until 28 November this year, which is really unusual, compared to last year when they disappeared in October.
This is a veliger that has lost its ability to swim. You can see the foot here is beginning to crawl around. There are siphons formed in this region of the animal, so it starts settling, and one of the surprising things we have found this year is that those individuals can settle in a matter of two weeks; 90% that are out in the water settle in two weeks. We found this at several stations.
Here again you can see 4 September was the last time we saw the veligers, and then they started settling on 9 September. These are three- to four-day intervals that we were sampling in. In two weeks, we had 90% of those individuals settling. In other words, there really was not much difference in the numbers beyond that point.
That should be a significant fact for industries trying to control zebra mussels, because that window can be narrowed to two weeks. Remember, last year there was only one period of settlement. In previous years there were two, so they would have to isolate both of those periods. The same at Stelpipe on the Welland Canal, two weeks again basically.
One of the things we also discovered was that the settling rate may be dependent on the numbers of larvae in the water. We are only now beginning to gather these data. We have to gather substantially more, but it looks like anything below 850 per cubic metre, for example, we did not see anything settling. Unfortunately we do not have anything between 850 and 36,000. We do not know if 10,000 is the magic number, for example, but once it gets to a certain point there is going to be a level where it will no longer increase.
These are the adults. What we have done here is take adults off rocks, measure each one and then we plot them. So we count the numbers in each length class. Those are very small length classes, something like 22 microns. Sorry, I cannot read the numbers here, but they are very small individuals, less than a millimetre in length. Each peak represents a cohort, so you can see a lot of new individuals appearing in this sample, which is I think 2 May 1989.
Those individuals grow to this point, that grows to that point and so on, so everything moves to the right. You can see a new recruitment event occurring here, so new individuals appeared again there. Those grow to that point, those grow to there and so on. If you plot those, you can determine the growth rates of the individuals.
We found that in 1988 and 1989 they grew as much as two centimetres a year. That is a lot of guesswork, because you do not know when those adults actually landed on the rock. You are presuming they landed in the fall or the spring of 1988 and 1989 respectively, but there is one way, because zebra mussels are so unique in their ability to attach, to determine exactly how old, how quickly they grow.
You can set out cement blocks such as this one here and you can see zebra mussels starting to settle in the groove. If you pull that rock every two weeks and take specimens off, you know that that block was put in on a certain date, you know when the mussels started settling on there and, if you measure them at two-week intervals, you can determine their growth rate. This is after another two weeks. You can see the block is almost completely covered by zebra mussels. If you measure them over the summer, you can confirm from the block date, which is the dashed line, that they grew 15 millimetres, compared to the 17 shown on this one site that we measured in Lake St Clair.
This is extremely fast compared to the European populations. They grow twice as fast and live half as long, it seems, in the Great Lakes. These are data from European populations. These are British populations here where they tend to grow faster than populations in Poland and Russia. So we have got a mix of these two and we are not quite sure if we have got any specimens that are particularly representative of any one country. We seem to have our own unique population, so to speak.
The data I have given you so far just give growth of individuals, how fast they grow and reproduce and so on. These are data on the population itself. We want to know when the populations are going to peak. What we have done is take data for 1987 and you have to back-calculate, because we collected clams in 1988, but the numbers that are on that clam represent those that were born in 1987, so we can go back one year. You lose some over the winter months because of ice scouring, predation and various factors of mortality.
On the vertical axis it is a log scale, so it is an order of magnitude: 1 is 10: 2 is 100; 3 is 1,000; 4 is 10,000; 5 is 100,000 per square metre. You can see that the population seems to be levelling off in Lake St Clair right now. Those solid dots are actual data. the round open dots are hypothetical data, just to try and fit to this curve. Those diagonal lines represent the amount of mortality that we see from one year to the next, so that would represent the population in the fall of one year and that would be the population in the following spring. Then they reproduce and produce that many more new individuals to the blocks. It looks like they are starting to peak out in Lake St Clair, but we need more data to confirm it because there tends to be a lot of so-called noise in ecological data.
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Where are we now? They are throughout Lake Erie, throughout Lake St Clair, three quarters of the way up Lake Ontario, at least in terms of the veliger larvae. Adults tend to be confined to the southern end of Lake Ontario, and we have spotty records in the rest of the Great Lakes, but they are not present throughout the rest of the Great Lakes. There are some data points missing here; for example, there is apparently a record in the Thunder Bay area and there is a record in the Ottawa River that has been confirmed. However, in both of these sites, the zebra mussels were found on ships. They were not actually taken from rocks from the bottom of the lakes or rivers.
What is going to limit their distribution within the Great Lakes? According to the European literature, there are two or three important criteria: one is temperature, one is calcium. and perhaps food. The European literature tends to indicate that the larvae require at least 12 milligrams of calcium to develop. However, the data are not good data. I would not call them good data, because they had 60% mortality in their control tanks. In tanks that had 100 milligrams of calcium, for example, they still had 60% mortality. So there are still a lot of experiments that have to be done with respect of calcium.
Temperatures: The European literature reports, and often we are able to show in the Great Lakes examples, that the reproductive temperature threshold is 15 degrees to 17 degrees. That is, you need 15 degrees to 17 degrees before the mussels will reproduce, and they need 10 degrees to 12 degrees before they grow. In Lake St Clair we had temperatures near 22 degrees or 23 degrees this year before we found larvae in the water. So we have to do some more experimentation there to determine if it is really absolute temperature or degree days. In fact, it might be a combination of things. We still do not fully understand what controls the reproductive events.
Chlorophyll: We are not sure yet whether the larvae play a significant role. Certainly the adults play a role, and I will give you some data in a minute to confirm that.
That is within the Great Lakes. What about the North American continent itself? We can get a pretty good idea if we look at the current distribution in Europe, and if you take the northern limit of that current distribution and across to North America and the southern limit across, you will find that roughly 75% of the North American continent, at least in terms of temperature, will have some habitats available for zebra mussels. Now there are other factors like calcium that will limit that distribution, but we still need a lot of experiments to determine whether calcium is indeed a factor that will limit the distribution, and if it is, what level of calcium will limit the distribution.
The impact on unionid clams is extraordinary. We had 16 species of native clams in Lake St Clair in 1988. There were five species found that we were not able to find living in 1990. There were an additional nine species for which we found less than 0.1 per square metre, and we have had divers go down with cameras. It is literally like a graveyard now with unionid clams lying all over with nothing but byssal threads attached to the shells. There is no question that we are going to lose some species of our native clams. Whether we lose all of them or not remains to be shown.
One of the problems that is happening is the zebra mussels get in between the gape, as we call it, in the native clams and they prevent them from closing, so that the native clams are exposed to environmental extremes. The numbers rise astronomically. For example, because zebra mussels can settle on top of one another and the numbers of mussels can grow much faster than the growth in length of our native clams, we find that the numbers of zebra mussels increase dramatically after the second or third year of infestation. This particular specimen shows about 3,000. We estimate 3,000 zebra mussels on it. As many as 15,000 zebra mussels have been counted on a single unionid clam.
Crayfish are not immune to infestations. However, these will moult periodically and they can get rid of zebra mussels, so they are a bit different than our native clams. It is like taking your jacket off and throwing it away.
One of the unique things about zebra mussels is their ability to filter water, not so much in their individual capacity to filter but in the enormous numbers of mussels that are out there. In general, one mussel can filter about one litre per day, so there is an enormous quantity of water being filtered and some of the MNR data tend to indicate -- although these are not necessarily cause-effect relationships here; that is, because we saw an increase in water transparency in 1989 over 1988, that is not necessarily due to zebra mussels. However, we do need data, definitive evidence to show that zebra mussels are actually causing that increase in water clarity.
It is highly coincidental, though, that the increases are occurring as the numbers of zebra mussels are increasing, and we see this in terms of the food content in the water as well. Chlorophyll A is a measure of the amount of primary production going on in the water column, and you can see again that the amount of chlorophyll in the water decreased in 1989 relative to 1988. These again are MNR data.
We may see some impacts on our fisheries but, where there is an awful lot of study, that has to be done on the fish. One of the problems with these holistic-ecosystem-type studies is there are always natural variations occurring in the lake, and you have to be able to separate those natural variations from those that are being caused by zebra mussels. In other words, we need a control lake, and right now all we have is the Great Lakes to go by. Unfortunately we are going to have to wait for other lakes before we can really show that the same events are occurring in all lakes. That is one way to show it, or you can manipulate lakes in some cases, but some fish might even increase in numbers, such as this sheepshead, for example.
It is an MNR slide. There are several species of fish feeding on zebra mussels. The perch is one, although not in a major way. The sheepshead is one of the major predators of zebra mussels.
Waterfowl may increase in numbers because of the presence of zebra mussels. We need data to show that some of the increases we are seeing in some of the waterfowl populations are in fact due to the increase in zebra mussel populations. There may be a negative side to this. Zebra molluscs are good intermediate hosts for parasites. Maybe the zebra mussels are carrying parasites and we will see an increase in parasitism in the waterfowl, for that matter in the fish as well. Those are other studies that have to be done.
In Europe, the crayfish preys on zebra mussels. In North America, they have not discovered how yet; the zebra mussels seem to be beating them to it. But in Europe at least they often use crayfish to control zebra mussels on nets.
So fish may benefit. We may be able to use them even for controlling zebra mussels, although I doubt it as far as the Great Lakes are concerned. There are several chemicals that can be used. Chlorine seems to be the most popular one at present, and you have to consider the effects of temperature -- 12 degrees versus 22 degrees -- and there are different times of the year when you have to control the mussels, so some times in the year you need more chlorine than at other times. It depends on how you do it. You can do it continuously at low levels or intermittently at higher levels. We have done experiments to show that roughly 2.5 to three parts per million is needed for 100% kill of zebra mussels.
There are some molluscicides that are seeking approval right now. These have to be studied in terms of their effect on the ecosystem. We know that they kill zebra mussels but we do not know what their effects on non-target organisms are. Hydrogen peroxide is another one that is being considered. As far as different materials are concerned, we have looked at something like 18 different kinds of products to date, and this includes waxes, coatings, different kinds of paints, paints with copper, paints without copper. So far, as you can see by the lack of bars here, paints with copper are the most effective at keeping zebra mussels off. That is copper plate in there and those are waxes at this end, which do not prevent mussels from attaching but are very good at preventing firm attachments.
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We have looked at growth rates on the different materials and still copper comes out best. Any material with copper in it is good from that point of view. They reduce attachment and growth rate. Even in the ability to attach, how firmly do they attach, copper comes out on top again. Waxes are good in the sense that you still get a lot of mussels attaching but they come off very easily. Anywhere from 80% to 90% of the mussels come off on waxes with a very gentle rinse.
Heat is a potential method for controlling zebra mussels. This graph shows that acclimation temperature is extremely important. If mussels are acclimated at 25 degrees, you need more heat to kill them. If it is at 2.5 degrees, you need less heat. These are laboratory experiments. What it is going to be like in nature, we do not know yet. These experiments have to be performed in the industries yet.
Filters: You can use filtration but the filters have to have a core size sufficiently small enough to remove the settling sizes of zebra mussels. That means 200-micron openings or smaller. At that size of opening, most filters will not supply the huge demands of water demanded by many industries, often exceeding 500,000 cubic gallons per minute.
This is an experiment we did with activated sewage sludge just to show you how good the zebra mussels are at filtering the water. You can see in the top there are two buckets on the left that have zebra mussels in cylinders and on the right there is none. You hardly see the air stones in that right bucket and you can clearly see them in the left. They are very efficient at taking out phosphorus. In this 3% sludge, you can see that the control levels were 40 to 50 milligrams per litre and in the test chambers they reduced to less than five zebra mussels.
Biochemical oxygen demand: very efficient at removing a lot of that organic material, hence lowering the biochemical oxygen demand and just generally taking material out of the water, putting it on the bottom. We refer to them as biodepositors.
That is my presentation for today. Thank you.
Mr Ruprecht: Dr Mackie, I would be interested to know what you would describe as the best agent at present in order to control the zebra mussels.
Dr Mackie: The best agent? Try something non-chemical, because chemicals tend not to be species-specific. In other words, chlorine does not attack just zebra mussels; it attacks all sorts of aquatic life. Potassium has been recently reported as an effective chemical, potassium chlorate, and in fact potassium is not species-specific. The researchers at Ohio State University, for example, found that roughly 70 milligrams is needed to kill zebra mussels; only four will kill our native clams, so potassium is not the secret chemical either.
In regard to molluscicides, algicides and whatever, we still do not know the full impact on the ecosystem and, even though they have been demonstrated to have little impact on non-targets, there are too many non-targets out there to study yet. So it really is an ecosystem approach that we have to take.
Mr Ruprecht: Are we presently using chlorine?
Dr Mackie: Chlorine is the most common chemical used right now because it is inexpensive. Most industries currently have chlorine in place, and it is just a matter of retrofitting.
Now to the intake structure: You have to go to the intake to control these. You cannot do it in the product so it has to be right out at the intake structures.
Mr Ruprecht: You were telling us that we have, I was not quite sure what the numbers were, but I thought it was 34 indigenous or local species of clams, and consequently they are being attacked by the zebra mussels. Could you confirm that chlorine is being used extensively? Is chlorine an agent that will kill the indigenous species as well?
Dr Mackie: We have no data on that. One of the problems we are currently facing as far as chlorine is concerned is that the Ontario Ministry of the Environment standard level allowed into the surface in the effluent water is 0.002 or 0.001 milligrams per litre. The most sensitive instrument that you can purchase to measure the lowest levels of chlorine possible is 0.01, or an order of magnitude higher than what that standard recommends. What the effect of that order of magnitude is going to have on the ecosystem over 10 years is really an unknown.
Mr Ruprecht: Have the Europeans rejected that?
Dr Mackie: No. Their systems are really a lot different and we cannot emulate them. We are not able to emulate it in most instances, number one, because the Great Lakes are so huge; number two, they tend to build short, wide intakes, so it is more of a mechanical control that they use. With short, wide intakes it takes several years for the mussels to collect and reduce the flow into the facility, whereas here we have narrow intakes. They are 9 or 10 kilometres out in the middle of the lake.
Mr Ruprecht: What area would you recommend to this committee to do future research in?
