Chow-Fraser: Our fish need to go home!

From Dr. Pat Chow-Fraser, Professor and Director of Life Sciences, McMaster University, Department of Biology, Hamilton, ON – presentation to public meeting 

International Joint Commission July 16 2012

I am speaking on behalf of those organisms that cannot speak:  the fish, the turtles, the frogs.  

In 1993, the Level Reference Study concluded that wetlands should be a key indicator when discussions are being made about water levels.  This means all wetlands, not just those in Lake St. Clair.  There are extensive tracts of coastal wetlands in eastern and northern Georgian Bay.  In eastern Georgian Bay alone,  there are more than 3700 wetland units along the 4500 km of shoreline.  These are critical spawning and nursery habitat for the Lake Huron fish community.  The lucrative musky and pike fisheries in particular, depend on annual flooding of coastal wetlands.  My McMaster students and I have carried out research in the Severn Sound area and in many other areas throughout Georgian Bay.  Without a doubt, the wetlands of eastern and northern Georgian Bay are of the highest quality, are most productive and have the highest biodiversity of all wetlands in the Great Lakes region.  

We have already lost one-quarter of the submerged habitat in wetlands because of low water levels since the 1990s.  We will continue to lose fish habitat at a rate of 7-8% for every 25 cm.  

In Severn Sound, our research shows that our entire historic musky nursery habitat has dried up since 2000.   We cannot afford to lose more habitats.  We need you to tell the governments to restore our water level.  Our fish need to go home!  And speaking of going home, diking wetlands as an adaptive management strategy is not going to work in Georgian Bay because fish like pike and musky are migratory and cannot cross dikes.  

Doing nothing IS doing something.  It’s eliminating wetlands.  Why isn’t there an estimate of the cost of wetlands and their ecosystem services that have already been lost?  Why isn’t there consideration of the lost recruitment of the pike and musky in eastern Georgian Bay?  Why only consider the value of sturgeon in Lake St. Clair?  

Doing nothing is not letting nature take its course because the problem to begin with is human-made.