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[water trickling]
[men laughing]
[narrator] Chicago sits on the shore of Lake Michigan,
one of the five Great Lakes.
A restaurant a short walk from the lakefront
began serving signature seafood dishes in the 1940s.
[Stephen] Shaw's gets a lot of tourist business from around the country.
We've always served lake fish, both whitefish and perch.
There you go.
[Stephen] We have two whitefish here.
These come from Lake Superior.
And then over here
are perch fillets, yellow lake perch out of Lake Erie.
I'd love someday to see lake trout back on our menu,
I don't know if that'll ever happen.
The Great Lakes have a natural organizing force for the people of the region.
They touch on eight states and two Canadian provinces.
The vastness of them is really hard to convey.
When you stand on the shore of one, it certainly doesn't feel like a lake.
They're very, very important to our economy.
The fact that we've got the world's largest source of clean fresh water.
That's why you can have tens of millions of people living around the Great Lakes.
The Great Lakes are really in our DNA.
One out of five jobs is related to water.
Kids grow up and they have that memory.
They associate it with their time and their summers
with their family on the shores of
Lake Michigan or Lake Huron, whatever is their lake.
And fishing is an integral part of that.
The fish that swim in the water
are part of the lifeblood of the Great Lakes region.
The fishery in the Great Lakes is unique.
This is a way of connecting son and daughter to dad, mom.
[narrator] Great Lakes fishing is first described in documents dating to the 17th century,
when European explorers first saw Indigenous people
catch tremendous quantities of fish.
We have a relationship with fish.
We survive because of these relationships.
And these relationships we can think of them with fish,
but also with the water, with the air, with the medicine plants.
All of creation.
So to us, the importance of fishing
is part of that full relationship with the natural world.
[narrator] For most of history, people simply assumed that the Great Lakes
were so vast and packed with fish
that there would always be plenty to catch.
But by the 1950s, everything had changed.
The fish most important to people were nearly gone.
The fish disappeared.
No one could explain it, let alone fix it.
Whether you were in Lake Ontario, or Lake Superior,
or everywhere in between, it was dire.
From small towns up to major cities,
it was people's livelihoods.
[narrator] Short on hope, some remarkable people tackled the mystery.
Their odd discovery still menaces the Great Lakes today.
Their battle against it dramatically changed
how people from all walks of life connect with these freshwater seas.
[dramatic theme music]
[narrator] People fish the Great Lakes for different reasons.
[Kent] Recreational fishing, commercial fishing, and subsistence fishing
are three very different types of fishing, and all of them are incredibly important
to both the history and current realities
of the Great Lakes.
[narrator] People began fishing to survive long before the first Europeans arrived.
The Anishinaabe people, or the Chippewa,
bands that are in the area,
were a nomadic people.
For subsistence, they would go out from shore and fish.
Along the shores of Lake Superior,
they would harvest primarily in the fall
when the whitefish or the lake trout would come in to spawn.
The subsistence fishery provides food to the family.
It's very important.
Subsistence fishing is fishing for survival.
Sport fishing is more for personal enjoyment.
[narrator] From the 16th century on,
European immigrants poured into the Great Lakes region,
and many brought a passion for fishing.
Freshwater fishing had been a recreational pastime
in Europe for centuries,
and a status symbol among elites
who fished for salmon, trout,
whitefish, and other freshwater varieties.
Long before Columbus stumbled upon the New World,
overfishing threatened lakes and rivers across Europe,
and nobles blocked access to prime fishing spots.
Things only worsened.
When the first European military officers
and entrepreneurs arrived in the Great Lakes region,
they found its tremendous abundance
of freshwater brimming with fish species
they favored back home.
One type of fish proved especially enticing.
Each fall, Atlantic salmon leave the open sea
to spawn in rivers from Scandinavia to Spain,
and anglers have stocked them for centuries.
They also move up the St. Lawrence River into Lake Ontario,
crowding into tributary rivers to spawn.
As the European immigrant population on its shores grew,
more and more people targeted them.
By one account, the haul on the North Shore in 1820
was so plentiful that,
[narrator] The impressive hauls drew other immigrants
to Lake Ontario, who launched a boom in another type of fishing.
[Frank] Great Lakes commercial fishing, I would say it's always been here.
We'd always been getting fish that we traded with each other,
that we traded with other people.
Fishing was part of our economy.
Not a cash economy, necessarily,
but certainly an economy of barter and trade.
Non-native people came into the area.
They decided to figure out how they could capitalize on it.
From the time of European settlement in the region,
the commercial fishery was also a major component of the economy.
It's one reason why people came to the region.
[Kent] Salmon was fished heavily in Lake Ontario.
They would use seine nets along the shoreline,
across shore and bay areas of the lakes.
[narrator] As cities expanded,
spawning streams were dammed to power gristmills and sawmills.
And commercial fishing boomed with the swelling population.
So people used bigger and bigger nets,
capable of snaring scores of fish at a time.
So these were fishing operations that reached back deeply,
deeply into the colonial period.
And the colonial period is ripe with stories of dam building
and water diversions and innumerable environmental changes
that absolutely devastated fish populations.
[narrator] By 1860, Lake Ontario's Atlantic salmon were gone.
Commercial fishermen at the time,
simply looked at the lake as a bounty.
They had never seen freshwater resources
of the size and breadth of the Great Lakes,
and they were viewed as an inexhaustible resource.
[narrator] By the time Lake Ontario's Atlantic salmon fishery collapsed,
European immigrants fished every Great Lake.
The commercial fishing industry, during the 19th and 20th century,
was significant and embedded throughout the Great Lakes.
Commercial fishing was intricately tied
to the development of the entire Great Lakes region as we know it today.
[narrator] Nowhere compared to Lake Erie.
It sat at the heart of America's industrial boom.
Smelters, refineries, and factories packed the waterfronts
of its lake-shore cities,
transforming raw materials into products
bound for East Coast cities and Europe.
Workers from around the world flooded into the region.
And commercial fishing boomed to help feed the exploding population.
At the dawn of the 20th century,
more than 100 million pounds of fish were hauled from
Lake Erie's shallow depths each year.
The commercial fishery of Lake Erie targeted a variety of fish species,
but most important to that commercial fishery was lake herring.
[Cory] They were actually ciscoes, or chorogonus artidae.
The reason why they got the name herring is because
in the Atlantic Ocean there's a native herring species that's marine,
or salt water, and they have a similar role that they play
as the herring in the Great Lakes,
even though they're entirely different species.
The fishing industries around Lake Erie were built on lake herring.
The shipping of fish, the processing of fish...
It allowed cities to be built near the water, both in Ontario and the U.S.