Dr Mackie: I would suggest looking at some of the physical approaches right now, and there are several of them. There is heat, although there are several industries that are now at the delta T limit. They are not allowed to have a change in temperature of more than 10 degrees, that is from the temperature coming in to the temperature leaving. Many are at that limit right now, so they have to be very careful how much more heat they add to the system or perhaps modify the system so it cools the water that they heat up. But that is one potential.
Not all industries have that capability, incidentally, so they are going to have to take a different approach, maybe filtration, if somebody can come up with a method of backwashing fast enough. Some industries will not be able to use it because the demands are just so enormous -- 500,000 gallons per minute, for example, at the Nanticoke station. I doubt if there is a filter that will supply that demand, but they will supply 2,000 or 3,000 I am sure, with some experimentation.
There are infiltration galleries being studied right now. Maybe that will be a solution. Flushing rates, none of the industries have the ability to increase the flushing rate, but if you can keep the flow running at 1.5 metres or more per second, that will prevent the mussels from settling.
Mr Ruprecht: What are infiltration galleries?
Dr Mackie: The Tilbury water treatment plant has an experiment in progress -- maybe the MOE people can give you the exact details -- but as I understand it they are using the bottom of the lake to filter the larvae out so that water goes through the bottom of the lake, is collected into a pipe, chlorinated and then distributed to the consumer.
Mr Waters: What I wanted to ask about was natural predators to the zebra mussels. Do we have any?
Dr Mackie: We have all sorts of them, but I do not believe they are going to be effective enough at reducing the populations to levels that we would call not a problem. In Europe, at least in the Netherlands, waterfowl have been reported to reduce populations by 97%. However, in those instances, the lakes did not freeze and the waterfowl did not migrate. Our lakes freeze and the waterfowl migrate, although there are reports of the migratory patterns of our waterfowl being altered, possibly, by the zebra mussels, because of the zebra mussels.
Mr Waters: Okay. I have heard that there is waterfowl, and the other one I think is the yellow perch.
Dr Mackie: That is right.
Mr Waters: I have a concern how that is going to affect the food chain, because in the Lake Erie situation they are not only cleaning it up, in that cleanup they are taking chemicals out of the lake. With the predator situation in the lakes, how is that going to affect it?
Dr Mackie: It is going to take several years to determine the impact on the fisheries because of this lack of control I was talking about. We see normal fluctuations in fish populations every year. As I understand it, the walleye were decreasing for about 5 to 10 years before the zebra mussels arrived. So, it is those kinds of declines that you have to account for. Now that the zebra mussels are here, it is very easy to say that decline is due to the zebra mussels, but it may not be.
So we need our control lakes. We need one lake that is over here and another one that is over here; one has zebra mussels, the other does not, so you have this lake to study the normal changes and you have this lake to study the effects of the zebra mussels. That is sort of our classical scientific experiment, and then you have your replicates on top of that.
We do not have that opportunity yet. All we can go on is historical data: What were the magnitudes of the changes over the last 20 years? Are the magnitudes we are seeing now greater than what we have seen over time? If they are, therefore it might be due to zebra mussels.
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Mr Waters: Another thing in your discussion that just sort of came to mind: you mentioned that they have a two- to four-week settling period. Once they have settled, and prior to that two to four weeks, do we have any concern about them? In other words, the concern time is the two to four weeks when they attach themselves?
Dr Mackie: As far as the industries are concerned, that is what they are interested in: Is the attachment on? As far as the ecosystem is concerned, as well, we are more interested in the settling stages and the effects of the adults on the water column, but also the larvae. Are those larvae going to alter the food chains or are they feeding on some of the rotifers or the smaller animals and the algae that is out there that was once available to the other animals? Are they going to alter that process? So those are the kinds of experiments that we have to do yet.
Mr Waters: I have one last question I wanted to ask because I come from the granite-stricken area of the province. When you get up there you probably do not have the calcium you have down here. Is that going to give us any relief once you hit the granite area?
Dr Mackie: It may be irony that some of our lakes that are currently acidifying may be free from zebra mussel infestations, but that is about the extent of it. We are not sure what level of calcium is needed for these zebra mussels to survive. The literature only reports lab experiments, and you cannot always extrapolate from the lab to the field. I mean, maybe calcium levels -- first of all, you need a firm substrate. I do not care how good the water is. You may have ideal temperatures, ideal calcium, ideal this and that food; if there is no hard substrate in that lake, they are not going to do well there. They need hard substrate to survive.
For a lot of our lakes we do not have that kind of information, as I understand it at least. We do not have maps of the amount of firm substrate in the bottoms of these lakes. Some lakes have easy road access. Boats are going in there every day from the Great Lakes. They are probably more susceptible to zebra mussels than lakes that you fly into and so on. Even though pontoons of airplanes can carry veligers into those lakes, they are far less susceptible to frequent zebra mussel introductions than the lakes that are accessible by road.
Mr Ramsay: I would like to return to the European history of the zebra mussel. You have mentioned in your discussion that the Europeans now are making changes to their infrastructure rather than using chemical combatants to stop this invader. I was wondering if you could give me a quick overview of what processes, chemical or otherwise, they may have considered and rejected and why.
Dr Mackie: One of the methods they have used is twinning a system. They have two systems. They run one and as it becomes infested with zebra mussels they will shut it down, open up the other one and clean out the first one. So they just keep switching back and forth. It is called twinning. That is an extremely expensive thing to do. Zebra mussel infestations, in many parts of Europe, happened with the industrial revolution. As these plants were being developed, they were incorporating this twinning process as they built the industries. I do not know how many industries that were once just single, you know, once through, have twinned their systems. It is an extremely expensive process.
Mr Ramsay: But certainly they must have considered other alternatives rather than just building additional infrastructure?
Dr Mackie: Yes. They have tried electroshocking, which has potential, and ultrasound, which they did not find very successful. but there are experimenters here in North America who claim they have the right frequency of acoustics to prevent mussels from settling. I am not sure that would kill them, but certainly prevent them from settling. There may be combinations of things that we can use.
We can use the European experience to start with, but rarely have we been able to emulate it exactly for some reason or other, even the chlorine levels; they used 0.5 milligrams per litre to kill zebra mussels. It will not kill the larvae here; the larvae dance at 0.5 milligrams per litre. We need two to three milligrams per litre to kill them.
Mr Ramsay: So they have considered chlorine but have set limits to it.
Dr Mackie: That is the most popular method of control in Europe right now: pour in chlorine.
Mr Ramsay: You are saying the limits they have set are ineffective?
Dr Mackie: I am not sure what their standards are, frankly, or what levels they have. Frankly, I do not know the answer to that.
The Chair: Okay, thank you very much, Dr Mackie. I appreciate your taking the time to be with us this morning and provide a very informative presentation.
JON STANLEY
The Chair: Our next witness this morning is Dr Jon Stanley, who is a fishery biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dr Stanley will discuss the US federal research and management efforts, with particular emphasis on American and international regulatory and policy initiatives intended to deal with invasive species once they have become established in North American environments.
Dr Stanley: My name is Jon Stanley. I am the director of the National Fisheries Research Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the US Fish and Wildlife Service. My agency has a long history of working with exotic species. My laboratory developed the control chemical for sea lampreys in the 1960s and my agency is working on control measures for zebra mussels. I would also like to talk a little bit about purple loosestrife, which was one of the subjects that was given to us, and then I would like to get into zebra mussels. I have two handouts for you; one on purple loosestrife and one on zebra mussels.
As Dr Leach said, purple loosestrife came into North America via solid ballast water, became established and was recognized as a pest in the St Lawrence wetland area in Quebec in the 1930s, and it spread from there throughout the North American continent. Populations are still high in Quebec. Canada might be able to get rid of a good portion of the purple loosestrife population by allowing Quebec to secede from Canada.
Purple loosestrife occurs in wetland areas. It is opportunistic and it takes over areas where there are disturbances. Where there are roadways made or the wetland is disturbed in any way, purple loosestrife seeds will generate in this bare earth and will sprout. They can grow in flood conditions up to half a metre of water; they tolerate 50% shade. They grow very well in poor nutrient conditions, so they can outcompete most of our native species. They are a problem because they crowd out the native species and form a dense jungle of herbaceous material that wildlife cannot penetrate.
Many control methods have been tried, most of them unsuccessfully. Burning is ineffective. It actually creates bare earth, which encourages purple loosestrife over the native species. Flooding is ineffective and may actually enhance fresh spreading of purple loosestrife. Believe it or not, one of the best ways of controlling them is by pulling them by hand, a very labour-intensive method, probably not recommended. But in areas where there are disturbances and it is possible to get a labour force big enough in there, you could stop them at the early stages until our native vegetation can become established.
Once they become dense, then we almost have to resort to chemical control. In the US, the chemical glyphosate, called Rodeo, is registered for use on purple loosestrife. In the early stages of infestation, hand-spraying is possible, so you can spot-spray the individual plants to avoid killing native flora. If the stands become dense and monocultures, then one may have to resort to spraying from aircraft. One would probably have to repeat the spraying, and as the population became less dense, one might have to go in with hand sprayers then to finish off the job.
Our best chance, however, of controlling purple loosestrife is biological control agents. There is a weevil and there are two beetles that keep populations in check in their native ranges in Europe and work being done by the US Department of Agriculture is seeking to bring these pests over here -- these are not pests, these are pest control agents -- so that we can control purple loosestrife. This is not off the shelf yet. We need to do a lot more research, and this endeavour is something I am sure the United States would welcome Canadian participation in.
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Now I would like to turn to zebra mussels. We have had a lot of interest in exotic species lately and this was generated by the invasion of zebra mussels. On the US side, we have recently passed the Non-indigenous Nuisance Species Act for the management of all exotic species in the United States. At this point, no specific money has been appropriated except for the control of zebra mussels. My agency got an add-on this year of $1.6 million specifically to study zebra mussels, and that would be under the non-indigenous species act. So we have a non-indigenous species act to cover all species, but funding at this stage is only for zebra mussels.
Several organizations in my agency are involved with this. One is our fisheries assistance office program in the United States. These are small offices located in various geographical areas. We are proposing that these people will collect early information on the spread of zebra mussels, because we do predict that they will spread throughout the United States. One of their main functions is to warn industries in the path of the zebra mussel to get out their chequebooks to pay for control as the zebra mussel shows up in any particular area.
My lab specifically is in the business of information co-ordination. We hope to be a data collection point and especially for co-operation with the Canadians in terms of research, results and dispensing information.
We have a laboratory in Gainesville which was set up specifically for the purpose of monitoring non-indigenous species, exotic species. They have a geographical information database set up. This is a computerized database that has environmental information, and they intend to input information on exotics and their environmental requirements, to try to match requirements with exotics to predict the spread and intensity of infestations in various places in the United States.
For example, will zebra mussels become pests in the river systems in North America? We do not know that yet. All we know is that they are pests in the Great Lakes and the big open waters. We do not know how much of a pest they are going to be in rivers. In Europe they are a bother in rivers, but nothing like the population that we see in the Great Lakes. What are those environmental factors that may limit zebra mussels in other areas?
We have a laboratory at La Crosse which is set up to register chemicals for environmental use. This laboratory will seek out methods for controlling zebra mussels with either toxic chemicals that are safe to use or relatively safe to use, or other measures that can control zebra mussels in industrial sites or even in environmental situations.
We are not giving up the possibility that we will be able to develop a toxic that will be safe to use in open environmental situations. We do not know if we can do it. It is a tall order, but that is our goal, that we can develop safe chemicals for use in pipes and industrial situations and that can also be used in the environment. We will of course have to work closely with the Environmental Protection Agency, because that is the agency that is responsible for registering chemicals.
My laboratory is specifically working with interrelationships of zebra mussels with the fish populations: for instance, in the fish feeding on zebra mussels, the effects of zebra mussels on fish spawning. We too have some work on the effects on the native clam populations and then also on the environmental requirements of zebra mussels that we will do in co-operation with the Gainesville laboratory. We hope these activities will allow the fish and wildlife service to evaluate the effects of zebra mussels on fish, fish resources and the planned strategies to minimize the impacts where they are likely to occur.
Then a final organization the fish and wildlife service is working with on zebra mussels is the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center, headquartered in Jamestown, North Dakota. They presently have a field station in La Crosse, Wisconsin, on the Mississippi River. They have documented a pronounced decline in the diving duck populations that utilize the Mississippi flyway. They were not sure where they were going. Now we think we know where they are going. There has been a large shift in diving duck migration out of the Mississippi River system that has diverted eastward to the Great Lakes. We do not know what this is going to do to the duck populations themselves. They are being diverted, the food resources in the Mississippi have declined and they have greatly increased in the Great Lakes -- namely, zebra mussels -- and the ducks are coming over and they are staying in the colder area longer and then they are forced to migrate south over unfamiliar migratory pathways. We do not know what this is going to do to the ducks.
Of course the second and flip side of this study is, what are the ducks going to do to the zebra mussels? Are there enough of them to even put a dent in the populations? At the present time we think not, but we need this kind of data to build models and make predictions as to what fish and wildlife may do to zebra mussels and what zebra mussels will do to the fish and wildlife.
Thank you for letting me address your group. I will be happy to answer any questions.
Mr Ramsay: Dr Stanley, you mentioned a non-indigenous species act. Is that a state act or is that the federal one?
Dr Stanley: That is a federal act.
Mr Ramsay: That is the Aquatic Nuisance Prevention and Control Act.
Dr Stanley: Right.
Mr Ramsay: That is the one. You said there was not really a financial allocation given to that bill yet.
Dr Stanley: Other than the zebra mussel money, which was actually appropriated by Congress before the President signed the act. Congress appropriated the money, then Congress passed the act, and we are treating that appropriation as it rolls under the act.
Mr Ramsay: Could you just give me a brief overview of what the act says?
Dr Stanley: The act is funding for the sea grant program, the corps of engineers, the fish and wildlife service and other agencies. It is managed by a task force headed by the director of the fish and wildlife service and the deputy under secretary of commerce. and then with the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They have formed a task force in which EPA and other federal agencies will be members. They will oversee a research and control program of the various agencies to attack aquatic nuisance species all across the United States. One species was listed that is not aquatic. The brown tree-snake in Guam is listed in this act. So it is broad-spectrum, national, and is not limited to zebra mussels.
