Reversing course

Like the Chicago River in 1900, the blog is changing direction. Rather than being a remora to asian carp and other stories, the blog will include more first-person accounts of the natural world and occasional speed research like the pitcher plant post. This might mean fewer posts overall, but more original content. So we say goodbye to the carp by posting photos of the Chicago River lock at Lake Michigan, from an architectural river tour this summer, a lock that is literally in the middle of the issue. And we brace tonight for a storm that is on par with the one that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975.

Bucket contents

The Tribune featured a story on the perils of dumping bait in yesterday's paper. This ties in to the previous post about the carp found in Lake Calumet. I was confused when it was reported that the 34-inch carp arrived in a bait bucket. It would have arrived when it was a minnow, as minnow buckets can include many varieties of fish, and someone could have dumped it in Lake Calumet. The story also notes there are ritual carp releases ("buy a carp, free a carp") that may account for the fish in urban park lagoons. So I'll be sure when I go to Michigan this weekend that I won't bring bait buckets full of Illinois minnows. It's kind of like moving firewood around the Midwest that may have emerald ash-borer. Purchase your bait locally and then use it locally.

Fish hoax

I'm a little tardy in reporting that the asian carp found in Lake Calumet in June may have been placed there. This report says it may have been a part of a bait-bucket transfer or a ritual release. I don't know about you, but my bait buckets don't usually include 34-inch fish. I would have noticed the 3-footer among all the minnows. Anyway, maybe it's just me. I'm tempted to believe this was a hoax perpetrated by people who despise the reversal of the Chicago (and Calumet) River and along with it the influx of asian carp. But to date, that has not been determined to be the case.

New watersheds

A new front has opened in the fight to stop the asian carp's encroachment on the Great Lakes. The ugly bottom-feeders have now reached Huntington, Ind., via the Wabash River (and Ohio and Mississippi watersheds). Huntington is a few miles from Fort Wayne, and there are ditches and waterways that connect it to the Maumee River, which feeds into Lake Erie. (If Chicago has to re-reverse the river, Fort Wayne should have to fill in those ditches, I say!) Another report says the carp has moved up the Ohio River as far as Indiana, but that no breeding records exist for the Ohio stretch. Phew. Moving farther up the Ohio would tap into another set of waterways that would draw it closer to the Great Lakes.

Carp discovery

The local media is reporting that the first asian carp has been found in a Chicago waterway. A commercial angler landed a 19-pound carp in Lake Calumet, a few miles downstream from Lake Michigan. This follows the recent fish kill on the Calumet River that didn't find any carp, and the kill a few months ago on a canal near Joliet that found one of the bottom-feeding exotics. Just to recap, there long have already been reports of the carp in inland Chicago parks. The carp already likely has infiltrated northeast Illinois via the Des Plaines River system, which flows all the way to southeast Wisconsin and is barely separated from the Chicago River (and the Great Lakes). Carp DNA already has been found in the Calumet and Lake Michigan.

Michigan pols are already reacting to the latest carp news, and this likely will revive the topic since the Supreme Court declined to hear the case few months ago.

Elsewhere, U.S. Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias believes that the Chicago River should be re-reversed. So now one of our greatest engineering marvels has become a campaign issue. Maybe we can go back to the old Chicago portage that Marquette and Jolliet used to get from Lake Michigan to the Illinois River. I stick by my previous post that we need to keep the current system, in part because sending sewage toward St. Louis is as Chicago as it gets. The Ward Room blog comes out in favor of the re-reversal, agreeing with most environmentalists.

Fireworks display

A roundup of recent news of interest:

The search for the asian carp continues. There was another fish kill, this time a few miles from Lake Michigan on the Little Calumet River, not far from the area pictured above. Thankfully, no fish were found. The outcome will lead to a re-examining of the whole situation.

Advocates for the sensitive Montrose Beach Dunes sanctuary are concerned about the city's plan to move a portion of the Independence Day fireworks display to Foster Beach. I've read some comments on message boards suggesting the city surround the dunes with security guards. Fat chance.

Driftless area is as pro-Midwest as any blog out there, and the Big Ten conference is like the force--it binds us together. The Tribune's Steve Chapman summarizes our sentiments toward Big Ten expansion by making a solid geographical argument.