When the Lake Erie cisco fishery is at its height,
the commercial fishing industry is experiencing
a lot of the same developments
that are taking place in manufacturing.
Schooners are becoming fish tugs.
Nets aren't being pulled out of the water by hand anymore.
There are steam lifters.
You have these technologies emerging,
and you have people learning to use these technologies
in a very heavily extractive way.
Lake Erie is much more industrialized, much more capitalized,
and much more resource-intensive
than the commercial fishery was in Lake Ontario.
It's the same industry with nicer mechanics.
[narrator] In 1924, more than 32 million pounds of herring
were hauled from Lake Erie.
A year later, the catch crashed
to little more than 5 million pounds and kept falling.
Everyone blamed everyone else.
No one had any idea what happened to these fish.
All of a sudden, there were no fish for those fishermen to catch.
And this had huge ramifications, well, for the economy.
It was really an impetus for full-scale Great Lakes science to begin.
Science into those fisheries and what was going on.
We see a real investment, particularly on the U.S. side,
from the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries,
clearly driven by the economic importance and value of the fishery.
Otherwise, this investment would not have been made.
[narrator] The Bureau of Fisheries opened a research laboratory
in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Its first director was the fisheries biologist,
John Van Oosten.
He started out more or less as a troubleshooter
for complaints that fishermen had about particular stocks.
He really tried to find out what was causing grief to the fishermen
and to correct it.
[narrator] Lab scientists began to investigate a range of potential causes,
from toxic dumping by the region's factories and chemical plants
to whether fishing nets killed too many small fish
before they reached reproductive age.
While scientists focused on Lake Erie,
the markets moved their focus to the upper lakes,
Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Superior.
The commercial operations were widespread throughout the Great Lakes.
As you moved up the lakes, you moved more into whitefish and lake trout.
[narrator] Lake trout are the natural top-level predator
that once ruled all the Great Lakes.
The largest ever taken weighed 102 pounds.
The lake trout's probably the most important
species of fish in the Great Lakes.
They were a great commercial fish.
They're large, they yield a lot of flesh,
they're a really good return on investment for fishermen.
It was just too easy to throw a net in the water, and pull money out.
That was far too easy.
[narrator] Mark Rude's family came to Minnesota from Norway
and began fishing Lake Superior a century ago.
[Mark] By the time I was 12 years old,
I was involved with going out on the lake
and working with the boats, maybe helping to clean fish.
By the time I was 14, I was taking one of the boats
and going out and doing the nets myself.
Lake trout were what everybody was looking for.
Way back in the old days
why, fat lake trout, or as they're called up there,
siscowets, were desired.
[narrator] Ralph Wilcox grew up fishing Lake Superior's Whitefish Bay.
They got a lot of names for them.
They're deepwater trout, they're siscowets,
they're a lot of things, you know, fat trout.
There's about 10 or 12 different varieties
Grandpa and Dad used to say out there.
It depends on your habitat where you catch them.
[Mark] They'd all look alike, when you put your nets in a particular area.
You move your nets a little ways away,
now you're liable to get fish that looked entirely different, still lake trout.
[narrator] Manitoulin Island sits across Lake Huron's North Channel
from the rest of Ontario.
George Purvis' family launched a commercial fishing business here
five generations ago.
[George] We started here in the late 1800s.
The fish were mainly lake trout.
From the early 1900s, where I have records,
the catch of lake trout was approximately
350,000 to 450,000 pound a year.
A couple of times it made 500,000 pound.
[narrator] Most towns on Lake Huron's shores date to the logging era
when timber companies built lakeside sawmills to process and ship white pine
from the forests covering the region.
[sawing]
When the big cut or the harvesting of timber,
which was central to that northern part of the Midwest,
depleted the resources and moved out of the area
and many of those companies relocated to the south,
the commercial fishing industry remained
a viable economic alternative for people
that needed work and resources in the region.
My Grandmother Mertz, who lived in Rogers City,
owned part of the fishery and her sons,
Clarence, Lawrence, and Louis,
my father, fished trap nets.
My dad was fishing down in the Harbor Beach area
in 1934 when he drowned.
And then my mother took over the fishing business.
My mother had no babysitter.
I grew up on that boat 'cause she worked on the boat
as well as my sister.
We had eight deep trap nets that we put in the straits here.
We used to catch a lot of trout.
[narrator] Lake Huron's fish weren't immune to problems.
Lake Trout and all three of the upper Great Lakes
underwent long-term declines.
The trajectory of decline steepened dramatically.
Stock collapses reached a point where the commercial fishermen
basically had to either quit or move.
Different types of fishermen are fishing
different types of gear, and it's their fault.
It's not my fault.
But then they also start talking to their legislators,
you know, their members of parliament
or their representatives, and say,
"Hey, you know, our entire community
is based on this fishery.
If we don't do something about it, it's going to disappear."
[narrator] On the U.S. side, those politicians looked to John Van Oosten
and the Ann Arbor Federal Fisheries Lab for answers.
As the Lake Huron fisheries declined toward collapse,
fisheries biologists led by John Van Oosten recognized
that they were seeing a replay of population declines
that had already taken place in Lake Erie and earlier in Lake Ontario.
[Jennifer] Van Oosten's being paid by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries.
He's not really looking at fish for fish's sake
and the ecosystem, but he's really trying to get to the bottom of what
is happening to these valuable species
and, you know, what can we do to
return them to their abundance and sustain them.
[narrator] Van Oosten knew the Lake Huron catch was declining,
but the sudden crash just didn't add up.
After all, Lake Huron was different from Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.
Far fewer dams blocked spawning streams,
and there were no major industrial cities on its shores
with factories heavily polluting the water.
Lumbering was the big industry on Lake Huron,
and floating logs downstream and across the lake
had destroyed spawning habitat.
But that wasn't anything new.
Like lakes Ontario and Erie,
overfishing was the most obvious culprit.
It finally led to direct involvement by federal, state,
and local political bodies to come
together and try to address the loss of these resources.
[Marc] There was a treaty proposed in 1946,
it gave regulatory power to a binational commission.
[Jennifer] Managing this binational resource means we have to think about things
like limiting the catch and the size of fish that you can take
and how many you can take and what gear you can use
and those are all sort of regulatory kinds of decisions.
John van Oosten believed strongly in regulations
and saw them as a way of maintaining
the financial viability of these fish stocks that were being overfished.
They then ran into the very organized political resistance
of the commercial fishing industries themselves.
Political and elected officials were not always in agreement,
especially after the New Deal when some were still you know chafing
from the great expansion of the federal government.
Cross-border regulations were not going to be issued.