Mr Ramsay: You said you felt the answer might be some sort of chemical combatant in the end. I am just wondering if we should be concentrating our research on a chemical combatant, when I think we are beginning to see, with the tremendous introduction of new chemicals over the years of this century in particular, especially in their application to agriculture and for other preventive uses that we have in society. a reaction against the introduction of new chemicals into the ecosystem. Do you think we should, to try to correct this problem, again be looking at a chemical combatant? Are we making an error in trying to just concentrate our research in that way or really thinking that is the answer, or should we be looking at other methods?
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Dr Stanley: I like to use the sea lamprey control as a model. It was an exotic. It was causing tremendous damage to the fisheries resources in the Great Lakes. We solved that problem by a combination of good research on the basic biology of the animal, coupled with some chemical control testing. We found a weak link in its life cycle that required a very minute amount of chemical treatment. I think we need to understand thoroughly the biological life cycle of the zebra mussel and other exotics to try to get at the weak link in their life cycles. It is probably the larval stage. Some of the research that is already being conducted by Canadians and by the US is trying to understand the biology better. Then we can follow this up with some very specific, hopefully environmentally safe, registration of chemicals to zero in -- pinpoint bombing, if you would.
Mr Ramsay: Surgical strike.
Dr Stanley: Right, a surgical strike.
Mr Ramsay: I think, though, that society today is demanding of us -- legislators, scientists -- more careful study of the effects of the introduction of new compounds into the environment also. This might take more time than maybe it did in the 1950s, when we were starting to look at the lamprey problem. It may slow down this process today if there is starting to be, as you know, some resistance to the introduction of new chemicals.
Dr Stanley: It has become very expensive. For example, we estimate that it will cost $5 million US to register a molluscicide for zebra mussels. Our appropriation is $500,000, so it will take us 10 years, if we are even successful. It is a very expensive process to get something that is environmentally safe. l agree with you that we should be very cautious about introducing chemicals into the environment.
Mr Ramsay: When you talk about developing a molluscicide to combat the zebra mussel, are you talking about sort of one application to wipe the species out or to try to just maintain the spread of the species? How do you envision the use of a chemical?
Dr Stanley: I think it is hopeless to wipe them out.
Mr Ramsay: So you would be looking at a maintenance regime of some sort.
Mr Waters: I have a couple of questions. Because it has been here for quite some time, can you give us some idea as to how long it would take for the purple loosestrife virtually to destroy an average wetland once it has been introduced?
Dr Stanley: It becomes very dense in three years. We heard testimony earlier about the number of larvae that zebra mussels put out. A healthy purple loosestrife plant puts out 100,000 seeds every year. One study, for example, showed that after 20 months, 92% of them were no longer viable, which meant that 8% were still viable. That is 8,000 seeds. The significance of 20 months of course is that this is the second growing season. So the seed bank can remain viable for two years or more. That is 8,000 seeds that would be ready to germinate from each plant. Once they become established, it is a tremendous problem to get rid of them.
Mr Waters: They would then fill up a swamp or a marsh area in virtually no time at all and make it solid land, destroy the whole ecosystem.
Dr Stanley: Yes. The real clue to prevent spread is to maintain a healthy population of native species. You keep them from getting a toe-hold. If there are a few in there, you kill them out as soon as you see them.
Mr Waters: You mentioned a weevil, I believe, and some beetles.
Dr Stanley: The United States Department of Agriculture is studying these three insect organisms as control agents.
Mr Waters: I take it they are looking at the effects on the rest of the life of the wetlands that these things might impact on.
Dr Stanley: Yes. The USDA has a rather rigorous quarantine procedure of working in greenhouses with these organisms. It is an expensive and laborious research program and takes several years to accomplish.
Mr Waters: Are there any other relevant pieces of legislation that you are looking at in the United States in regard to the current infestation of all of these things coming into North America from Europe?
Dr Stanley: The federal legislation I referred to is pretty comprehensive and includes ballast transport provisions. The one thing that is probably the weakest is the intentional introduction part of it. But from the earlier testimony you have heard, generally the intentional introductions are not the ones that are producing the problems.
Mr Ruprecht: I want to follow up on a supplementary to Mr Ramsay's question, but let me preface my remarks by saying that we appreciate your presentation, especially the humorous parts on Quebec and on pulling out your chequebook. We will leave the remarks about Quebec alone for this time. If we were to pull out our chequebook, Dr Stanley, where would you want us to do the research that would not be duplicated by either the army corps of engineers or Ann Arbor university, or other places where it is being presently done in the United States?
Dr Stanley: I am not sure a little bit of duplication is not desirable. I can give you a real good example. Three different groups were studying the effects of zebra mussels on walleye reproduction, a real simple question. They did the first year of experimentation and none of the three groups produced good, definitive results. So I think we do need to have some duplication of people working on the same objective to ensure that we get findings as soon as we can.
There is certainly room for work by the Canadians on whether the zebra mussels are going to spread into your inland lakes and rivers. It will be your responsibility to determine that. We are setting up our geographical information system; you should do the same. We all need to be working on the basic biology: What are the environmental requirements? How does this interrelate to the reproductive cycle? Some of these are site-specific, as you saw from the previous testimony. Is there one peak or two peaks of reproduction in particular locations? These are very important questions that industry needs to know the answer to, to map a defensive strategy.
We need $5 million worth of research to register a chemical. Probably a lot of biological information is needed to back up that kind of research. We have $500,000 devoted to that. We need help. There is ample place for a full partnership of the Canadians with the US, working together, co-ordinated. We have close co-ordination on the US side. We welcome the Canadians to join our co-ordination group of scientists and we hope that you can have an observer in our task force under the Aquatic Nuisance Prevention and Control Act.
Mr Ruprecht: Thank you very much. We will do that.
Mr Arnott: My question has more to do with governance than biology. I am wondering if the US has a comprehensive strategy, or an umbrella agency, or a strategy that takes hold when herbaceous species come in so that a prompt response from the government of the jurisdiction in question can be given.
Dr Stanley: The answer is that we have not had in the past, but under the aquatic nuisance act, yes, we will have. We will have a task force, we will have a structure of committee and subcommittees of scientists. I think we can address new problems very quickly. For example, we are already using some of the zebra mussel money to address exotics in general. A small portion of it is diverted to anticipating future exotics invading us as well.
Mr Arnott: I just feel it is absolutely critical, because there seems to be a consensus that zebra mussels are here to stay. My feeling is we have to learn how we respond to future problems such as this from this exercise.
The Chair: Thank you, Dr Stanley, for a very informative presentation and for making the trip to be with us today. The committee will now stand in recess until 2 pm.
The committee recessed at 1210.
AFTERNOON SITTING
The committee resumed at 1403 in room 228.
DAVID W. GARTON
The Chair: If we can come to order, I see a quorum so we can begin this afternoon's hearings. The witness this afternoon is David Garton, Department of Zoology, Ohio State University. Dr Garton will describe research being undertaken at Ohio State University. which hosted a recent symposium on the zebra mussel and other exotics.
Dr Garton: I would like to thank the committee for the invitation to provide testimony this afternoon. I am going to forego slides and just make a brief comment on some of my own personal opinions about the status of our knowledge of the invasion of zebra mussels into North America, and try and leave ample time for the committee to address questions regarding research being conducted at Ohio State University and my own personal opinions as to what should receive priority for research on zebra mussels.
As you have already heard today, the zebra mussel has spread rapidly throughout the Great Lakes in the past two years since its initial discovery in Lake St Clair. Although its rapid spread can be easily explained by its free-swimming larval stage, the population explosion that has resulted in mussel densities far above those reported in European studies has been an unpleasant surprise.
The introduction of the zebra mussel will pose significant ecological and economic problems for many years to come. Water intakes for power generating, water treatment and manufacturing facilities on Lake Erie, both in the United States and Canada, have already reported significant problems with fouling by zebra mussels.
Fisheries biologists are now also faced with the problem of estimating the production of commercially important species of fish using bioenergetic models that do not incorporate the impact of zebra mussels and will be trying to answer fundamental questions such as, will there be a long-term reduction in Lake Erie fisheries?
Only time will answer these and many other important questions regarding long-term impacts of the zebra mussel in North America. Unfortunately, there is simply no practical method for eradicating zebra mussels and restoring the Great Lakes community to its pre-zebra mussel status. However, we can guide our reaction to this invasion in several ways.
We should commit resources to limit the distribution and spread within North America, determine reasonable──that is, inexpensive and environmentally responsible──methods for controlling local populations in intake systems, and implement research on long-term changes in aquatic communities invaded by zebra mussels. Just as important, the continuous introduction of non-native species must in some manner be curtailed.
In this statement to the committee, I would like to report current research on the biology of zebra mussels and offer my opinions regarding the zebra mussel issue. All opinions expressed below are my own and do not reflect the official positions or policies of federal or state agencies which have funded my research, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the national sea grant program, the Ohio sea grant college program and Ohio State University. I would like to emphasize that these are my own opinions.
There is no doubt that the western region of Lake Erie is an excellent habitat for zebra mussels. In less than two years mussel densities in some areas exceed 100,000 per square metre. In the Bass Island region in western Lake Erie, where I conduct my research, densities routinely exceed 50,000 mussels per square metre. Densities in excess of 700,000 per square metre have been reported for intakes systems for Detroit Edison's coal-fired electric generating plant at Monroe, Michigan. Clearly such high densities are the result of ideal environmental conditions for the growth and reproduction of zebra mussels.
My initial research has focused on factors responsible for controlling the reproductive cycle and growth of zebra mussels at Stone Laboratory, which is a research facility operated by Ohio State University in the Bass Island region in western Lake Erie. Results of work begun in 1989 and continued through 1990 have shown considerable differences in reproductive patterns between the two years, possibly the result of annual variation in temperature, weather patterns, food availability and the density of mussels themselves. In fact, there is initial evidence that these high mussel densities are limiting further growth of populations in the western basin.
However, most of my results are preliminary and it is difficult to make firm conclusions or sound statements and predictions about future conditions. Rough calculations now indicate that population growth has probably peaked and that the carrying capacity of the system for zebra mussels has been reached or even surpassed, which would indicate a decline in population densities in the future.
One point that has become clear from my own research on zebra mussels and that has been reported by other researchers in North America, such as Gerry Mackie at the University of Guelph, is that zebra mussels are highly variable and adaptable. Data from many other European studies and my own conversation with European researchers have indicated the difficulty in predicting the behaviour of zebra mussels in different systems. In some lakes where environmental conditions are adequate for supporting large populations, small populations are found. Vice versa, in some lakes where environmental conditions are rather extreme, they find large populations of zebra mussels.
Although some critics may claim that we are simply repeating European studies, we must continue to study the basic biology of zebra mussels in North America in order to better understand the consequences for native organisms. We cannot afford to extrapolate from European studies to predict the impact of zebra mussels in North America.
Research on the basic biology of zebra mussels will also yield data important for control efforts. Reasonable control strategies should exploit weak links in the life cycle of the mussel. Disruptions of these critical stages may lead to successful control of local populations. As has been mentioned earlier, the larval stage is one critical point in life for a zebra mussel and it is at this point in the life cycle when mussels are most sensitive to stress. Therefore, studies on factors which determine spawning of adults, duration of the planktonic stage and mortality of veligers, the free-swimming larvae, should be given high priority. In addition, studies on the stress physiology of adults may provide useful information on when adult mussels are most vulnerable to control measures.
Large populations of zebra mussels can have significant direct and indirect effects on invaded communities. In an ecological sense, understanding the flow of energy, or carbon. through populations of zebra mussels, as well as linkages between zebra mussels and pelagic communities, provides the information necessary for formulating new community models for fisheries biologists. As filter feeders, zebra mussels feed on microscopic algae in the water column, and as these algae represent the base of the food chain which supports important species of fish, consumption of this algal food base may have significant negative impacts on fish production. Zebra mussels can also attach directly to other native species of mussels with significant negative effects.
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Given the large population of zebra mussels already established in Lake Erie, plus the potential for spread to additional inland lake and river systems in the United States and Canada, I simply cannot overemphasize the need for continued support of basic research on the biology and ecology of zebra mussels.
Zebra mussels have already spread throughout the Great Lakes, with veliger larvae being transported passively by water currents from Lake St Clair into Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, and carried in the ballast tanks of lakers into the upper lakes, Huron, Michigan and Superior. This intralake transport represents the same mode of transport from Europe to North America. Within the near future, zebra mussels will be transported from Lake Michigan via the canal connecting Lake Michigan to the Illinois River, which drains into the Mississippi. From the Mississippi River drainage system, they can spread throughout most of the eastern United States. Transport of mussels along commercial routes and lakes and rivers probably cannot be prevented. Even if ships and barges could somehow be decontaminated, bulk flow of water along navigable waterways would provide a route of invasion for free-swimming veligers.
The most likely avenue for the spread of zebra mussels into inland bodies of water is through human transport of the microscopic veliger stage via live wells in fishing boats, bait buckets, transport of hatchery-reared fish, or even as adults attached to the hulls of pleasure boats. Therefore, mussel dispersal along this pathway has the best potential for regulation. If the introduction of zebra mussels into inland lakes is to be prevented, then an immediate, aggressive public education campaign and inspection and monitoring systems must be established. However, one must question the likelihood of excluding zebra mussels from any particular body of water, as it takes only one bucketful of water containing veligers to breach any defence system.
The introduction of non-native species into North America began with the first European colonists and has continued to the present day. Indeed, many familiar plant and animal species are the result of intentional and non-intentional introductions. Most introduced species are benign in that they do not have significant ecological or economic impacts. However, transoceanic dispersal of marine and freshwater species has recently caused catastrophic introductions.
We are all familiar with the zebra mussel and its impact in Lake Erie, but I would like to mention two other species which by coincidence also appeared in North America in the 1980s. Earlier, mention was made of the river ruffe, which was introduced into the Great Lakes in Duluth harbour in western Lake Superior. In Europe, ruffe invasions often lead to declining harvests of commercially valuable species. Fortunately it is not spreading rapidly across Lake Superior. However, it is still cause for concern. A small clam, potamocorbula, appeared in San Francisco Bay in 1984 and since then populations of this Asian species have exploded. Decreasing abundance and biomass of native species as well as elimination of spring phytoplankton blooms have been correlated with increasing potamocorbula populations.
