The Lake Champlain Basin Program was created as part of the Lake Champlain Special Designation Act of1990 to work with partners in Vermont, New York, Quebec, and U.S. and Canadian agencies to protect the lake and its watershed.
Part of its work is to coordinate funding for invasive species management and protection. There are currently more than 50 invasive species in its waters and another poised to enter the lake could cause a severe disruption to current fish populations.
Lake Champlain Basin Program Director Eric Howe tells WAMC North Country Bureau Chief Pat Bradley they and other groups are closely monitoring the location and migration of the Round Goby as it enters the canal system leading into the southern end of Lake Champlain.
We have been coordinating meetings almost weekly since probably mid to late April to make sure that everybody's on the same page, everybody understands what is happening, this current status of Round Goby, where it is and what the next steps for management perspective might be in the canal system if it does advance beyond where it is now. We've been fortunate in that the monitoring that's been happening for Round Goby in the Champlain Canal has not found Round Goby north of Lock One, which is in the Troy area. That's been one of the major roles for the Basin Program in this is to sort of sound the alarm, make sure everybody hears the alarm, and understands the potential impacts on Lake Champlain if Round Goby does invade Lake Champlain, and perhaps more importantly, work to make sure it doesn't get into Lake Champlain.
Eric Howe, there are other invasive species in Lake Champlain and it seems every few years we hear about a new one. And the Round Goby appears to be the latest one. But it seems like with the Round Goby there's a bit more of a dire sensibility towards it. Why is that?
Yeah, there's a couple of reasons that we have this dire sense to keeping Round Goby out of Lake Champlain. And one is that this invasive fish can have very significant ecological impacts on the lake, in the neighborhood of what zebra mussel did to Lake Champlain back in the early 1990s. In my mind there's like these different tiers of invasive species. Some have major impacts and others maybe not so much. But Round Goby has the potential to be a significant impact, ecological impact, to Lake Champlain and economic also. Research has shown that Round Goby can have a detrimental impact on the bass fishery. Which may be contradictory to what most people understand about Round Goby, which is that small mouth bass will feed on Round Goby and get very large. The bass get very large. But what will happen is the Round Goby are voracious eaters of bass eggs and lake trout eggs and other fish eggs. And eventually the Round Goby will win. And they'll consume most of the bass, many of the bass eggs. And you may have slightly larger bass but there's going to be fewer of them. Right now we have, Lake Champlain has, a very strong bass fishery. If you talk to the folks that run the Bass Masters tournaments and all that on Lake Champlain this is one of the top 10 or so bass lakes in the country, I think. So that's one reason. And the other reason that this is drawing so much attention, that we're bringing so much attention to this potential invasion, is that this is one of those rare occasions where we know what the source is. We know that Round Goby is in the Hudson River down near Albany. We know that it can swim on its own through the canal if it's able to or if the locks are open. And so we can actually point to this: hey, this is your source right here. And some people will say well sure it could be introduced by people who dump their bait buckets illegally. Yes, that's definitely a source. But the closer it gets the greater the risk of invasion obviously and the greater the risk of other sources of introduction will increase too.
Everybody is also pointing to the potential incursion of the Round Goby from the Champlain Canal at the south end of Lake Champlain. But you and the folks that you provide grants to that study the lake and study invasives have also been looking at the incursion of the Round Goby from the north for an even longer period of time. What's going on there and why isn't it in the same, as we mentioned earlier, dire predicament from the north?
So yes that is true. And so Round Goby has been in the St. Lawrence River for a long time and the fish has worked its way up the Richelieu, which is the outlet of Lake Champlain, to the first dam which has a lock on it in the Chambly Canal system which allows boats to traverse from Lake Champlain down to Montreal or vice versa. But it stayed there. It stayed at the St. Ours dam for at least a decade anyway, if not more, and it hasn't been found any farther upstream or farther south or closer to Lake Champlain. So there could be just more flow and more current that prevents it from moving upstream. But then that's still quite a ways away from Lake Champlain. And the Round Goby population in New York and Troy is much closer geographically. It has a shorter distance to travel. And the risk it just seems much greater coming from that direction now than from the north. There's still a risk coming from upstream from the Richelieu River. And the province of Quebec is monitoring the length of the Richelieu River very frequently at least monthly if not more frequently than that for Round Goby.
And for people who may get confused Lake Champlain flows north.
Yes, yes. That is definitely something to remember. Lake Champlain flows north through the Richelieu River and up towards Montreal.
Speaking of Lake Champlain in general, this year is the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act. What's your assessment of Lake Champlain's water quality over the past five decades and how it may have changed or not changed?
That is a great question. And so we, the Basin Program is working actually on, I'm kind of spilling the beans here a little bit on one of our side projects we're working on. But we're working on creating a retrospective State of the Lake report. The Basin Program publishes a State of the Lake report every three years on the current condition of Lake Champlain. And for this year we will, it's not going to be the full publication that we do for our typical State of the Lake report. But we have worked with some groups to look at how the lake was, what the conditions of the lake were back in 1952, or 72, sorry. And we're going to publish like a story map or something of the condition of the lake in 1972. So people can kind of get that perspective: like what was happening in 1972 in Lake Champlain or in that general timeframe anyway. And that's when the wastewater treatment systems were just coming online. And so there was, you know, trying to deal with raw sewage going straight into the lake all of the time not just during combined sewer overflows like we have now. Invasive species were just starting to arrive. So then, you know, there's some good and bad things over the last 50 years. We've had a lot of invasive species make their way into Lake Champlain. But we've also made a lot of improvements and particularly in the wastewater treatment industry. So there has been some ups and downs. But I can say I think with relative confidence if the Clean Water Act were not passed in 1972 this lake would be a very different lake than what it is that people enjoy today.
The Round Goby is native to the Caspian and Black Seas. The fish was first detected in the U.S. in Michigan’s St. Clair River, a part of the Great Lakes Waterway system, in the 1990’s and has been migrating east.