Consistent regulations were not in the cards.
[narrator] As things went from bad to worse on Lake Huron,
word reached van Oosten about a curious development.
On a bright spring day,
some young people hiked to a waterfall on the Ocqueoc River
near Rogers City, Michigan.
They arrived to find their favorite swimming hole swarming
with strange eel-like creatures.
They hurried back to town and told a game warden what they saw.
The news reminded John van Oosten of another strange incident.
Alexander Crewe and his brothers lived on Lake Erie's Ontario shore.
On the morning of November 8th, 1921,
Crewe and his helper motored to one of several nets
he and his brothers left staked into the lake bottom.
As they filled box after box with whitefish,
something odd occurred.
They came across a truly bizarre creature.
None of them in the boat had ever seen anything like this.
Alexander Crewe lifted up the fish
with this creature attached,
ripped it off the fish,
and put it in a jar and sent it to the University of Toronto to be analyzed.
The creature was identified as Petromyzon marinus,
the sea lamprey,
a creature that's native to the Atlantic Ocean
and not supposed to be in the Great Lakes.
We have four species of native lamprey in the Great Lakes.
Sea lampreys are wildly different than our native lamprey species.
They grow two to three times the size of a native lamprey.
[narrator] Sea lamprey were known to be in Lake Ontario,
but Crewe caught the first one ever found in another Great Lake.
To understand how remarkable that was,
it helps to know something about Great Lakes geography.
The Great Lakes region holds one-fifth of Earth's surface freshwater.
The Great Lakes are really one big system
and arguably one big slow-motion river flowing out to the Atlantic Ocean.
[narrator] Rivers connect the Great Lakes.
The most famous landmark along a connecting waterway is Niagara Falls,
over which water from Lake Erie cascades almost 200 feet
en route to Lake Ontario.
Nature split the Great Lakes into two distinct aquatic ecosystems.
Fish and other aquatic creatures migrated freely
from Lake Superior to Lake Erie.
They also migrated between Lake Ontario and the Atlantic Ocean.
But Niagara Falls was an impassable barrier.
[Cory] Niagara Falls would have stopped anything from getting into Lake Erie.
Nothing could make it over those massive falls.
[narrator] At least before Alexander Crewe's odd catch.
Crewe caught his sea lamprey
200 miles upstream of Niagara Falls.
Despite the curious location, no one paid much attention to it.
The sea lamprey wasn't seen as being particularly dangerous
when it first appeared.
[narrator] Six years passed before another sea lamprey turned up in Lake Erie.
And this time latched onto a whitefish near Sandusky, Ohio in Lake Erie.
John Van Oosten himself went to confirm this sea lamprey sighting.
[narrator] He'd studied reports about damage they'd caused in Lake Ontario
and New York's Finger Lakes.
One report from 1897 called sea lamprey...
Having fastened itself, it rasps away with the saw-like teeth on its tongue
until it has worn through the thick skin or scales
of its victim.
Then it has nothing to do but to remain attached to the fish
and be carried around by it, sucking blood when it's hungry
and occasionally rasping away at its raw flesh,
making the hole deeper and deeper,
if its victim has any blood left.
Or if not, it seeks another fish.
They're very primitive, jawless fish that resemble eels.
But unlike eels, they don't have paired fins,
jaws, or bony skeletons.
Lampreys are native to the Atlantic Ocean.
They co-evolved there with much larger host-species,
attaching to hosts that are far larger than anything we have in the Great Lakes.
So, in the Atlantic Ocean, they act as parasites.
In fact, they're imperiled in the Atlantic Ocean.
In the Great Lakes, they are much larger than their hosts in a relevant sense.
And when they attach to the host,
they actually serve more as a predator than a parasite.
There were some individuals that were very alarmed at the start.
They were the ones that actually knew the most about the sea lamprey.
[narrator] John Van Oosten was one of them.
He knew that the swarming mass at the Ocqueoc Falls swimming hole
could spell catastrophe for the already struggling fishing families on Lake Huron.
But ten years had passed since he identified the Sandusky sea lamprey,
and no more had been reported until the previous year,
when a skipper walked into the Milwaukee Museum
carrying one attached to a Lake Michigan lake trout he'd caught.
As the fish swims,
logically you would think the next step for the invasion would be
through the Detroit River into Lake Huron
and maybe through the Straits of Mackinaw, around that area.
That is not at all what happened and it's quite strange.
The next lamprey that was detected was found all the way over
in Lake Michigan near Milwaukee.
It shocked everyone at the time,
and no one could explain how this jump happened.
[narrator] A museum biologist, T.E.B. Pope identified it
as the first sea lamprey found in a Great Lake
upstream of Lake Erie.
Pope alerted the noted ichthyologist Carl Hubbs
who helped him pen an article delivering an ominous warning.
[narrator] John Van Oosten asked the Michigan Department of Conservation
to have its game wardens look out for them in other streams.
Another squirming horde spotted near a cider mill
in Rochester, Michigan, 20 miles inland
from the nearest Great Lakes waterway,
confirmed his worst fears
that something alarming was underway.
As the wriggling creatures were spotted
in more and more tributaries,
fishing families began seeing a new kind of carnage.
The first sea lamprey that they saw here,
apparently they say they brought it to shore in 1934.
They played with it, thought this was a real oddity,
and didn't know what to think of this thing.
By 1944, the fish were dead on the bottom of the lake,
especially in the fall when they were spawning.
If you swept your nets a bit on the bottom when you're pulling them up,
it tugs and stinks so bad, you couldn't stand
to be on the boat from all the big fish laying on the bottom.
I was about seven when I saw
my first sea lamprey on a whitefish,
and I remember workers on the boat told me
that was going to be my job to take care of those,
and so I had the knife in my hand
and I cut that sea lamprey in about four or five pieces
before he threw it back in.
So that was that.
[narrator] The Michigan Department of Conservation
built a device on the Ocqueoc River to trap sea lamprey
and gauge the size of the spring spawning run there.
They caught over 3,400 spawning phase sea lampreys.
The Great Lakes Basin has thousands of tributaries,
so 3,400 sea lampreys in one small river like the Ocqueoc,
that's a huge red flag.
This was looking like a massive infestation for the Great Lakes.
[narrator] But why Lake Huron?
Two great lakes lie between
the sea lamprey's natural habitat,
the Atlantic Ocean, and Lake Huron.
Why didn't sea lamprey cause
a similar level of destruction there?
The sea lamprey needs access to high-quality water
upstream in every river where it spawns.
It was in Lake Ontario for quite a while,
did do a lot of damage initially.
Its spawning habitat was really depreciated.