These examples serve as evidence of the continuing threat posed by invading species to native communities. Unfortunately we cannot predict which species are potentially beneficial, benign or catastrophic. An innocuous species in Europe or Asia may cause serious problems if transplanted to North America, and the reverse is also true. Therefore, it would be wise to try and prevent the introduction of all non-native species. In the case of the zebra mussel and its mode of introduction, this would require legislation controlling the treatment and discharge of ballast water from ships arriving from overseas ports.
This past fall the Congress of the United States enacted legislation appropriating funds to support zebra mussel research, and right now those funds will be averaging about $8 million per year for five years. US Senate Bill S. 2244 is broad-ranging, covering issues on the regulation of ballast water, promulgation of environmentally sound control measures and assessing ecological impact on fisheries. Many government agencies are involved in this bill, including the US Fish and Wildlife Service, national sea grant program, NOAA's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Coast Guard.
In addition, this legislation established the Great Lakes Aquatic Nuisance Commission, charged with overseeing, co-ordinating and submitting annual reports on control, research and education programs on nuisance species. Jon Stanley mentioned earlier how broad-ranging this bill is. There was one section in the bill concerning the brown tree snake, which eats the eggs of birds that nest on the ground and is a serious pest on Guam and other islands in the western Pacific.
As this legislation was only recently passed, many research projects have not yet begun. Most research projects on zebra mussels begun in 1939 through 1990 were initiated by state sea grant programs in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and New York, and by necessity were quite limited by available funds. However, several pilot programs on monitoring, public education and a clearing house for zebra mussel information were successfully established. The Great Lakes region sea grant programs have also been aggressive in organizing conferences and symposia as additional avenues for disseminating information on the current status of the zebra mussel in North America.
In spite of these early efforts, it is clear that much additional research needs to be performed. I can only counsel patience and recommend continued support of both basic and applied research. Scientific endeavours do not provide ready-made answers to all questions. A thorough understanding of the biology of zebra mussels is crucial and with time will provide the knowledge necessary for minimizing its ecological and economic impacts. Furthermore, I hope the American and Canadian experience with zebra mussels provide a powerful lesson on the penalties for allowing unregulated introduction of non-native species.
I will be happy to entertain any questions from the committee.
Mr Ramsay: Dr Garton, thank you very much for that presentation. It is for me eliciting four different areas that I would like to ask you about.
You stressed very heavily that we should not reduce our efforts in any way in the amount of research we are doing, and basic research in particular, into these invasive species. The question was asked earlier this morning about would there be any waste and duplication of work between the various jurisdictions, state, federal and between our jurisdiction here in Canada and what you are doing in your country. Do you see the need, with the limited funds that all governments have today, for maybe getting into some sort of co-ordination so that there could be some duplication, but that would be planned where people felt it was necessary?
Dr Garton: Under an ideal funding environment, you could fund all deserving projects for practical reasons; for example, in case one project fails where another might succeed in giving the necessary information in the shortest period of time. Jon Stanley alluded to one situation.
Second, the species is very adaptable, and what it might be doing in the western basin of Lake Erie as far as responding to environmental cues is concerned could be quite different from Lake St Clair, could be quite different from Lake Michigan, could be quite different from an inland lake or body in Ontario. So we need to do similar studies in many different types of environments to try and get some understanding of what factors regulate the biology, the reproduction, the growth of zebra mussels. So some duplication is necessary.
Also, if you are using techniques that might lead to equivocal results, if you get the same results multiple times, you have greater confidence in those results.
Realistically, with limited funds I do see a need for some central organization. Right now on the American side, with the list of federal agencies that I just provided to you, they are talking about commissions or committees of 15, 16 or 17 individuals, and that I think is getting to the point where it gets rather cumbersome. However, it should be that the ideal we strive for is co-ordination of efforts.
Mr Ramsay: Between our various countries too. Maybe the International Joint Commission could be one body to try to co-ordinate what you are doing in your country and what our provincial and federal authorities would be doing too.
Dr Garton: It is my understanding they are already working along those lines.
Mr Ramsay: You also mentioned, which I found interesting -- I believe you were particularly alluding to the populations in the western basin of Lake Erie -- that you felt the populations may be self-limiting at that particular place. You said it was very difficult, though, to predict exactly what is going to happen with the populations, but it could be that in some places they have even gone beyond and will die down. I am just wondering, is it going to be possible, do you think, that all other species and mankind may just be able to coexist with this invasion?
Dr Garton: There is no doubt we will have to coexist with zebra mussels. There is no way to eradicate them.
Mr Ramsay: I meant without any interference, let's say.
Dr Garton: Without any interference? Clearly in Europe that is the situation as it exists there. However, as to their densities, we are talking, in order of magnitude, of a greater number of biomass and numbers of zebra mussels in Lake Erie than have been reported in European systems. However, the common phenomenon in European lakes is a rapid population explosion followed by a crash. Right now we are simply waiting to see if there is going to be a crash in Lake Erie.
Lake Erie is considerably larger than virtually all of the European lakes so we are, in engineers' or statisticians' lingo, sort of extrapolating beyond the database, the range of experience in Europe and of Lake Erie being larger and quite a bit different from some of the European systems. If it follows the European pattern, we may end up seeing cycles. There will be good years and bad years for zebra mussels. Some years the population will explode; other years it will be quite low.
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During the conference we had last month, I had an opportunity to spend a good bit of time talking to Dr Anna Stanczykowska from Poland. In many lakes they see 7- to 12-year cycles, large population increase and just sort of a natural dampening or cycle once it becomes established. Whether we will see similar long-term patterns in Lake Erie or other systems in North America, we do not know.
Mr Ramsay: In dealing with trying to control the spread of the zebra mussel to other bodies of water, you stress the need for inspection, some sort of enforcement mechanisms. What sort of inspection enforcement mechanisms may be in place in the United States right now?
Dr Garton: I know of no formal inspections that are up right now. There are some informal ones. There is a colleague of mine at the University of Tennessee who has been driving around to various lakes and just inspecting boats that are coming down now -- actually it was earlier in the year, earlier in the season. A large number of people in the Lake Erie region in Ohio trailer their boats to lakes down in Tennessee and Kentucky and can make the drive well within a short enough period of time for zebra mussels to survive the trip. He has observed adults on the hulls of boats about to be placed into lakes in Tennessee and Kentucky. So we may be closing the barn door after the horse is already gone in some respects. It is hard to say. It may take one, two or three years before the population reaches a size where they can be detected. That is apparently what happened in Lake St Clair. They were discovered in 1988, probably introduced in 1985 or 1986.
Mr Ramsay: So it appears that it really it is going to be impossible to prevent the spread, but we might be able to inhibit somewhat the spread?
Dr Garton: Yes. That would be my recommendation. If you were to pick a lake and say, "We're not going to let zebra mussels come here," I would be dubious as to the success of that strategy, because there are simply too many lakes and bodies of water. However, you want to do all that you can to discourage and retard their progress. It may even be conceivable that for fairly small lakes, just like if we find an environmentally safe or reasonable means of treating an acidified lake with lime, you may end up being able to treat small enough bodies of water for zebra mussels, if the fishery in that lake is valuable enough and if we feel there will a negative impact by zebra mussels on a fishery.
Mr Ramsay: I think it was earlier this morning we saw some evidence, I believe it was presented by Dr Mackie, where he was showing comparative studies of different surfaces and the different degrees of adhesiveness that the mussels have on these surfaces. I am wondering if one way of trying to inhibit this spread, rather than trying to have some sort of forced inspections and, as you say, "We're going to try and save that lake, whatever," might be to encourage the use of some coatings, waxes, whatever, that just might slow the adheredness of these molluscs to the different surfaces. Would that be one way of at least trying to slow it down a little bit?
Dr Garton: If you are using high-pressure water to clean off the boat hull before introducing it to another lake, that might be one recommendation that could be made. That is outside my area of expertise so I really would not really know.
The Chair: Can I move to other questioners?
Mr Ramsay: Sure. I have one other question. I could maybe have a go later.
Mr Waters: Since there are a lot of people who want to ask, I have one question. If you have a boat or a bait pail, how long will these molluscs survive once you pull the boat out of the water?
Dr Garton: The larvae or the adults?
Mr Waters: I will take both answers.
Dr Garton: The adults, if under moist, damp, moderate conditions, can probably go many days outside of water, attached to a boat hull. Many mollusc bivalves can close their shells and avoid desiccation for many days, so they are really tough in that respect. The larvae, if the dissolved oxygen or water temperature changes very rapidly, are very sensitive. It might be hours to a day or two under those types of conditions. The larvae are far more sensitive than the adults.
Mr Waters: I will turn it over and let somebody else ask.
Mr Charlton: One of the things that you emphasized in your presentation here today was the need, because of what we have experienced with this zebra mussel situation, to control the introduction of non-native populations into our ecology. I suppose there are some approaches that, in terms of regulation around both your federal and our federal governments, around questions of shipping that we could look to in terms of both tough regulations and enforcement of those regulations around ballast water and so on.
In terms of a strategy, would it make sense, for example, to look on some kind of a recurring cycle basis at where the shipping is coming from and attempting to identify in advance potential problems and learning as much about those problems as you can before you get into the questions of whether you can screen them out or not?
Dr Garton: Well, turn it backwards and say, since we know zebra mussels came in and about when they came in, which ship brought them in? You cannot. We do not know which ship brought them in. Since we cannot go back and determine how to identify the ship that brought them in, to formulate a model where we would predict, this is the ship or these are the ships we have to worry about, is going to have some amount of doubt to it. If you allow just one ship to slip through -- sometimes with shipping records and ports of call you do not know if you can get that in real time enough to save --
Mr Charlton: You are right. In terms of identifying a specific ship that brought in a specific zebra mussel, you are not going to be able to do that. I guess what I was trying to get at, would it make sense or is there any mileage in, in terms of a general scientific approach, attempting to identify the potential dangers based on where the shipping was coming from?
Dr Garton: Danger zones overseas, I suppose.
Mr Charlton: In other words, you are not going to have ballast water bringing in great white sharks. It is going to be small --
Dr Garton: Precisely. It should be ships that are transiting from freshwater ports or ports that have large freshwater input, the Baltic, some of the coastal ports in Europe, and the Caspian, in that area. Recently the zebra mussel could have come from any port in Europe so it provides no information. The spiny water flea probably came from a northern European port. The two goby species that have recently been reported from Lake St Clair come from the Caspian, probably from a Turkish port. We are talking a large number of ports that potentially could bring in organisms.
Mr Charlton: In scientific terms, if we were more prepared for a potential when we discovered it in Lake St Clair or wherever else we discovered it, are you in a better position to deal with it if you have done some advance work?
Dr Garton: That is a good question. I really would not know.
Mr Charlton: We have to decide both how to deal with the current problem and how we deal with what you are saying is a very important future.
Dr Garton: I could not pick a problem and say this is the one you will prevent by adopting this strategy now. I could not say that. Part of the problem is that zebra mussel larvae were identified in plankton in ballast water years before they were successfully established in Lake St Clair. They have continually been introduced. Something happened in the Great Lakes community or some environmental condition was benign enough that it allowed the successful introduction to take hold. Organisms are continuously being brought over, but 99% of them are unsuccessful.
Mr Arnott: I want to commend you on your presentation. I am sure the committee will find it very, very helpful to us in our responsibilities here. l wonder if you can elaborate on the last sentence that you gave in the presentation, talking about, "This should be taken as a powerful lesson on the penalties for allowing unregulated introduction of non-native species." Would you like to expand upon that? Is there something that you could suggest that we should set up so we can be more responsive to invasive species when they do appear?
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Dr Garton: In this case it is trying to recognize all possible avenues. For agricultural pests, animals, plants, insects, those are all very close and tightly regulated. Ballast water missed the attention of everyone because it was so invisible and probably most of the organisms that were being brought in at the time had no significant effect or impact. In the last decade we have seen many examples where the reverse is quite true. There are species out there which can cause harmful effects. I mentioned potamocorbula in San Francisco Bay in the 1980s, and zebra mussels also in the 1980s. I put that comment in there specifically to address ballast water.
There is a whole other philosophy. You can talk about manipulating ecosystems. We do that all the time in the Great Lakes. But at least for intentional introduction some forethought has gone into what will be the result of this. It is sort of moving from a reactionary phase to a proactionary phase. I would not argue that we could be 100% successful in preventing any future introductions, but at least reduce the swell. In my years of working in biology in the field, I have never seen an organism move into an environment and dominate it so quickly, so rapidly.
Mr Klopp: There has been a lot of talk that we should study potential new problems. Can I take it from you that you have said very clearly, "Just assume that there's a problem out there. Don't waste the money and the time to guess what's coming next. Pass regulations that virtually -- you can get as tough as you want?"
If we are going to have free trade, fair trade and all that stuff, one of the costs we are going to have to put in there to everyone is that you be environmentally safe -- almost you wash the boat right down or the plane right down, or whatever, and just assume that there is going to be something there, as you pointed out. Is that what you are basically saying to us and your government?
Dr Garton: Yes. We already accept that in agricultural products. Look at the state of California, the state of Florida response to medflies. It was automatic and traumatic. They were protecting a billion-dollar industry. The Great Lakes and other inland bodies here are also billion-dollar industries. It simply makes sense to try to protect them.
Mr Klopp: We have the same thing in the breeding of cattle, like black tongue and stuff. We have a very stringent rule. Unfortunately your government actually wants to make it its rule, but that is another issue. I want to make that clear to everyone, to me it is very important.
Dr Garton: I am not specifying any particular organism because right now we could not predict.
Mr Klopp: Who knows.
Dr Garton: We certainly would not want to introduce snails that might carry some kind of parasitic disease. They probably would not survive here anyway because those are tropical species, but anything can happen.
Mr Ramsay: Could I have a supplementary on that?
The Chair: One minute.
Mr Ramsay: In your section of the paper where you talk in general about the introduction of non-native species in North America, you start off talking about the history of European settlers bringing in non-native species. Then you talk about the invasions we have had the last couple of years. You finish off saying that you really cannot predict how serious a problem these introductions can cause, and you finish off that sentence, "Therefore, it would be wise to try and prevent the introduction of all" -- and you have that capitalized -- "non-native species." Would you take this point so far as to mean that we should be very careful in our intentional introduction of non-native species, as we do, say, for sport fishery?