"If your students can harvest oysters without leaving the state, you are not a Big Ten school. If they can leave class and be standing in a cornfield within 20 minutes, you are."

Virus definitions

West Nile Virus was sort of the asian carp of the early 2000s--a developing environmental story that received a lot of coverage in the Chicago area while inciting a mild panic. The virus sadly did lead to a few human deaths as well as the deaths of many corvids and a few smaller birds like titmice, too. Well, the virus is back for the summer of 2010, though one assumes it's not as prevalent as it was around the turn of the century. (This reminds me of a funny story a former co-worker would tell. That an elderly neighbor often expressed fears of the "Niles West" Virus, confusing the virus' name with the Skokie high school.)

Carp supreme

I'm a couple days late in reporting that the Supreme Court will not reopen the Chicago River case or hear the asian carp case. So now we turn to all sorts of potential policy or legal challenges. But it's a small victory for those of us who think the river should keep flowing away from here.

Canal pride

The asian carp still is in the news. In its latest screed against Chicago’s position, the Detroit Free Press questions Illinois researchers’ conclusion that the economic impact of closing the locks to Lake Michigan would be $4.7 billion. The Freep says the tally is computed over 20 years, and that half of the dollars actually would be spent on flood prevention. For the Free Press, the value of the Great Lakes fishing industry is $6 billion. And messing with that fishery is a lifetime proposition. We’ve yet to hear from SCOTUS on the request to reopen the 100-year-old case of Chicago’s diversion of water away from Lake Michigan.

Sending sewage down the Mississippi is as much a Chicago tradition as Paczki Day or “dibs” after a snowstorm. We take a lot of pride in the reversal of the Chicago River. We used early 20^th century equipment to dig a canal over the Valparaiso Moraine and raise the Chicago River level above Lake Michigan. This way our filth doesn’t fester right in front of us in Lake Michigan.

Reversing the river is an engineering marvel, and one that could only take place in the City That Works. We may have created a pipeline for exotics into the Great Lakes. But there are so many other ways they can get in, besides the canals. The zebra mussel and round goby came in through ships’ ballasts. And we already know carp have made it into Chicago Park District ponds. I think we should be concerned with our Great Lakes fishery, but the Chicago canal system is here to stay.

Fished out

There has been an explosion in asian carp coverage during the past few days. The Chicago Reader features an entire "asian carp issue." Chefs try their hands at preparing carp--the "eat 'em all" solution--without much success. I was surfing the World Wide Web and found a USGS report from 2000. It was a simpler time then. The carp had only just reached the Illinois River Valley.

The Natural Resources Defense Council noodles on the issue without much resolution. The bottom line, to me, is that the fish is known to be in the Des Plaines River, which originates all the way in Wisconsin. It's basically in Lake Michigan. Closing the locks won't save the lakes now. So what do we do?

Gill talk

Two pieces of asian carp news today. First, the U.S. Supreme Court won't hear the suit brought by Michigan and other states against Illinois. The court thinks it's up to the Army Corps of Engineers to open and close Lake Michigan locks. So this is a victory for the shipping interests that want the locks open.

Then startling news came across that the Army Corps has found asian carp DNA in Lake Michigan. That would mean the carp already is in Lake Michigan. The fish kill from a few weeks back took place miles away, in the Sanitary and Ship Canal. How does one find DNA in the water, by the way? I'm guessing it's not with a magnifying glass and a kitchen sieve.

Executive branch

The asian carp now is part of national conversation. President Obama is siding with Illinois in the carp conflict, and Ohio, Michigan and other states are not pleased about it. Closing the locks on the Illinois canal system would block commerce on the waterways--lots of the road salt in the Chicago area comes in on barges from the Mississippi River Valley. The U.S. Supreme Court may take up the carp case as soon as Friday.

Fish fight

View Lost Peninsula, Michigan in a larger map

The Buckeyes and Wolverines have hated each other for a while. I just finished reading a book called "The Toledo War" that chronicles the border dispute between the states in the mid-1830s. The dispute was mostly resolved when Ohio was given Toledo--and the pivotal Maumee River port and basin--and Michigan was given the consolation prize of most of the Upper Peninsula. Michigan and Ohio also squabbled over the Lost Peninsula, which extends north from Ohio into Lake Erie. Michigan wound up with part of the peninsula, even though it's only accessible by driving through Ohio.