If you look at old maps, you'll see that
every river had 10, 12, 15 mill dams on it.
The next lake it got in was Lake Erie.
A lot of the Lake Erie streams, they were polluted.
They were marginal for the sea lamprey
to really expand its population.
The lake trout, which was the primary prey,
was already essentially gone from Lake Erie.
It exploded in Lake Huron next.
[narrator] In 1940, more than 2,726,000 pounds
of lake trout were caught in Lake Huron and Georgian Bay.
By 1946, the catch had dropped
to only 760,000 pounds and kept falling.
By 1944, the lake trout were pretty well gone,
and then we started fishing whitefish on a regular basis
to try to make a go of it.
When we fished out here, especially in the fall,
we would get a washtub full of lamprey every day
attached to the whitefish, and it was really bad.
We would just see all the fish on the bottom of the lake dead
with the lamprey marks on them and it was pretty obvious what was gonna happen,
that it wasn't going to be only a matter of time.
The late 1940s is when we start seeing
lamprey mentioned at congressional hearings and parliamentary debates.
[narrator] Fred Bradley, the congressman representing Rogers City, Michigan,
persuaded his colleagues to hold a hearing about the catastrophe
devastating Great Lakes commercial fishing.
The head of the Michigan Fish Producers Association
testified before the House Committee.
Even some of the most diehard anti New Deal-ers out there
would say in the congressional hearings
that there is no way we're gonna tackle the lamprey problem
until we work across borders
and we have the federal government
with its resources step in to deal with the problem.
[narrator] The hearings convinced Congress
to fund research on ways to control sea lamprey in the Great Lakes.
The allocation was a mere $20,000 per year for 10 years,
the equivalent of about 270,000 per year in current dollars.
John Van Oosten's federal lab led the effort.
Van Oosten understood that no one had a clue
about how to control sea lamprey, and that had to change.
He needed someone tenacious with innovative research skills
and a dogged attention to detail
to discover their vulnerabilities.
A University of Michigan graduate student caught Van Oosten's attention.
Vernon Applegate grew up in Queens, New York,
and served in the army during World War II.
His mil-spec discipline and determination
impressed Van Oosten who offered him
the chance to earn his PhD
by developing the intel needed to wage war on sea lamprey.
Vern Applegate is a big part of this story.
He's a pioneer researcher in the sea lamprey world.
[narrator] Van Oosten sent Applegate to Rogers City
to set up shop at a former Depression-era
Civilian Conservation Corps camp
with an earshot of the Ocqueoc River.
He tapped its ready supply of sea lamprey
to launch the most detailed study ever made
on the animal's lifecycle.
Vern Applegate was a relentless researcher
and a hard worker.
It was actually said he lived on cigarettes and coffee.
[narrator] He applied a military mindset to his new mission.
[narrator] Applegate assembled a team of conservation workers and locals.
Cliff Kortman hired on as a handyman.
[Clifford] I come here and asked for a job and Dr. Applegate gave me a job.
So I stayed on for 33 years.
[narrator] Over the next three years,
Applegate's team measured the sea lamprey invasion
and studied the organism's behavior and spawning streams.
In December 1949, Applegate delivered an alarming report.
Where the first Ocqueoc River weir
caught 3,466 adult sea lamprey migrating upstream,
five years later, new weirs there trapped more than 24,000.
[narrator] Commercial fishing families were only too aware.
[George] When the sea lamprey come along,
we were running two gill net tugs and a trap net operation.
As the fish got fewer and fewer,
we had to go down to one boat, lay off two crews.
We stopped fishing entirely in the mid-'50s.
Whole operations of commercial fishing boats moved
through the straits into Lake Michigan,
and then they contributed
to an already serious decline there
by adding even more fishing effort
and mortality onto those stocks.
And then some of the fishing operations
moved over to Lake Superior.
[narrator] Stuart Sivertson's family
was already well established there.
My grandfather came here with two brothers in 1892.
He came to Duluth emigrating from Norway.
He was in it for good.
I don't think he ever did anything other than fishing.
And they learned about opportunities at Isle Royale
and he raised children who wound up
getting involved in the commercial fishing industry.
They managed to garner a fairly large fraction
of the catch from Isle Royale.
We first heard about the lamprey
at Isle Royale in the 1940s.
This terrible thing had happened in Lake Michigan
where the annual catches of lake trout
had gone from 6 million pounds annually to 400 pounds
within a stretch of about three years,
[newsreel] A catastrophe has been visited
upon these fisheries by the invasion
of a voracious marine predator.
Commercial catches diminished as this parasite
multiplied in unbelievable numbers.
And then tragically and abruptly,
the lake trout fisheries of Lakes Huron and Michigan
collapsed completely as the fish all but disappeared
from the fishermen's nets.
We were warned by fishermen from down on the lower lakes.
I remember, as a youngster, seeing a magazine.
It was Stag magazine that had a picture
of a fellow staggering out of the waters of Lake Michigan
with lampreys hanging on his chest
and a horrified look on his face.
[narrator] Newspapers dubbed sea lamprey
"Dracula of the Lakes," spreading the hysteria.
[Stuart] The question was, is this problem gonna hit us
here in Lake Superior?
We were at a loss as to what we were going to do.
[narrator] Vernon Applegate presented
his doctoral dissertation in 1950,
providing the first scientific description
of the sea lamprey's remarkable life cycle
in the Great Lakes.
It all begins when lake water warms in the spring
and adult sea lampreys venture from deep open water
to gather near shore, where streams drain the land.
They anxiously roam there until the water warms
to just the right temperature,
signaling optimum conditions for procreation.
Then, under the cover of darkness, the lampreys move inland,
squirming their way upstream in search
of suitable river beds where they spend days building nests.
Once all is ready, males and females move onto the nests
and intertwine in wriggling embraces that mix male sperm
with tens of thousands of eggs released by each female.
Their writhing kicks up small pebbles
and sand grains from the nest
to which a sticky substance on each egg's surface adheres.
The pebbles and sand carry each egg
back into the nest, anchoring them there.
Lamprey repeat their mating dances
again and again over the course of a day or two.
Then with nothing left to give, they die.
Within two weeks, hatchlings appear.
Lamprey larvae are called ammocoetes.
The lampreys live as harmless larvae
in the tributaries
and filter microscopic organisms from the water as feed
and grow from almost microscopic size
up to about five to six inches.
[Cory] You'd never know they're there,
but hundreds of thousands of larval sea lamprey
can live under the muck in an infested river.
[narrator] After about four years, ammocoetes metamorphose
into free-swimming juveniles called transformers.
Their mouths become spiny fish clamps,
and their digestive tracts convert to handle different food.