Dr Garton: This is my opinion. There is a lot of argument about what sort of fish community, aquatic community, we should be trying to manage in the Great Lakes; as to whether we should be trying to go back and re-establish the community that existed back in the 1800s or if we should just be trying sort of a recreational-commercial fishery that can be maintained.
We have species like rainbow trout and salmon of various species being stocked intentionally in the Great Lakes to provide a fishery. Those were intentional introductions, some better studied than others. Some will argue that that was good or bad, and I am not going to argue that right now. Certainly before any species is introduced into the environment, all possible long-term effects should be thoroughly studied.
Mr Ramsay: Thank you, Mr Chairman, I appreciate that.
The Chair: Thank you, Dr Garton, for a very informative presentation. Thank you very much for taking time to appear before us today.
MINISTRY OF THE ENVIRONMENT
The Chair: The next group of witnesses will be a panel from the Ministry of the Environment. The panel will brief the committee on existing and proposed research, environmental management and policy initiatives relating to the invasion of exotic species. I will have to let you gentlemen introduce yourselves.
Mr Fleischer: My name is Fred Fleischer. I am manager of the Great Lakes program for the Ministry of the Environment. My colleague is Jim Janse, the assistant director of the London region of the Ministry of the Environment. We have both been involved in the zebra mussel issue over the last year or so, working closely with the Ministry of Natural Resources.
Before Mr Janse gives us a summary of the activities related to the Ministry of the Environment's programs in zebra mussel control and management, I would like to just briefly identify to the committee the responsibilities of the Ministry of the Environment as they pertain to the federal government and the Ministry of Natural Resources, with our first overhead, please.
When we talk about water management issues in Ontario, it is understood by the scientific and policy communities that the federal government is the agency or the group largely responsible for the management of offshore waters in the Great Lakes. The provincial agencies, specifically the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Natural Resources, are responsible for water management in the near-shore areas.
When we try to distinguish those activities, the province is responsible for management of the inputs that come from the land area, specifically direct inputs from municipalities and industries and indirect inputs from agricultural areas such as runoff from storm events and river discharges. The province also then develops control measures to manage those sources coming from the shore areas. So we have the federal responsibility pertaining to the offshore areas, international waterways and shipping. The province looks after the near-shore areas.
When we look at the introductions of foreign species to water bodies such as the Great Lakes, the Ministry of the Environment's responsibilities pertain to the study of those introductions as they impact on water quality. We could extrapolate that and say the study of the impacts of any sources, being contaminants or not, on water resources.
We look at bioaccumulation of those contaminants in the food chain. We study the impact of those introductions on intakes, and Jim will speak to us more extensively on that. We manage the approval of control technologies for protecting the intakes. We provide advice to municipalities and industries on the control of those technologies.
Over and above that, we also feel that we are responsible for conducting research into the management of resources, specifically those items I have mentioned. When we talk about the introduction of foreign species, the research pertains to, again, impact, bioaccumulation and development of control technologies for municipalities and industries.
I must also stress that there is close co-operation between the federal and provincial agencies in the management of Great Lakes resources. The zebra mussels issue certainly has been discussed with our federal colleagues and there are movements under way to co-ordinate activities related to those. The co-ordination is conducted under the International Joint Commission, as well as the Canada-Ontario agreement pertaining to Great Lakes water quality. The only other issue I wish to mention at this time is that from a provincial point of view, the management of the initiative related to zebra mussels has been assigned to the Ministry of Natural Resources, so MNR is playing the lead role on behalf of the province. The Ministry of the Environment is supportive of that role and co-operates with Natural Resources in the development of those policies.
Mr Janse: I would like to indicate to you very briefly some of the activities the Ministry of the Environment has been involved in. Our main interest that we have been expending all of our energies on is relating to the impact of the zebra mussel infestation on the water plants and industrial plants. Just to give you an indication of the areas of concern, as highlighted on this overhead, we are experiencing considerable plugging of the intakes where the mussels are actually building up inside our intakes and therefore reducing capacity to provide water to municipalities. There are also concerns with respect to internal plumbing within. Mainly, that is on the industrial side. The pipes of the heating systems fill up and create considerable problems. There are also corrosion problems as a result of the mussel infestation.
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Another concern and impact is the actual disposal of the zebra mussels. When they clean them, physically remove them, they have a waste product which then has to be disposed of in a satisfactory manner. The cost of control mechanisms to control zebra mussels as it relates mainly to the municipal side of things has an impact on the province of Ontario.
I think Fred already mentioned water quality and the bio-accumulation of contaminants. I will probably skip over that and go into a bit on the background of our involvement with respect to this.
As I identified here earlier, they were first detected in about 1988. The Ministry of the Environment in 1989 undertook essentially three main aspects. First, we monitored the spread and the impact on intakes. The purpose of that was to identify where they are, which intakes they are going to impact next and what action should be taken to control the adverse impact on the capacity of the intakes.
Second, we undertook a research study. Professor Mackie did that work for us -- I think there may have been some discussion relating to that here -- essentially to find out what they did in Europe, what mechanisms of control have been used and what the success of those particular controls were; that relates to biological control, chemical control, physical control and actual mechanical means of removing intakes.
Third, we were assessing the impact of it and control mechanisms on our existing intakes in the Lake Erie basin.
I just put up a slide. We have a report we can leave with the committee that highlights the results of the European experience and the details as they relate to the various control mechanisms.
Following up on that, with respect to controls, one of the things we found out in early 1990 was that in order for us to use a chemical control for zebra mussel protection in the intakes, we were required to get approval through the federal government under the Pest Control Products Act. Based on the information we got from the European experience of the nature of the problem we were facing and the urgency of the problem, we proceeded with the application and received approval in June from the federal government to use chlorine as an interim method of controlling zebra mussels. The control is really to prevent them from growing in the intakes, to kill the larvae of the zebra mussel as it goes into the intakes.
What we did and are doing is moving the point of chlorination at water plants from the treatment plant itself to the mouth of the intake and therefore chlorinating through the intake as we go down. We reduce, then, the amount of chlorine we need through the treatment process of the water plant and then just bump it up at the end of the plant before it has gone into the distribution system. Essentially, it is relocating the chlorine from where we had it in the treatment plant, which was usually at the plant itself, and moving it to the mouth of the intake.
Again, we continue to monitor the spreading so we can predict where they are going to impact the intakes next so that action can be taken to correct it. We participated on an interministerial committee for provincial initiatives which MNR, I am sure, can enlighten you on. As Fred mentioned, MNR is the lead agency, and we were involved with them in various discussions relating to this.
We provide advice to municipalities and industries. We also hired consultants to obtain approval for the installation of controls at some of the MOE facilities that were being adversely impacted. Also, we approve applications that are submitted from industries and municipalities. Under our legislation, they cannot add anything to the water without an approval from the Ministry of the Environment.
We developed a set of guidelines, a guideline book, which would give direction to municipalities and industries on the approval requirements, what our conditions will be for the use of chlorine control for zebra mussels. That is just the outline of the cover of the guidelines.
Just to give you an indication of the problem we are currently facing, we have a number of intakes that are currently experiencing from 45% to 50% reduction in the capacity of the intakes; this is in the Lake Erie basin. The mussels just start growing on top of each other and just keep expanding and slowly fill in the intakes, and we have some intakes with a 40% to 50% reduction. Intakes that are now being impacted are all the intakes in Lake Erie and parts of Lake Ontario. It is our understanding that the mussels now extend beyond the city of Toronto. Parts of Lake Huron and some in the St Lawrence River are currently being affected.
The next overhead is to give you some idea of what we are talking about when we are talking about intakes. There are approximately 86 large water supply intakes in those basins, as identified on the overhead. I also identified for you the number of industrial intakes that will also be affected, and the source of this information is identified in the overhead.
In total, in the Great Lakes basin -- plus we anticipate that over time the mussels may get into the Lake Simcoe and Trent canal systems -- we are looking at approximately 110 municipal intakes that are going to be affected.
I would like to very briefly identify why chlorine was selected as an interim approach. This problem came upon us rather quickly, as the previous presenter also identified. We looked at the research done in Europe, and it was determined that chlorine in fact is an effective way of dealing with it. It is readily available. We are presently using chlorine at the water treatment plant. It is a compound we add to drinking water now for bacterial control, so we are not adding a different compound; our staff is experienced with the handling and use of the compound. It has shown to be effective and will prevent the buildup on intakes. Also, it can be installed over a very short period of time. There is not a massive reconstruction of the intakes to be done.
I know there has been in the past a lot of concern about the use of chlorine. I have identified some of the controls we have incorporated in our approval for the use of chlorine for zebra mussel control. One is that they can only apply during the breeding season, because we are not going after the adult, we are going after the veligers or larvae of the zebra mussel. Those are the ones we want to kill off. The period is generally between June and October. My understanding is that when the water temperature is around 12 degrees centigrade they start to reproduce, and that is the period in which they would undertake the chlorination.
As identified earlier, the point of chlorination would be at the mouth of the intake. This was so we would not get chlorine feeding back into the lake, and also to protect our intakes. The chlorinator feed pump only operates when the water pump is operating and sucking the water into the intake, so it has no way of going back into the lake and therefore affecting the aquatic environment.
The chlorine residual levels we need to control the zebra mussels are between 0.5 and one part per million, which is the same level we use for the control of bacteria, so we are not adding a higher concentration.
When you add chlorine to water it produces compounds called trihalomethanes, and there has been concern about whether there will be an increase in the production of trihalomethanes in the Great Lakes as a result of moving the point of chlorination. We have been looking at that. I have some data that have indicated that the level of trihalomethanes in our drinking water in the Lake Erie area has gone down slightly over the last three years. We attribute that to the clarity of the water increasing, that perhaps there is less organic matter in the water. Trihalomethanes are produced when chlorine reacts with organic matter in water; it produces a compound. Our levels in the drinking water in the Erie basin run between 20 and 60 parts per billion, and our criteria is 350 parts per billion, to give you a perspective.
Industry requires control over zebra mussels for its water systems. In the case of drinking water, the water goes into the municipal distribution system in a normal fashion and then the water is used in and goes through a sewage treatment plant. In industry we do not have that, so with any discharge directly back to the aquatic environment we put constraints on the level of chlorination to protect the aquatic environment in the lake.
That is essentially the background. We are open for questions.
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Mr Ruprecht: Would you say that the pressure you are under to begin treatment with chlorine is going to increase in the very near future?
Mr Janse: I do not see that the pressure to use chlorine is going to increase in the near future. The number of locations will definitely increase, as I indicated to you. As the zebra mussel spreads across the Great Lakes, we have to protect the intakes in that area, so on an interim basis there are definitely going to be more requests for the drinking waters to move to a point of lower chlorination and for industry to chlorinate.
Mr Ruprecht: We are in a bit of a quandary right now, to use chlorine, on the one hand; on the other hand, I am not sure we have enough research to determine what the effects of that treatment will be on other aquatic life or even what the effects will be on animal life. The reason I said we are in a bit of a quandary is that the pressures, as you said, may not increase, but they are certainly there now. But we do not have substitutes, or do we?
Mr Janse: We do not have any other substitutes that are approved in Canada now. As I indicated to you, under the federal jurisdiction we would require approval for any other compound to be used for zebra mussel control through the Canadian pesticides act.
With respect to chlorine, there are two aspects. First, for drinking water we are not adding anything different than we currently add to drinking water, whether the mussels were there or not. We have used chlorine on any surface water supply for disinfection, for bacteria. The concentration is not increasing above that. There will be some increases in chlorine use at the plants because we are adding it earlier. With respect to industry, as I indicated, any discharge from an industrial facility must dechlorinate to get down to 0.01 part per million so that the discharge will not affect the aquatic environment in the lake. That is how we are controlling it.
Mr Ruprecht: We have heard this morning from Dr Stanley, I think it was -- I could be wrong; it could be someone else -- who said that the treatment with chlorine and the levels of chlorine are different between Europe and Canada. I am not a scientist, but he says the treatment levels would be 0.5 in Europe and some regions, whereas in Canada they would have to be 2.5 to be effective. At least, that is what I remember from this morning. Your indications are that the levels could be 0.5 to effectively treat this zebra infestation. What would you say to that?
Mr Janse: I was not here this morning. In answer to that, based on the information we have been able to determine, the 0.5 to one part per million concentration of chlorine residual is effective in treating for the zebra mussel.
I do not know what he was referring to. There are two aspects you have to remember. One is that we are talking about a chlorine residual. In order to get a chlorine residual at that level you have a chlorine dosage of between two and five parts per million, which is the dosage we are currently applying to kill the bacteria. There is a chlorine dosage and a chlorine residual, and they are two different numbers and two different things.
Mr Ruprecht: My final question is about the research. As best as you can explain it to us, do we actually have enough research that would indicate that we are not, with this treatment, which might increase, affecting other aquatic life or other life that might use drinking water from the lakes?
Mr Janse: With respect to the water plants, we are not impacting the aquatic life because the water is not going directly back to the watercourse. The level leaving the water treatment plant will be identical to what it is without zebra mussel control.
With respect to industry, one of the conditions on the certificate of approval is that they do a biological study in the lake in the cone of influence of their discharge, to see whether the levels we have determined they must meet now will impact. If it will, we will have to make the levels lower.
Mr Ruprecht: You are quite confident, then, that if there is impact, it is not out of the ordinary?
Mr Fleischer: The level of 0.01 milligram per litre in the receding water body that Jim referred to as the criteria is a provincial water quality objective. That means that objective has been designed scientifically for the protection of aquatic life. We are using that same objective to control the emissions of chlorine residual.
Mr Ruprecht: That may be, but I have asked you specifically whether, in your own mind, you would be confident enough that the treatment levels you are using would not affect either aquatic life or other life that impacts on the Great Lakes. That was my question. I do not want to put you on the spot, but the reason I am concerned about this is that we will hear other presenters later on who may be making that point. I want to have an answer, if possibly I can get one from you.
Mr Janse: I can respond to that. I am of the opinion that the levels we are seeking will not adversely impact. As a safety precaution, though, we have identified that we will have the survey done to provide us with more information to determine that.
Mr Ruprecht: When will that be out?
Mr Janse: Within the first year of operation of their facility they are to undertake the biological survey in the lake or in the body of water of their discharge to see if there has been any adverse impact.