When these changes complete,
transformers migrate to open water
and enter what Vern Applegate called the lake phase.
They're now fish-seeking missiles,
ready to spend up to 18 months latching onto fish
and draining them of their bodily fluids.
Each lamprey can destroy 40 pounds of fish
in about 12 to 18 months while they're out there feeding in the Great Lakes.
So in a very short period of time,
you can have huge numbers of lamprey
and each lamprey is killing or devastating
a large amount of fish.
[narrator] After serving their destructive
term of gluttony, lamprey answer nature's springtime call
to move shoreward and await the water temperature
green light to head into streams
and pass the torch to a new generation.
Vern Applegate's studies learning the natural history
of the sea lamprey to look for the points in the life cycle
where control could be feasible, that was critical.
[narrator] When Applegate delivered his dissertation,
few lake trout remained in Lake Huron and Lake Michigan.
[newsreel] Economic losses have been severe.
On Lakes Huron and Michigan,
entire fleets have been tied up.
Equipment and buildings have been abandoned to the elements.
[narrator] How did such a destructive invader get past Niagara Falls?
Most blame the Welland Canal, which bypasses the falls,
lifting ocean-going vessels more than 200 feet
from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie.
The canal opened for shipping in 1829,
so if it's to blame, why did almost a century pass
before Alexander Crewe caught the first sea Lamprey
known to have entered Lake Erie?
Today's Welland Canal is not the first configuration.
The Welland Canal was not much more
than a glorified ditch in the 1800s,
and it was fed from a water source
in the middle of the Niagara Escarpment
and created the Welland Canal channel that split two ways,
so there was no unified flow
through the canal from Lake Erie into Lake Ontario.
[narrator] When the canal was upgraded
to handle larger vessels, the original water source
proved incapable of providing the increased flow required.
Engineers tapped Lake Erie,
whose water began flowing downstream
through the entire canal.
For sea lamprey, that made all the difference.
Sea lampreys are programmed adaptively
to move into rivers through something called positive rheotaxis.
What a lamprey does is feels the current with its face
and it instinctively swims upstream.
After the turn of the century, when that Welland Canal was modified, deepened,
and began to flow from Lake Erie directly into Lake Ontario,
we essentially turned that canal into one giant river.
Sea lampreys moved through into Lake Erie
and just continued right upstream
through connecting channels from lake to lake
and up the thousands of tributaries
that feed those Great Lakes.
[narrator] The economic devastation
spurred the US Congress to approve emergency funds
to expand the fight against sea lamprey.
A lot more changed that year.
John Van Oosten retired
and turned the Ann Arbor Federal Lab over to James Moffet,
who shifted focus from studying sea lamprey
to finding ways to eradicate them.
He hired Applegate to lead the assault
and laid claim to an abandoned US lifesaving service
lifeboat station on Lake Huron's Hammond Bay,
near the mouth of the Ocqueoc River,
where Applegate devised a new battle plan.
Prevention of spawning through the blocking of the stream,
the destruction of larva lampreys
before they emerge from the mud and silt flats,
and the destruction of the newly transformed migrants
on their way to the lake.
Of the three approaches, the first
and third appear to offer the greatest promise.
[narrator] He focused on those.
When they found a stream teaming with lamprey larvae
they built barriers there.
[Bob] They started mechanical weirs first,
fences across the stream,
and then the cart worked on those fences
and they were stopping the lamprey.
[Everett] All it would take would one breakdown,
and if it occurred during a spawning run,
you had a spawning population of lampreys upstream.
[narrator] Mechanical barriers came up short,
so Applegate tried something else.
[Cory] These were the electrified barriers.
It was his big ticket idea, almost like a silver bullet
that he thought was gonna save the Great Lakes fisheries.
[narrator] Crews strung gauntlets of electrodes
from bank to bank powered by a gas generator.
[Cory] There was a world of problems with these.
That electrified field wasn't selective against any type
of fish or animal whatsoever.
Anything that got into that electrical current
would be shocked and killed.
They quickly realized that these were not
gonna be the silver bullet they thought they were gonna be.
[narrator] Mechanical or electrical barriers
didn't validate Applegate's first strategy,
so he devised versions to test the third.
But catching transforming lamprey,
moving from streams to the lake didn't work either.
Three years in, commercial fishing on four of the five
Great Lakes was all but dead,
and Applegate still had no way to stop sea lamprey.
Some in Congress grumbled
that it was a hopeless waste of money,
but James Moffet refused to surrender.
Moffet shifted focus away from blocking those migrating
adult sea lampreys and over to the larval sea lampreys
that were living burrowed in the stream.
At the time, there was a lot
of new technologies coming forth,
especially in the chemistry world.
There had been chemicals used for pest species,
things like controlling mosquitoes
or controlling toxic invasive plants.
But really nothing had ever been discovered
to selectively kill a vertebrate animal before.
[narrator] Moffet backed the research
of a University of Michigan doctoral student
named Philip Sawyer to try something new.
He set up shop at Hammond Bay.
They helped him set up a little bioassay station all to himself.
What Philip Sawyer did was to look at
all kinds of groups of chemicals
that might have selective toxicity to lampreys.
He found that some of the chemicals he was testing
were killing lamprey before the other creatures in his jars,
and he also noticed that they had this weird nitrophenol group to them.
So he was starting to put together these patterns.
[narrator] Sawyer moved to the East coast after earning his doctorate,
but his work with chemicals showed promise.
So Moffet and Applegate transformed Hammond Bay
into a full-blown chemical research lab.
It was a tremendous long shot to try to find this chemical
that would selectively kill sea lamprey without harming
other aquatic animals and organisms in the stream.
It also couldn't harm animals that drink from those streams.
It couldn't interfere with crop irrigation,
human activity in those streams, people swimming.
It had to be completely safe
and selective to killing sea lamprey.
[narrator] They followed Philip Sawyer's lead
using 10-liter glass jars.
[Clifford] They would fill 'em with five liters of water.
I'd weigh up the chemical and put in each jar,
and we'd put two larvae and two fish in each one,
and then every hour on the hour, we took the observation
and most of the time, it'd kill the fish it didn't kill the sea lamprey.
We simply tested any chemical that would dissolve in water.
[narrator] Chemical after chemical was tested,
but 1953 ended without reason for hope.
After more grueling work, 1954 did, too.
1955 was more of the same.
The number of chemicals tested climbed into the thousands.
Meanwhile, lake trout fishing
was officially declared dead on lakes Michigan and Huron,
and Lake Superior showed troubling signs.
Grandfather and his brother and my dad
fished long lines for Lake Trout.
Lampreys started showing up and all of a sudden the trout
that you were getting up were so ate up
that buyers in Detroit, Chicago where they would ship
most of them, didn't want 'em all marked up like that.
It went downhill so fast just in a three or four year period
that you went from catching a ton or ton and a half
of lake trout in a day right down to
catching hardly nothing the next spring.
My mother and father would write regularly back
and forth when he was at Isle Royale.
It was the only communication available.
There was no telephone or radio at that time.
I remember seeing my mother crying one day
while she was reading a letter from my dad,
and I asked her what was wrong,
and she said, "The lamprey have reached Isle Royale."
It turned out to be the beginning of the end
of the Lake Trout fishery for many families at Isle Royale
and along the North Shore
and throughout all of Lake Superior.
[Marc] The fishery was collapsing.
The economic results were terrible,
and the condition of the resource was appalling.
There was no end in sight.
[narrator] Hammond Bay technicians soldiered on.
After nearly four years of frustrating work,
a Dow Chemical company product named Dowlap
finally showed promise.
The team tested it in a stream near the lab.
It killed nearly 96% of the sea lamprey
in the stream without harming any other organisms.
But it proved to only be effective
in really large concentrations.
So you just needed too much of it to get the job done.
[narrator] So Cliff Kortman weighed scores more chemicals
and lab technicians tested them in glass containers.
While Applegate and the Hammond Bay chemistry team
searched for a miracle, James Moffet worked on Congress.
He had help from commercial fishing industry leaders
and a growing number of legislators in Congress
and the Canadian Parliament.
In 1955, after years of stubborn resistance,
the United States Congress and Canadian Parliament
ratified a bilateral agreement
establishing the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.
The two nations formally joined forces to eradicate
or minimize sea lamprey populations
and ensure the maximum productivity
of fish of common concern to the two countries.
Though it really took 'til we were in pretty dire straits
to get sort of a milieu, or a time
where US and Canada could come together
on the Convention for Great Lakes Fisheries,
and even then, the fishery commission that was created
under that convention is not given regulatory authority.
They're given authority to manage sea lamprey populations,
but they don't have any authority over
managing any other fish.
[narrator] In 1957, five years into the search,
Cliff Kortman weighed another nitro-group compound
used to make color dyes
for the textile, print and paint industries.
[Cory] It surprised him.
Where Dowlap was killing sea lamprey
at a concentration of around 13 parts per million,
the new chemical was killing sea lamprey
at around two parts per million, so substantially less,
and it was significantly more selective
at killing those sea lamprey.
[narrator] Its name was a mouthful.
...so the Hammond Bay crew dubbed it TFM for short.
On May 14th, 1958, James Moffett and Vern Applegate
watched the first application of TFM
in Michigan's Mosquito River.
It gave off a vivid yellowish-green color
when it was applied to the river,
which made it easy to analyze
so that we knew what their concentrations were.
[narrator] They placed mesh cylinders
filled with sea-lamprey larvae downstream
to measure how the chemical's killing power
diminished as it traveled.
[Cory] Inside the cylinders,
all of the larval sea-lamprey were dead,
all the way downstream, so they knew right away
that they had something big going on here.
[narrator] The first test worked better than anticipated,
prompting a second on another Lake Superior tributary.
Again, it exceeded expectations.
The team applied TFM
to eight more Lake Superior tributaries that fall.
In 1959, a full decade after Vern Applegate began,
the strategy he assumed least promising,
attacking larvae in streams, looked like it might succeed.
And the Great Lakes Fishery Commission
approved an all-out assault.
Everyone focused on Lake Superior
at the beginning of sea lamprey control,
because lake trout had not disappeared completely.
There were remnant populations scattered around the lake,
unlike Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, where they were,
for all intents and purposes, were gone completely.
[narrator] Hammond Bay teams applied TFM to 28 streams
on the American side of Lake Superior...
While Canadian teams treated nine streams
on their side of the lake.
When winter ended the first round of TFM applications,
the Great Lakes Fishery Commission faced a decision.
Their impact on the sea lamprey population
couldn't be assessed for two years.
That's how long any larvae that survived the treatment
and transformed into adults would be in open water
before returning to the treated streams to spawn.
Should the Commission suspend treatments
until their effectiveness was confirmed?
Or should they continue the full-scale attack?
They forged ahead.
By the end of the following autumn,
American and Canadian teams applied TFM
to all Lake Superior tributaries
infested with sea lamprey larvae,
as well as some streams
flowing into Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.
The early results were far from encouraging.
Instead of dropping, the spawning run count
the following spring almost doubled.
They were still catching huge amounts
of migrating sea lampreys, and some chalked this up to,
"Well, maybe there are tributaries we don't know about yet.
reproduction that's happening in rivers that we're not in,"
others chalked it up to the fact
that we just aren't killing enough,
and this just wasn't gonna work.
[narrator] Undeterred, the Commission relied
on Moffett's and Applegate's assurances
that the story would be different the following year.
Eighteen months later, when the Great Lakes Fishery Commission
met at Ottawa, Ontario,
the future of Great Lakes fishing hung in the balance.
If hordes of adult sea lamprey had returned
to treated spawning streams again,
the 13-year battle to save Great Lakes fish
would be a failure...
And a fundamental aspect of life
deeply rooted in the history of the region
would likely be lost forever.
The Commission chairman took the microphone.
[narrator] TFM devastated the sea lamprey population.
And there were no reports of harm to people or animals.
The first spawning runs after the initial treatments
demonstrated, without a doubt,
that the lampreys had been reduced in significant numbers.
[narrator] TFM accomplished the Great Lakes Fishery Commission's first mission,
to control sea lamprey,
freeing it to focus on its second.
[Marc] Sea-lamprey control was the necessary first step
to restore the Great Lakes fishery.
Without lamprey control,
fish in the lakes would not have a fighting chance
to survive old enough to reproduce,
or to be caught by humans, or to lead a natural life in the system.
[narrator] Government-run fish hatcheries had been around since the 1800s,
and most people assumed that hatchery-raised fish
would restore things to how they were before sea lamprey arrived.
After sea lamprey control proved effective,
officials looked to hatcheries once again.
The general assumption
was that the native fish were gonna be restored
to revive these commercial fisheries that were at the docks and idle.
Lake trout were the principle focus
of all of the effort to restore fish populations
after sea lamprey control was proven to be effective.
The idea was to put the native species back in the lake,
and hopefully, that would lead the whole system
back towards its original state.
The effort invested in lake trout recovery
is probably the largest-scale species recovery program ever.
It exceeds, by quite a margin,
the amount of federal effort invested
in any other species-recovery in the country.