Mr Waters: What you have stated is basically that you treat the water now with chlorine between May and October or whatever it is. Is the way you are going to treat it with chlorine, in the interim?
Mr Janse: We are treating water for bacteria control year-round if it is a surface water supply. For zebra mussel control we are going to treat only during the period in which the micro-organisms are there, which is June to October.
Mr Waters: From the hearing this morning and discussion since, it is my understanding that the critical time is when the mussels settle. As long as they are suspended in the water or after they have settled there is no real problem as far as what you specifically are looking at is concerned, the water intake. Apparently there is a two- to four-week period for each peak in their settlement; they have a peak settlement time. I think we have experienced in some years two settlement periods. Why would we be treating for so long when there are only approximately, at the most, eight weeks?
Mr Janse: The decision was made to treat whenever they are there. There are peak settling times, as you indicate, but as I understand it, they are produced over the whole summer, so you have some that will be larger than others over time, but I am not certain on that. The intent was that when the micro-organisms are there, to ensure that they do not grow in the intakes or settle in the intakes, that they are in fact killed.
Mr Waters: Have you looked at such a thing as a high-pressure backwash on a daily basis? They cannot get fixed to the pipes. That is something of an alternative.
Mr Janse: There are a number of what they call physical means of attempting to prevent zebra mussels from plugging pipes. The main difficulty we are running into is that our intakes were not designed of a size and access to actually get in and do those types of things. Some of those intakes are 1,500, 1,600 feet long.
We have in Tilbury, though, designed an intake where we put what we called an infiltration chamber in the bottom of the lake so that we do not have to use chlorine in that instance. We built a sandbed in the bottom of the lake which will filter out the water before it gets sucked into the intake. You cannot do that everywhere, though, because if your lake bottom is heavy clay in an area you will get siltation and it will plug up that system. So we have asked in our approval for any application that is submitted to us that they look at alternatives to chlorination, not automatically assume that chlorination is the way to go.
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Mr Jordan: I was wondering, in that the ballast of the ships are the main means of transportation, would it be feasible to treat that water with chlorine?
Mr Fleischer: Certainly I think that would have to be considered as one way of attempting to control the introduction of foreign species into Ontario, and in this case Canada. We ourselves have not considered that as an option only because the provincial government has no jurisdiction over that kind of management of shipping. It rests with the Canadian Coast Guard, the United States Coast Guard and the Canadian federal government.
Mr Jordan: Would it make sense to pursue that, then?
Mr Fleischer: You would then have to adequately set up control measures to monitor the effectiveness of it or to measure the residual chlorine. Certainly there would be a large amount of chlorine residual introduced into the Great Lakes that could be of concern.
Mr Dadamo: I just want to go back to the chlorine thought. Is it the only known research solution that we have at the present time? Are we toying any other solutions to eradicate the zebra mussels?
Mr Janse: Maybe I can comment on that. There are some molluscicides, as I understand it, that are used in the United States for chlorine control. The difficulty you would have currently in Canada is that you would have to get that approved, as I indicated, through the federal government before it could be added to water, and to add them to drinking water we would have to have the necessary health studies and data to support that. Then it would have to be registered through Agriculture Canada. But there are some other compounds available to control zebra mussels.
Mr Dadamo: I know we have chlorine in our drinking water now. Would any more be damaging for human consumption?
Mr Janse: As I indicated to you, by moving the point of chlorination and the amount of chlorination required, we feel there will be some small increase in the amount of chlorine, because the water is not as pure where we are introducing it with zebra mussel control as we would without zebra mussel control. As far as the health-related aspects of it are concerned, the trihalomethanes is the health concern compound, and as I indicated to you we do require -- I did not say that to you, but we do require monitoring for that. The levels that we are looking at, especially in the Lake Erie basin, are very low. One of the approval conditions is that they must monitor for THMs.
Mr Dadamo: How expensive would it be for municipalities to undertake this kind of endeavour?
Mr Janse: The monitoring?
Mr Dadamo: No. Actually the chlorine use if that were to be the only solution.
Mr Janse: The cost to municipalities will vary depending on the intake and the solution and how easy it is to install the facilities. It is going to be fairly costly; there is no doubt about it.
Mr Fleischer: If I may add to that, Ontario Hydro is involved in extensive research pertaining to examination of alternatives to chlorine. Certainly they are in the forefront in Ontario in conducting this type of work and we are in close co-operation with Ontario Hydro. We are attempting to set up better co-ordination throughout the province, as well as with the federal government and the United States. But Ontario Hydro is looking at other chemicals as well as use of heat, electric shock, filters, ultraviolet light, even sound frequencies, in an attempt to find an alternative to the use of chlorine.
Mr Janse: If I may just add to that, as indicated to you, we look at chlorine as an interim solution. We know it works, we can apply it and we are currently used to chlorine, but it is interim in our mind.
The Vice-Chair: I guess, due to a time overrun here on this, I am going to ask Mr Ramsay to be the last questioner.
Mr Ramsay: I have one very specific question. You talked about that as we introduce chlorine earlier in the process, there is a bit of loss during the process, that we need a little bit of topping up to bring it up to standard. Is that loss taking place in the water treatment plant through evaporation?
Mr Janse: No. The loss I am referring to is it reacts with water for disinfection purposes, and if there are other compounds in the water they will absorb some of the chlorine. The normal process that we do is we top it up as it is discharged anyway, but you will have an increased loss in chlorine due to being absorbed by the contaminants in the water.
Mr Ramsay: I want to ask a more general question. You have really restricted your presentation to dealing just with zebra mussels. I was wondering more in general, as we begin to really start to combat these invasive species, is there some sort of protocol that is established so that if a government jurisdiction or a company wanted to, say, introduce a biological combatant, say bacteria, to burrow into purple loosestrife, for instance, how would we deal with that? Is there a class environmental assessment that is sort of there to deal with that or how would we deal with examining that introduction or proposed introduction?
Mr Janse: If you want to introduce something into a body of water for control of an organism, you require approval under our Pesticides Act. You also require that product to be registered under the Canadian pesticides act. Those controls are in place. They are for purposes of ensuring that the compound that is added is not going to adversely impact the aquatic environment but is added for the purposes for which the person wants to add the material.
Mr Ramsay: What if it is a biological combatant and it is on land, let's say?
Mr Janse: I cannot answer that question. I really do not know.
Mr Ramsay: I take it it would be against the law to do that.
Mr Janse: I would take it you would need some approval, but I really do not know the mechanism.
The Vice-Chair: Allow us to thank you, gentlemen, for coming in and giving us the MOE's perspective on this and how it is handling it.
Mr Janse: Mr Chairman. did you want a copy of these two reports? I can leave them with the committee if you so desire.
The Vice-Chair: Yes, please, if we could.
MINISTRY OF NATURAL RESOURCES
The Vice-Chair: The next group to come before the committee is a panel from the Ministry of Natural Resources. I would ask that someone introduce yourselves as to who is who.
Dr Balsillie: Good afternoon, members of the committee. My name is David Balsillie and I am the assistant deputy minister of the policy division of the Ministry of Natural Resources. With me today on my right is Chris Brousseau, who is the zebra mussel program co-ordinator for the Ministry of Natural Resources. As you heard previously, MNR has the dubious lead role in this particular situation. Chris is here to present the information on zebra mussels. On my left is Laurel Whistance-Smith, the manager of the habitat and stewardship section of the wildlife policy branch of the Ministry of Natural Resources. She is here to address the issue of purple loosestrife.
Following their presentation, we would be willing to entertain questions not only on these two organisms but also on the introduction of not only what we call introduced species in one sense, but also in the invasion of pests such as zebra mussels and purple loosestrife. We would be pleased to have that conversation with you.
I think we should proceed. We have tried to tailor our presentation. We are a few minutes over, but we are in your hands. We have tried to tailor the presentation so that it is fairly quick and straightforward so that there is enough time for discussion.
The Vice-Chair: I was just going to say that you probably were not here this morning. We have made some extra allowances for MNR so we have until 4 o'clock.
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Mr Brousseau: If I may before I start, would I be able to pass a sample of zebra mussels around to people.
Mr Ramsay: Is this on a cracker or with rice?
Mr Brousseau: It is on a rock out of Lake Erie. I just wanted to show the committee because I think, like myself, most of you have not seen zebra mussels. These are live zebra mussels, about a year old. You will notice some bigger ones that were taken out of a rock. The reason they are on the top of this rock is because the bottom half of the rock was actually in the mud when that rock was picked up. Have a look. So that you can always say that you will know what zebra mussels look like, I also have a preserved sample for each of you.
If I can start now, I would like to draw your attention to the overheads. What I would like to do today is to give you an update on the present distribution of zebra mussels in Ontario, tell a little bit about the various mechanisms for zebra mussels to spread and the difficulty we are going to have in preventing the spread, as well as tell you what the Ministry of Natural Resources is doing to combat the zebra mussel as part of the Ontario government's effort.
On the overhead in blue you can see that zebra mussels, where they started in Lake St Clair, have drifted downstream and by 1989 had completely colonized the bottom of Lake Erie. In 1990 they spread through the Niagara River and we now have colonies in the Toronto harbour area, Hamilton and along the south shore of Lake Ontario. There are also colonies established in the eastern portion of Lake Ontario and in the St Lawrence River. This fall, just before freeze-up, we had reports of colonies in the Port Elgin area and Lake Huron.
I would just like to bring to your attention that a lot of times the press picks up on sightings of zebra mussels and a lot of times these sightings are what we call movable substrates. They are attached to the bottoms of boats and so on. They are noticed when they come out of the water and in fact zebra mussel colonies may not be there, but they are there in terms of being attached to the bottom of boats. We have sightings of that nature in Thunder Bay and Lake Superior, and this fall when boats were taken out of the Ottawa River at Mooneys Bay, zebra mussels were attached to some boats there as well. So as of today, except for that sighting on the Rideau River, the zebra mussel colonization is restricted to the lower Great Lakes.
Where will they be in Ontario in the next few years? That is a good guess. This is one author's interpretation of where zebra mussels will be. Indications are that zebra mussels will spread across North America. The two lines actually represent temperature isotherms, the north being, I think, the 12-degree Celsius for reproduction. However, I just moved from that area and I can guarantee that they will spread entirely across Ontario because we do have water temperatures exceeding 12 degrees to 15 degrees in most parts of Ontario.
The thing to keep in mind with this distribution is that there will be lakes in Ontario where zebra mussels will reach very high densities and that they will have significant impacts on water intakes and the aquatic ecosystem, but there will also be lakes within Ontario where zebra mussels will not get to very high densities and will not have impacts. So we are looking at a wide range of impacts and a wide range of population densities across the province.
To give you an idea of how difficult it is going to be to stop this, there are several different mechanisms for zebra mussels to be transported, primarily the downstream drift of the larval form, and wherever zebra mussels are deposited upstream the larval form before they attach are free-floating and they will drift downstream.
Difficulty on boats, boat traffic from infested waters inland: Zebra mussels can be attached to boat hulls, motors, anchors and chains. The larval stage, the microscopic form, which is very important -- this is why it is going to be difficult for people to see them -- can be found in the bilge water on boats, live wells that people keep fish in or in the water coolant in their engines. There are several different ways for zebra mussels to attach themselves to boats at various life history stages, and it is extremely difficult for the average boat owner to actually perfectly clean and rid his boat of zebra mussels.
They can be transferred in bait-fish water, the bait-fish transfers from the Great Lakes inland. They can be attached to crayfish and also fish transfers from infested waters to other waters. They can be attached to fishing gear, such as commercial fishing nets that may be used in the Great Lakes and then used inland, or even sport fishing gear that may be used from one lake to another.
Float planes using infested waters: Not only can the adults attach themselves to the pontoon themselves, but the larval form will go inside the floats, because I do not think there are very many float planes that are completely free of water inside their floats, and it is possible that float planes can bring the zebra mussels long distances inland.
There are different vectors that we virtually have no control over. It has been shown that zebra mussel larvae can live in the moisture on duck feathers, for example. Insects can carry them, mammals such as beaver with water on their fur going from one pond to another and reptiles. If they are attached to a snapping turtle, for example, snapping turtles are known to move long distances overland from one water body to another.
Because there are so many different dispersal mechanisms, I think the bottom line here is that we cannot prevent the spread of zebra mussels in Ontario. We can only hope to slow the spread down to give us a chance to find some of the answers. We are going to have to learn to live with zebra mussels.
What is the Ministry of Natural Resources doing? We have been designated as the lead agency in this program. We are leading an interministerial co-ordinating committee comprised of the following ministries: Natural Resources, Environment, Intergovernmental Affairs, Tourism and Recreation, Treasury and Economics and Municipal Affairs, along with Ontario Hydro. We have sat down and discussed our information needs. We have integrated those information needs and out of that we have defined the Ministry of Natural Resources role, which obviously reflects our mandate and our area of expertise.
From that role we have basically taken on four major program responsibilities. I will go into each of these in a little bit of detail, but essentially they are program co-ordination and planning, invasion monitoring of zebra mussels, research into the impacts on the aquatic ecosystem and developing and delivering a corporate communications plan.
Program co-ordination: Why? I think we heard questions about duplication this morning. Program co-ordination is extremely important to maximize the effort in zebra mussel management, prevent duplication, focus the efforts of our program and it gives us a single contact to liaise and work with other agencies.
How are we doing this? We have established a zebra mussel co-ordination office, which has become the focal point of the provincial program. From there we are developing and delivering a provincial communications plan. We are responsible for co-ordinating the budget, work plans and audits of the zebra mussel program. We are coordinating research on zebra mussel biology, impacts and control measures and developing a central data base on these activities.
We are responsible for determining the long-term distribution, spread and impact of zebra mussels and, importantly, supplying that information back out to the users.
Liaison and co-ordination of programs with other agencies: We have already started contacts with our US counterparts and the federal government in terms of co-ordinating our programs. We are there to project Ontario's concerns to prevent the introduction of other exotic species and we are here to act as a centre for scientific exchange of new information.
Scientific literature takes a long time to get into journals and so on, so we are trying to keep on top of research as much as possible and developing more informal mechanisms where we can get this information out to people in the field.
Invasion monitoring: Essentially what we are doing is monitoring the spread of zebra mussels. It is important to prepare for potential changes in the aquatic ecosystem, and currently to establish early warning networks. I think our US people talked about that this morning, so that users of the aquatic environment can implement control and mitigative measures before the zebra mussels get there and be able to predict what the long-term impacts of zebra mussels are.