From the start, there were problems.
No matter how many lake trout they planted,
the populations in Lake Huron and Lake Michigan
just wouldn't increase.
Sea lamprey weren't targeting young lake trout,
because they really can't target that small a fish,
something else was going on.
In the midst of being optimistic about sea lamprey control,
we got invaded by another species in the Great Lakes.
[narrator] The alewife is a small prey fish
native to the Atlantic Ocean
that first appeared above Niagara Falls in 1931.
From there, it spread to Lakes Huron and Michigan,
catching the public's attention when mounds of smelly dead fish
washed ashore in the early 1960s.
[Andy] I remember, all up and down Lake Michigan,
no one was going to the beach, no one could could go swimming.
It turned what was, you know, paradise into hell, basically.
Sea lampreys facilitated alewives
by eliminating predators that might have stood in the way
of alewives, or at least, impeded their progress.
95-or-more percent of all the fish biomass
in Lake Michigan was alewives.
They kind of threw our plans for lake trout restoration
a curve ball, because they turned out to be not that great for lake trout either.
Alewives are a double-edged sword for lake trout.
When lake trout are smaller than alewives,
they're vulnerable to being eaten by alewives.
But the reverse is true when alewives are smaller than lake trout.
So alewives were probably one of the reasons
why lake trout could not reproduce successfully.
[narrator] Alewives prayed on lake trout eggs and larvae,
threatening the recovery that TFM made possible.
Beyond that, lake trout takes several years
to reach maturity.
So it might be a decade
before hatchery-raised lake trout that survived
could dent the alewife population.
But what could be done?
Howard Tanner was the Chief of Fisheries
for the Michigan Department of Conservation.
While most people saw alewives as a problem,
Howard saw a tremendous opportunity.
[Jack] When Howard first came to be Chief of Fisheries,
there had been a 10-year decline in fishing license sales,
which was the only source of revenue
for the department for fisheries work.
The then-director, Ralph McMullen, said,
"You know, things aren't going well.
You need to try some things new."
Ralph called me into the office, we had a long conversation,
and he ended my conversation with,
he said, "Do something.
And if you can make it spectacular,
why, please make it spectacular."
[narrator] What Howard Tanner did
dramatically changed the future of Great Lakes fishing
and made sea lamprey control more crucial
than anyone ever imagined.
Tanner knew something about the kind of fish
that excites sport anglers.
He also knew what those fish like to eat,
and alewives were definitely on the menu.
[newsreel] The state's Department of Natural Resources
chose the coho salmon.
A million coho eggs were flown from Oregon.
Dr. Howard Tanner tells why this salmon was picked.
You want a fish that's big and beautiful and grows fast
and eats alewife, and is attractive to the sportsman,
and one that he likes to catch,
one that fights well, one that's beautiful,
one that tastes good.
And I guess you'd have to ask one that's kind of dumb,
because after all, you want the fishermen
to be capable outsmarting him and catching him.
[narrator] Before Michigan put salmon into the Great Lakes,
anglers mostly fished smaller, more tranquil inland lakes.
The big lakes were for commercial fishing.
Salmon changed that.
They drew fishing fanatics to the big lakes in droves,
and not just from local towns.
Sport anglers from around the world
traveled to fish the Great Lakes.
And you saw all kinds of boats.
I mean, small row boats, speed boats, pontoon boats,
going out of the beyond the break walls,
dangerously into open water with very little freeboard
on many of these skiing boats to fish for salmon.
They were that excited, and they were catching fish.
You could go out there without trying
and not having a ton of knowledge
and catch a lot of fish and quality fish,
and it was consistent.
They call it salmon fever for a reason,
because once you start catching salmon, it's hard to stop.
[narrator] Salmon fight like crazy.
They roam the entire water column,
so you don't always have to fish deep,
and they return to streams to spawn,
giving landlubbers the chance to get in on the action.
Most importantly, for fisheries managers,
salmon grow much faster than lake trout
and they eat alewives voraciously,
so they quickly put a big dent in the alewife population.
Every state with a Great Lake shoreline
got in on the action,
planting salmon in their own streams.
So did Ontario, making it an international effort.
Salmon made the Great Lakes a world-renowned fishing destination,
launching a multi-billion dollar industry
that revitalized struggling lake shore towns.
Lots of salmon early on had scarring and-or had sea lamprey attached,
so without the prospect of control,
we would've never introduced salmon.
[narrator] Before the recreational fishing boom,
TFM was never applied to tributaries
feeding Lakes Ontario and Erie.
That changed when Ontario, New York State, Pennsylvania,
and Ohio began stocking salmon.
It was a very high wounding rate, so the folks down there decided
that there was no sense of us putting in fish if they're not gonna survive.
So we started our original survey work down there
in the early 70s,
and then picked up on the treatments.
[Jack] The recreational fishery opportunities in the Great Lakes
were really unexploited at that time
and offered tremendous opportunities.
The salmon introduction kind of paved the way
for looking at the Great Lakes
as a source of recreational fishing opportunities,
more so than it had ever happened in the past.
[Cory] Sea lamprey control made it all possible.
Salmon are just as susceptible to sea lamprey attacks
as lake trout are,
and so people came back to the water.
There was a new thing to come back to.
It was salmon fishing, it was sport fishing.
Even fishing for lake trout became popular again,
and still is today.
[narrator] As they have since Vernon Applegate's day,
crews still inspect streams for sea lamprey larvae.
And treatment teams deploy
to where troubling numbers are found.
People think that the sea lamprey problem
was dealt with years ago.
They don't realize that it's an ongoing program.
[narrator] TFM remains the foundation
of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission's
sea lamprey control program.
[Everett] TFM stood the test of time.
It has been studied and followed.
Once it reaches the open water of the lakes,
it dilutes to concentrations that cannot even be measured.
[Ellie] TFM is very selective.
It's not persistent in the environment,
it doesn't bioaccumulate,
and it's really one of the safest pesticides there is.
[Andy] Obviously, you don't want chemicals in water,
you don't want chemicals in the Great Lakes,
but chemicals are a form of pollution that dilutes,
that disperses.
Invasive species are a pollution that reproduces.
If you can find a way to contain that explosive growth
of this living, reproducing awful pollution,
then you gotta take a serious look at doing that.
Sea lamprey management and the use of chemical controls
has been going on for so long, and it has been successful.
And so I think by and large,
people in the environmental community,
members of the public, don't actually think too much
about the fact that it's going on.
We have to be exceptionally careful
with what humans put in the water.
I don't think that means the method has to be stopped,
but I think a lot of thinking needs to go into,
how can we ensure that there continues
to be no material deleterious effects
by introducing these chemicals into the water system?