We are doing this by monitoring the distribution of zebra mussels, their spread and their abundance over time. We can use this information as a network to provide information to users and hopefully to come up with more information to be able to predict the impact of zebra mussels.
As we heard this morning, it is very difficult to predict what the end result of zebra mussel population densities will be. We know in Europe that there are some cases where zebra mussels are experiencing what we think has happened in Lake Erie, where they start, reproduce very rapidly and then crash to some low level. But we also know of cases where zebra mussels have gone up and stayed up, and we know of cases where zebra mussels have never gone up and other cases where they are very cyclical over several years.
Hopefully by comparing the information learned from our monitoring program, we can then determine what water quality and habitat characteristics will allow us to be able to predict what these population densities will be in order to predict what the impacts will be on the aquatic environment.
We are planning to do this through our existing fisheries assessment unit network that is in place across the province, our district offices spread throughout Ontario, and other agencies. There are a lot of people doing monitoring of zebra mussels, such as Ontario Hydro, Environment, universities and so on and the public.
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We have had several requests from various organizations on how they can help in zebra mussel programs and we are currently developing a sampling protocol to be used by all agencies so that we can compare our results. This program will be extremely simple. We will have a network set up so we can feed back and forth to each other on the spread of zebra mussels.
Our preliminary area of research will be determining impacts on aquatic ecosystems. It is required to understand what is happening with zebra mussels in their new environment here in North America, how mussels are impacting native fish and vertebrates, what overall damage is being done to the aquatic ecosystem and what life stages could be most susceptible to control.
We are doing this by Natural Resources fisheries scientists under existing organization and we will be looking at various things such as impact on fish community structure, habitat, nutrient cycles, food webs, predator-prey interactions and ultimately -- and what most people are asking -- what is the impact on sport and commercial fisheries.
It is very important that we have good co-operation and co-ordination with other agencies. We have already discussed with our federal and other provincial counterparts ways of doing this. We have been invited to sit on the US committee that was referred to this morning and will be co-ordinating our activities with its zebra mussel management programs.
Ontario Hydro, which you will hear from tomorrow, is a leader in industrial control research. It is important that we work together with other industry and universities to maximize our efforts. We will also be acting as a mechanism for science transfer and exchange of information.
The final area that we are responsible for is development and delivering a corporate communications plan. It is essential to create public awareness of the zebra mussel and associated problems, communicating initiatives and developments in zebra mussel research, control methods and distribution and so on. It has been the chief method that we have used to slow the spread of zebra mussels through public education and responding to public inquiries.
How have we done this? Over the last year, we have had a major communications effort put in place. We have sat down and looked at the various audiences that are affected by zebra mussels and we have come up with initiatives to try to address and get the message out to these various audiences.
I will not go through each of these, but we have initiated about 35 major initiatives. I think one of the packages, the green kits you received, is an information kit that we have made widely available to the general public. We have given hundreds of these kits out. We have a slide show and video that is now across the province. We have almost 100 copies of that in circulation. We have produced posters and brochures and newsletters. In your package there, the copy of the plan outlines several of the activities that we have undertaken in communications.
Finally, I would just like to sum up by telling you about some of the recent activities we have done. We have initiated assessment, research and monitoring programs on Lake Erie, Lake St Clair, Lake Ontario and we are getting ready for pre-invasion monitoring on some of our inland waterways.
We are continuing to review our communications plan that was in place this year and to look at possible gaps and ways of improving things for next year. We have had feedback from the public on the effectiveness of some of our programs, such as our signs and so on, and we are taking that feedback into consideration.
I am now full-time co-ordinator responsible for developing a long-term plan on behalf of the Ontario government. We are currently preparing a paper and recommendations on spread vectors. By that I mean we are looking at all the different mechanisms that the zebra mussels can spread in the province, looking at the ones that we may have control over, and what we can do in addition to public education and communications to slow down or reduce the spread of zebra mussels.
We are setting up a central reporting of zebra mussel distribution spread, abundance and monitoring. Right now a lot of different agencies are out there monitoring zebra mussels. We hope to be able to come up with one central reporting of information, putting this altogether, everybody's information in one package, and using it as a complete network.
We are developing co-ordinating mechanisms with other agencies and we are looking at developing a central database not only for scientific information but for slides and audio-video equipment.
Essentially, we are responding to hundreds of request for information. There is a lot of interest out there on behalf of the public about zebra mussels. There is a lot of concern on behalf of the public on what impacts zebra mussels are going to have, and we are doing our best to keep up with those information requests.
The Vice-Chair: It has been suggested by Mr Ramsay that we deal with some questions on the zebra mussels, and then go on to the other. Does that affect your presentation or is it better?
Dr Balsillie: That is fine, Mr Chairman.
The Vice-Chair: Any problems with that from the committee?
Mr Ruprecht: In the previous presentation, we heard about the development of trihalomethane. In your communications and in your research, are you at all worried about this trihalomethane developing in the Great Lakes as a direct offshoot of treatment by chlorine? I guess it is only chlorine, right, or was there some other?
Dr Balsillie: Maybe I could respond to that. I used to be with the Ministry of the Environment, so I have a dual background here. The chlorine, when it is added to the water, as was explained by Mr Janse, reacts with organic material to create the group of compounds called the trihalomethanes. The "halo" is the chlorine part, and there are three chlorines attached to an organic molecule.
The concern with that is that in larger amounts, above the guidelines, they are considered to be carcinogenic and therefore they are not good necessarily to have in your water system in terms of drinking them. Low amounts are not considered to be a problem. The offshoot is that if you do not have the chlorination, then you have a whole series of other problems with your drinking water, things that we overcame many decades ago in terms of the spread of disease, etc.
The drinking water containing trihalomethanes then goes through the system, is utilized, goes back into the sewer system and gets treated before it goes back into the waterway. So that is not considered to be a problem. Also, as the chlorine is added to the intake, it is added inside the pipe, so it is moved up the pipe. The chlorine is not dispersed into the water. I think this is the big distinction that has to be made, that there is a diffuser inside the pipe. Then it goes into the system and into the water treatment plant.
Mr Ruprecht: So this does not act like PCBs, which you really cannot catch?
Dr Balsillie: No.
Mr Ruprecht: It goes right throughout the whole system and enters the food chain really. This is different.
Dr Balsillie: That is exactly right. It is entirely different. The chlorine is not willy-nilly put into the water, with the water to be sucked into the pipe. The water is sucked into the pipe and, as it is sucked into the pipe, the chlorine is added. Then the chlorine goes up the pipe with the water. You want to look at it as an early chlorination system, so that you do not chlorinate it in the plant, you chlorinate it in the pipe.
What you do is you kill the larvae in the pipe so that they do not have a chance to settle, as was pointed out over here, to get the foot of the larvae attached to the screens or to the pipes so that they then start to build on each other, as they are in the rock here, so that they build one on the other until they actually clog the system. But the chlorine is not introduced into the Great Lakes, it is introduced into the pipes and sucked up into the water treatment system.
Mr Ruprecht: And so is the trihalomethane, but you are filtering it out.
Dr Balsillie: On the way out, yes, through the sewage treatment process.
Mr Ruprecht: So in your mind, that is no problem?
Dr Balsillie: No problem.
Mr Ruprecht: I will sleep better tonight.
Mr Charlton: Obviously, there is not going to be any easy solution to this zebra mussel thing, but there was something that David Garton said during his presentation just an hour ago that did not hit me until after he had left. He essentially said -- and this is not an exact quote of his words, but I think paraphrases what he said fairly closely -- that there is evidence that zebra mussels had reached our waters on a number of occasions prior to successfully establishing themselves here and obviously something has changed to make for ideal conditions for success this time. We have had some minor climate changes over the two centuries, but it seems to me that the largest identifiable change that has occurred has been the gradual degradation of water quality in the Great Lakes over the course of the last 100 years.
In the scientific approaches that are being taken to look at this problem, has anybody focused on that at all, and is there any indication that perhaps with significant cleanup of the water systems in the Great Lakes, the problem may solve itself?
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Mr Brousseau: I think Dr Garton previously said that they may have been introduced a couple of times. I think what he was getting at was that they may have been introduced in one or two ships, probably one ship, in 1985 or 1986, based on our calculation of how old these organisms are. When they were introduced, they obviously found the environment here to their liking.
Mr Charlton: But he did also say that there was clear evidence that they had been introduced on other occasions and had not survived here and that something had changed to make this introduction a successful one. Those are not his exact words, but that is in essence what he said.
Mr Brousseau: Where they were deposited in Lake St Clair, obviously the habitat was to their liking and that is where they have initiated, essentially from that point, and where they have drifted downstream and have been carried upstream. The water quality here was more conducive to zebra mussel densities. It is a better water quality than a lot of cases in Europe.
One of the things in Europe which is very interesting is that, when we talk about zebra mussel densities here, some of the numbers we have heard this morning are in the several hundred thousand per square metre, which is very high, but in Europe, the high average densities are much lower, maybe 5,000 to 6,000 mussels per square metre. So the impacts there are much less than they are here. By having this good water quality for zebra mussels in terms of habitat, they have enabled themselves to basically population-explode. As they move into other areas, the habitat and water quality will affect them differently and there may be areas where they might not have much effect.
Mr Charlton: I understand that is the case. There are some areas in the Great Lakes where the zebra mussel population is just taking off, some where it is surviving but not expanding at any great rate and others where it does not seem to be catching on, at least not yet. What I am trying to get at is, is there an attempt to identify why that is the case? And in doing so, are you looking at more than perhaps just the temperature of the water at that location, the kind of plant life? Are you looking, for example, at the contaminants that may exist in the sediments in those locations?
As we know, in terms of currents around Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, for example, there are areas where you end up with higher concentrations of the chemicals we know exist right through the lake, but in certain pockets they exist in much higher concentrations: not just chemicals but other contaminants as well. I am just wondering if anybody has had a look at that in trying to identify why they do so well in some places and not in others, and why there are indications that we have had infestations before that did not survive and this one did.
Mr Brousseau: I think we talked about temperature. Calcium is very important. There are people trying to piece together, based on the European literature, the characteristics of lakes in terms of temperature and water chemistry and so on, trying to fine-tune those predictions of characteristics, to enable us to be able to predict here in Ontario where we can expect to have problems. But we are still a long way from being able to say, "In this particular lake, we will get zebra mussel densities at this rate."
Mr Charlton: I guess one of the reasons why this is starting to crop up in my head is because of the progression of information that we have received today. We started out this morning with background briefings on the original sources of zebra mussels in the USSR and so on, the movement of those through Europe after the Industrial Revolution, and their subsequent introduction here. It seems to me that the kind of time lines that are involved here may in fact be a significant clue to the way they have moved and spread.
Dr Balsillie: I do not think we have all the answers to your question. On the other hand, we have an opportunity to look at the establishment of zebra mussels in a number of areas across Ontario and I think, if we find that they fail to establish, for instance, despite the fact that they have been seen in Lake Superior, if they fail to establish there, then there is a relationship between, say, the water quality, the temperature, etc. of Lake Superior vis-à-vis the water quality of the west end of Lake Erie. l think there is potential for that and I think those are the sorts of things which we will be looking at.
Mr Ramsay: You said in your presentation that we can stop the spread and we must learn to live with the presence of zebra mussels. In order to learn to live with this invasion of zebra mussels, do you anticipate any sort of regulation that will have to affect human behaviour so that we can live with that, or do you think just the way we carry on with our sports fishery, boat transportation, etc, we would still be able to find ways to live with it without changing some human behaviour?
Mr Brousseau: We are wrestling with that right now. The approach we took in 1990 was a widespread public education campaign to make sure people are aware of zebra mussels, with the problems they can cause, and to help them out in terms of some guidelines in terms of cleaning their boats off. The problem we are trying to come to grips with right now is that there are so many different spread mechanisms.
Say, for example, we were to restrict bait-fish transfers from the Great Lakes. In other words, we are going to close down the bait-fish industry in the Great Lakes as a method to reduce the spread of the zebra mussels inland. The concern is, if we do that, we will have a major impact on bait-fish operators. In fact, are we going to have any overall impact on the rate of spread of zebra mussels across the province? These are the types of questions we met last week in a workshop and we discussed all the different mechanisms, but we are going to follow up with looking at those that we have some control over. Obviously water fowl or reptiles or mammals we do not have any control over. We will have another look at things like the bait-fish industry, boat traffic, to see if there is anything further we can do, in addition to our education and communications plan, that will have an impact and at the same time will not have significant impacts on a very small portion of the industry which may be only contributing to the spread in a very small way.
We are currently still working at those questions and we are preparing a discussion paper on that now and we will be going out and looking for comment and input from people on that.
Mr Ramsay: I would encourage you to do that, because as you had mentioned, the groups have offered to help, and I think you would find, as with the overall environmental situation, people want to be involved and there may be some rather benign interventions that people could do. Whether it is waxing boat bottoms or whatever it is to get people involved, it may help in the long run and it is something.
You listed really what you are doing, starting off with the establishment of the office, and then listed from there what the ministry has been doing. Basically, how much money are we spending on the fight against the zebra mussel?
Mr Brousseau: Over the past year, we have put funds into those four major areas that I talked about in terms of the co-ordination office, the research we have begun on Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, invasion monitoring and the communications plan. To date, the Ministry of Natural Resources has spent close to $1.1 million on this particular program.
Mr Ramsay: Just one last quick question.
The Vice-Chair: We have another full presentation to go yet and we still have questions here as well, so if we could move to Mr Cleary and Mr Johnson and move on to the next presentation.
Mr Cleary: Now that they have found their way into eastern Ontario, I would like to talk a little bit about the time of the St Lawrence Seaway, some of the water supplies to the villages and towns, and other water supplies were wells underneath the river. Are wells underneath the river as apt to attract zebra mussels as other types of water supplies?
Dr Balsillie: I am not familiar with the type of system that you are talking about, but I would envisage that they are drawing water from below the bottom of the river through a sand point of some sort.
Mr Cleary: No, I do not think so. To my knowledge there is not a sand point.
Dr Balsillie: It would be my understanding that if it is a reasonable distance below the bottom of the river, similar to the way Mr Janse indicated that they had built what they call the infiltration boxes around the ends of water intakes for Tilbury, for instance, the water supplies would not be affected, but I would suggest that those individual municipalities, if they have concerns, get in touch with the Ministry of the Environment to find out about the susceptibility in that case.
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Mr Cleary: The other thing you had talked about was treating the water supply at the source instead of at the plants. To my knowledge, these plants do not have foot valves, so that could not be done unless that whole system was changed. Is that correct?
Dr Balsillie: That would be correct if the system were at risk. If the system were not at risk, then it would not matter. So I think the best advice would be for you to advise those municipalities to get in touch directly with the ministry, if they are not already ministry-run plants.
Mr Cleary: No, they are not ministry-run.
The Chair: In the interests of time, Mr Johnson has withdrawn his question. I appreciate that very much. So if we can move on to the second half of the presentation.
Ms Whistance-Smith: We turn now to a short discussion of purple loosestrife in Ontario. Purple loosestrife is a tall, emergent aquatic plant of Eurasian origin that became established in the estuaries of northeastern North America in the early 19th century. The primary method of spread appears to have been accidental via marine commerce. This species now poses a serious threat to native emergent vegetation in shallow-water marshes throughout the eastern and central regions of the United States and Canada. It is a serious problem in wetlands and irrigation systems.
The impact of purple loosestrife on native vegetation has been disastrous. The plant readily outcompetes native species and then forms dense, monospecific stands which appear to be able to maintain themselves indefinitely. It reduces the species' diversity, thereby reducing waterfowl and aquatic furbearer productivity, although we do not know a lot about its impact on wildlife generally.
In the United States, 190,000 hectares of wetland habitat have been lost annually and it is present throughout southern Ontario and as far north as Kirkland Lake in northern Ontario. The distribution limit for this weed is about the 50th latitude, but there is evidence that it is farther north from that even now. Management efforts to control the proliferation of purple loosestrife in Canada and the United States have involved legal status designation and various control techniques.
Purple loosestrife is not on the noxious weeds list for Ontario; however, some municipalities, such as the county of Bruce are passing bylaws declaring the plant a noxious weed. Although Agriculture Canada deals specifically with the sale of plants in nurseries, once purple loosestrife is declared a noxious weed in Ontario, if it were, local weed inspectors could remove it.
Removal of plants by hand is effective in eliminating purple loosestrife, and it is selective. However, it is very labour-intensive and therefore only practical in wetlands where plant density is low. Cutting reduces stem numbers in the short term and reduces seed production. However, many repeated cuts are necessary for long-term control and cutting may never eliminate purple loosestrife from a site.
Burning is not an effective management technique because the growing points on the rootstock are below the soil surface.
Manipulation of water levels has demonstrated some success in the control of purple loosestrife; however, this technique is not selective and not possible in natural wetland communities.
Ducks Unlimited in Ontario has indicated that it will be investigating the use of flooding as a management technique. Of course you know that they use water control structures on their projects.
The herbicide 2,4-D is not as effective as another one called Roundup, but selects only broad-leaved species and is thus likely to do less damage to native wetland species. This herbicide is recommended by the United States for controlling large populations of the plant.
Three beetle species are presently undergoing final screening at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and state quarantine facility in Virginia. Laboratory tests in Europe have indicated that these beetle species are highly host-specific and control purple loosestrife by feeding on various parts of the plant. Full implementation of such a biological control program in the United States may take from 3 to 10 years. That is their estimate.
In Ontario, in September 1990 the Ministry of Natural Resources organized a purple loosestrife working group, up on the screen there. This group's purpose is to develop a strategy for the management of purple loosestrife, hopefully by around May. The group consists, as you can see, of representatives from a number of government agencies and non-government organizations. We have a couple of consultants who are involved with the group as well.
The current activities of this working group are investigating the status of current research and management practices in other jurisdictions, investigating the success and failure of public information approaches to the problem and developing options for a management strategy, as I said, in May, we hope.
Strategic options which the group will be considering include information compilation -- some of the research that needs to be done is listed in that group on the left-hand side; public information dissemination ideas. which is the extension list there, and looking at control techniques such as the ones I mentioned earlier -- herbicides. cutting, flooding, hand-pulling and biological control.
That is all I have to say at this time. We are a new group and just getting started on our work.
Mr Waters: When you talked about the beetles, you said that in 3 to 10 years they would be introduced, if at all. The question is, should they be introduced in the United States, once they have made that decision, regardless of what we say, does it really matter? Are they going to just naturally move into Canada?
Ms Whistance-Smith: Yes, we think so.
Mr Waters: In other words, if the US goes for it, we might as well say we are in for it too, because it would be just a matter of time.
Ms Whistance-Smith: I believe so, yes, but certainly we will want to consult with them, and I am sure they will want to consult with us because of that very thing.
Mr Waters: My concern would be that what they might have down in the warmer climate versus what we have here could affect things differently.
Ms Whistance-Smith: Yes. I do not know just how extensive their research is, but the beetles might not be able to live up here, for instance. We do not know that yet.
Mr Waters: Are we doing anything on it?
Ms Whistance-Smith: No, not that I know of.
Mr Ramsay: Just to follow on Mr Waters's question, I believe you said if the United States introduced the insects to combat the loosestrife, that we would get them here.
Ms Whistance-Smith: Yes.
Mr Ramsay: In the presentation, though, you said they were very host-specific.
Ms Whistance-Smith: Yes, to purple loosestrife.
Mr Ramsay: Okay. How would they transfer, just through winds and everything?
Ms Whistance-Smith: Yes, flying from one group of plants to another.
Mr Ramsay: We would get this. Okay. My main question was, since we have got the working group we are certainly aware it is a problem, but we have not designated it a noxious weed yet. Why have we not done that?
Ms Whistance-Smith: The Ministry of Agriculture and Food is looking into that now. As I said, Bruce county has already declared it a noxious weed locally. If enough municipalities do that, my understanding is that the Ministry of Agriculture and Food might then put it on its list of noxious weeds of Ontario. That is my understanding.
Mr Ramsay: So you would not make your recommendation to the ministry. You have been waiting for the other ministry to respond to the problem?
Ms Whistance-Smith: They are part of our working group and we are asking them to look into that end of things, yes.
Mr Ramsay: Okay, thank you.
Mr Ruprecht: Yes, I just had a quick question. We heard from Dr Stanley this morning, and he said that probably the most effective method was to pull the plant out by hand. If anyone should call our offices about how to do that, would you recommend that that is done in the fall, in the spring, and how often should that be done? Do you have any experience in that, in other words?
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Ms Whistance-Smith: I do not have any experience in it, but I guess there are some people who have tried it and it is a very good method for small populations. I think it has to be done in the spring or before the plant flowers; that is really their recommendation. But there is a way of doing that so that you get the whole root. And you have to be very careful about how to get rid of the plant, otherwise it will propagate from the cuttings or the root pieces. So this public information campaign about how to do that would be very helpful, and that is one of the things we will be looking into, how to get that information out to people.
Mr Ruprecht: Maybe you can put a pamphlet out.
Ms Whistance-Smith: Yes, that is what we plan to do. But if you have anybody interested in doing some of that locally, our office would be happy to --
Mr Ruprecht: No, I might end up doing it in my lot. I have seen them already.
Ms Whistance-Smith: We would be happy to tell you exactly how to do it.
Mr Ruprecht: Okay, you come along and show me.
Ms Whistance-Smith: Okay, that is fine.
Mr Charlton: There are two areas I would like to pursue. First of all, I think you said that the working group is working towards trying to have some kind of a strategy in place by about May.
Ms Whistance-Smith: Yes.
Mr Charlton: Does that strategy include, presumably, how you are going to approach the question from the perspective of research that we might do here in Ontario?
Ms Whistance-Smith: Yes, that would. These are options for management.
Mr Charlton: To follow up Mr Waters's question of earlier, if the working group were to determine that the beetles are one of the more promising approaches to the whole question, the working group may recommend that we do some of our own research around those issues here to determine both from our perspective whether that is the right approach and whether climatically it is going to work here even if somebody else's research shows it may work somewhere else, that kind of thing?
Ms Whistance-Smith: Yes, we could do that.
Mr Charlton: None of that is precluded at this point?
Ms Whistance-Smith: No.
Mr Charlton: It is just not happening at the moment.
Ms Whistance-Smith: That is right.
Mr Charlton: My second question relates to all of that, because my sense is, and you can correct me if I am wrong, that although we have now identified this as a problem and we are working to develop a strategy, until now at least the purple loosestrife has not been seen as being as critical a problem as the zebra mussel one we have been talking about. It has set on very quickly and it has had a lot of publicity and it has been escalated as a priority topic very quickly. The purple loosestrife obviously has been around for a long time and we are only now starting to recognize it as a problem in terms of its priority.
On the other hand, we have over the past 20 years identified our wetlands as extremely sensitive and important parts of our ecosystem in this province, and it seems to me that as a priority the protection of our wetlands has to be very high on the list. Is it the view of those who are working in the working group to develop a strategy to try to upgrade the importance of the purple loosestrife as an issue that requires high priority and intensive attention?
Ms Whistance-Smith: I cannot speak for each of the members of the working group, but the fact that this group was struck and is a co-operative group, a partnership of all these interested parties, I would think that there is some feeling we should be doing something and doing something fairly quickly. But the plant has been around, as you point out, for quite a long time. It has only started to take off in the last 30 years or so, I gather, and only really coming to our attention in the last few years, the amount of it around. So it is just one of these things that we have to deal with. As you also say, our wetlands are so precious to us and we are spending a lot of money in that area, so we want to be able to protect them from being invaded and being taken over by this species.
Mr Charlton: Maybe the ADM is in a better position to respond to the question of the priority of the issue in terms of the overall importance of the wetlands in Ontario.
Dr Balsillie: Certainly. The wetlands have become a focal point of discussion over the last little while and we were coming forward, I guess, once again, with the revisions to the wetland policy. We are looking to a very strong protection policy for the wetlands within the province. As the purple loosestrife impinges on those wetlands and if they are going to be something which is going to take over and change those wetlands so that they are no longer the same sort of environment that we are dealing with now in those wetlands, then certainly we are going to be looking to some way of trying to control them.
The difficulty we see is that some of the fixes are just as bad as the loosestrife itself. In other words, you do not want to go in and spray the wetland, because the impacts on the wetland from Roundup or 2,4-D, or whatever, could be as bad as the loosestrife itself. This is why we are looking to something such as the US approach. where we may be able to introduce a biological control which would be compatible with a natural wetland strategy, which would help us out considerably. The problem with that is that with the timing it may be too far down the road. On the other hand, you do not want to rush something like introducing three species of insects, because you may introduce three species of insects that are worse than the loosestrife.
Mr Charlton: I agree. Maybe I can short-circuit the answers here just by saying I took it from the presentation that we were not going to get all the answers as to what the preferred solution in Ontario would be today. I guess what I am trying to get out of you is --
Dr Balsillie: Yes, it is a priority.
Mr Charlton: -- a sense of the priority this is going to get in terms of finding that solution.
Dr Balsillie: Yes. We will be there.
Mr Ramsay: I just want to get a point of clarification. I believe in the introduction of this presentation it was pointed out there would be, as we have had the presentation on zebra mussels and loosestrife, questions on those and then I imagine there is some time. I do not know if you have any other presentation of a general nature of invasive species, but I believe then we were going to have a little bit of a discussion in general on invasive species.
The Chair: My understanding is that they have addressed them, I think, more in two specific areas. We have a small amount of time. If they wish to provide some more insight in terms of a general strategy, certainly they can do so, but we are limited in time.
Mr Ramsay: I have a question. To me the history of the MNR has been that the ministry has been quite enthusiastic in the past about the idea of introducing and reintroducing species into the environment here. To be fair, I think that was a direct reflection on the culture out there and our thinking in regard to the environment. Obviously, the thinking of the general population has changed dramatically in the last 10 years and maybe even more so in the last couple of years.
I was wondering, with the battles we are now undertaking with these involuntary invasions of these species that we have been discussing today, if that has changed at all the ministry's thinking of our voluntary introductions and potential introductions of species into the environment.
Dr Balsillie: You have made the clear distinction between voluntary introductions and invasions and that is the way we look at it ourselves. Introductions are controlled by either the Game and Fish Act or the federal Fisheries Act and there are quarantine requirements and all sorts of restrictions and controls in those areas.
In terms of things which we would like to introduce or reintroduce into the environment, we are looking very closely at that. We are coming forward in the not-too-distant future with a series of amendments to the Game and Fish Act which will control much more closely introductions and also things like game farming and other activities in that area, so that we do have better control on disease, so we do have better control on animals and birds and other things not getting free into the environment which could then cause us difficulties.
On the other hand, invasions are something we have very little or no control over and they usually arrive by some sort of manner over which we have no control. So things like ballast water, which should be exchanged at sea, are beyond our jurisdiction, things such as importing logs on which insects become free to fly around, or wood material which comes in with termites in it.
It is very hard to try to control all of those. We find ourselves almost always in these situations in a reactive mode, to try to then understand what is going on, look at the distribution and spread, do some research on the control, then move into the area and try to stem the damage and do that type of activity. So the two of them are very distinctive and I think in the past we have won some and lost some.
On the sea lamprey, I think our record is not too bad in terms of trying to control that, get rid of it and reintroduce, once again, some of the trout and salmon species into the system. On the other hand, something like Dutch elm disease only reached its natural level of control, except for a very few trees which were highly protected with a lot of spray. We did not win the Dutch elm disease. The white elms are essentially few and far between nowadays.
On the one hand we are trying to move to control introductions. On the other hand, with invasions it is a backward fight.
Mr Ramsay: Has our thinking progressed to the point where maybe we would now question the idea of introductions at all, that maybe we should not be tampering with the environment at all?
Dr Balsillie: I think it is a fair statement. We are examining whether we should be putting certain species of fish into the system or whatever. We are looking at that. You know, you only have to turn on the TV on Sunday and watch the fisherman's show and he says, "Now if the Ministry of Natural Resources only got its act together and put lake trout in here instead of the backcross." So those messages are certainly being heard.
The Chair: Any further questions? Thank you very much. We appreciate your spending this extended amount of time with us and you have provided a lot of very good information to the committee. That is the last scheduled witness for the day. We will recess until 10 am tomorrow morning.
The committee adjourned at 1603.