Sea lamprey control is constantly evolving,
and this is really important.
It's evolving both with technology,
but also to a changing society.
[Randy] The goalposts are moving on us.
The problem is going to be to find a way
to control sea lampreys
when actually the Great Lakes have been made
much more hospitable to them.
[narrator] Water flows from Lake Superior into Lake Huron
through the St. Mary's River.
Canadian and American cities, both named Sault Ste. Marie,
straddle the rapids where whitefish spawn,
drawing Indigenous people
long before Europeans first came to the Great Lakes.
By the 1950s, much of the river was transformed
into a canal and lock system for ships,
and whitefish no longer came to spawn.
In the 1960s, Dr. Jim Tibbles,
the director of the Sea Lamprey Control Center at the time,
referred to the St. Mary's River as a biological desert,
meaning that it didn't support life of any kind.
It was highly polluted and very little usable habitat.
[narrator] The Canadian Parliament
and US Congress passed major environmental laws
that dramatically cut pollution.
When the water cleared,
whitefish returned to their historic spawning grounds.
But they weren't alone.
[Paul] We saw a gradual increase
in the abundance of larval sea lamprey in the St. Mary's
to the point where it was probably the number one source
of parasitic sea lamprey in Lake Huron,
if not the Great Lakes.
[narrator] Their numbers rocketed so dramatically
in Lake Huron, they threatened to destroy the fisheries
that took so long to rebuild.
There are certain rivers that can't be effectively treated with TFM
because of their size, water volume.
When you get down into the bigger connecting channels
down in the St. Clair, down in the Detroit River area and that,
they're just so huge and so vast
that TFM wouldn't be the answer at all to try and treat.
As the streams tributary of the Great Lakes clean up,
there's more and more habitat for sea lamprey.
We need new technology that's less costly
and can work on these big rivers.
Lamprey are not going to go away.
They are here to stay. They're part of the Great Lakes
and every fishery management decision that has been made
since the lamprey invasion has to take sea lamprey into account.
This is very much about countries working together,
states working together,
communities, tribes working together, local communities.
Sea lamprey are not only ugly,
but they're ugly for the lakes.
[narrator] Don Dubin lives near Chicago, Illinois.
Fishing is my life.
I started fishing as a young kid,
probably, oh, five, six years old.
My grandfather took me out to the Chicago parks.
[narrator] His basement is a museum to his passion.
As a young kid, I dreamed of someday catching a big trophy fish
and putting it on my wall.
And I learned taxidermy on my own.
Today I have all the fish that I really tried to catch.
I became a woodcarver.
So I have become an activist
because fishing in the Great Lakes is
such a valuable resource for people.
Sportfishing in the Great Lakes is one of the reasons
that people live here.
We pull people in from all over the country
who think this is a great fishery and come to fish.
This is a fisherman's dream.
[narrator] Joe King retired from the insurance business
and launched a hunting and fishing club
in Indianapolis, Indiana,
that teaches inner-city children to fish.
How do you think it's about what you wanted?
It's about any other fish in the world.
They are some tough fish.
[narrator] Every fall, he brings mentors from his club
to Michigan to fish for salmon.
Over 30-some-odd years I've been coming up here.
But you see young adults.
You see women and you see men and they're all fishing.
They just enjoy it.
It's just a beautiful place
and a true outdoorsman, this is heaven.
[narrator] Commercial fishing came back too
and is an important economic engine again
for First Nations, tribal communities,
and small towns on both sides of the US-Canadian border.
But the history of Great Lakes fishing teaches us
that nothing can be taken for granted.
It takes a lot of effort to control the sea lamprey.
But without that control,
there wouldn't be any fish in the Great Lakes.
[Cory] Without sea lamprey control,
we couldn't talk about restoring Great Lakes native fishes.
We wouldn't talk about lake trout.
We really wouldn't talk about invasive species control at all,
because there just would be no fishery out there to talk about.
One side is good, this side is bad.
The lamprey eel was on it.
[narrator] The Hammond Bay Laboratory still stands
on the Lake Huron shore.
In a dusty corner of a storage shed there,
stand some forgotten cabinets filled with index cards,
each cataloging a chemical that was analyzed at the lab
in the search for a weapon to defeat sea lamprey.
Vernon Applegate's team tested thousands
of compounds acquired from chemical companies,
universities, and other sources around the world.
The 5,209th compound tested
proved to be the needle in the haystack
that no one knew would ever be found.
Killing fish is not that difficult.
There are chemicals out there that will kill fish effectively.
What is difficult is killing exactly the fish
that you want to kill and not harming the fish
that you want to leave in the river or in the lake.
I remember talking to Louie King,
and he told me of the pit that he had in his stomach
when he arrived in northern Michigan for the first time
and looked out at Lake Huron and just saw all this water
and thought, "How in the world are we going
to control a species in this vast body of water?"
It's been described as a moonshot.
They took a long time, very methodically,
to figure out exactly where the chink in the armor was
in this devastating species.
It's truly a remarkable thing
to find something that could be so selective.
If we hadn't discovered TFM,
the whole economy of the Great Lakes would probably look
dramatically different than it does now.
Even today, in invasive species control science,
sea lamprey is looked at
as one of the biggest success stories in existence.
It's one of the only cases
where a very destructive invasive species was
completely brought under control, held under control,
and has allowed an ecosystem to recover and function.
It's an amazing program. Who could have guessed
that you could actually control these things?
The important lesson here is that government investment
and science benefit the economy
and benefit us in our small communities on the coasts
who really enjoy and need the Great Lakes
as part of our culture.
[Joel] The management of sea lamprey has granted
the Great Lakes region a second chance to bring back
a thriving, naturally reproducing native fishery,
and that's got benefits written all over it
for Great Lakes communities across the region.
It required US and Canadian ingenuity and expertise
to work together to find the solution
and then to implement it and to continue that program.
So we need to work together, not just on sea lamprey,
but on other invasive species,
on other common challenges in the region.
We don't know what other species may be coming.
And often those mix of other things,
we don't know how they'll relate with each other
and with what we're living with now.
[Joel] We want to celebrate the success of the sea lamprey control program,
but we also want to take it as a reminder
to try to focus on preventing new invasive species
from getting into the Great Lakes in the first place.
We don't want to have to rely on technology silver bullets
or the need to continually control a species
in order to protect the Great Lakes
for the people who live here.
The best solution is not allowing the invasive species
to get into the Great Lakes ecosystem in the first place.
It's so important. We don't want to lose this.
We've got to protect it.
I want to make sure we have this in the future.
[rousing closing music]