Now, Midwestern states are fighting again. Michigan, Minnesota and Ohio have sued Illinois, reviving the century-old dispute over the reversal of the Chicago River. The other states want the Land of Lincoln to close the locks to Lake Michigan and take steps to mitigate flooding of the Des Plaines River and the Sanitary and Ship Canal. Why? Because of the Asian carp's inexorable flow north from the Mississippi River Valley. Still, it's interesting that the Land of 10,000 Lakes is involved. The carp already resides in the state's Mississippi River waters. And some reports suggest the carp can't survive in the cold of Lake Superior, Minnie's only Great Lakes shoreline.

Sanitation day

Michigan is set to file a lawsuit to close canal locks leading to Lake Michigan in hopes of stopping the Asian carp. The suit would dredge up (pun intended) complaints from the 1920s. Wikipedia has a nice summary of the Sanitary and Ship Canal (Sanitary goes before the Ship, unlike several of my earlier posts), the lovely waterway created by a turn-of-the-century engineering marvel that reversed the flow of Chicago's rivers toward the Mississippi basin.

One fish

I often have lines from 1980s movies running through my head. My inner monologue attempts to make sense of the world through movies like "One Crazy Summer" and "Hoosiers." So when news came across that only one Asian carp turned up when the Ship and Sanitary Canal was poisoned yesterday, a movie quote popped into my head.

In "Major League," Bob Uecker plays broadcaster Harry Doyle. When Doyle looks at the box score of another Indians' loss, he exclaims, "One hit? All we got was one goddamn hit?"

So here goes: One fish? All we got was one goddamn fish?

More carping

Was linking the St. Lawrence watershed with the Mississippi River watershed more than 100 years ago a mistake? Was it worth it to reverse the flow of the Chicago River and connect it to canals that emptied into the Illinois River and ultimately the Mighty Miss? Was all that barge traffic that important, even as trains, trucks and planes have mostly made water transport obsolete? These are the questions worth asking as officials dump Rotenone into a canal near Lockport, Ill., as evidence shows the Asian carp may be way beyond the area that is now being poisoned. All that 19th century engineering could have effects from here to Buffalo, N.Y., and beyond. As one online commenter said earlier today, this is the most underreported Chicago story of 2009.

Something fishy

It doesn't take a geographer, or even a biologist, to tell you that the handling of the Asian carp invasion has been weird. Dale Bowman of the Sun-Times agrees in his latest column. He documents a number of catches in Chicago lagoons that show that the carp already has been present in town since perhaps 2003. A glance at a map shows that there were a lot of holes (e.g. interconnected waterways) in the Army Corps' plan to deter the fish. The new plan to poison a section of the Ship and Sanitary Canal, days after evidence of the carp was found on the Calumet River, a different waterway altogether, reinforces the idea that this is a big boondoggle. The carp continue to outpace us, and it's only the Great Lakes that are at stake.

Fish story

Scientists have found evidence that the Asian carp is now above the electric barrier on the Sanitary and Ship Canal and within a few miles of the Great Lakes. There's just one lock in their way on the Calumet River, which connects to the Mississippi River watershed through a web of other waterways.

Until Friday, it was thought that the carp were in the Des Plaines River, which runs side-by-side with the canal that ultimately leads to Lake Michigan. To reach the Great Lakes, it would have taken a flood or a fish flopping three miles down Devon Ave. to the North Branch of the Chicago River. Now, it's known that the carp hopped the electric barrier on the canal. Life finds a way.

Carp time

In news of the inevitable, Asian carp are now just a mile from the electric barrier in the Ship and Sanitary Canal and north of the barrier but within the parallel Des Plaines River (not in the Lake Michigan watershed). The Army Corps acknowledges that a good rain could send the river over its banks and into the canal, spilling a few carp along the way.

Electric carp

The dreaded asian carp is closing in on the Great Lakes, reports the Detroit Free Press and Chicago Sun-Times. They're now just a few miles from leaping from the Mississippi River watershed, southwest of Chicago, and into the St. Lawrence watershed. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has turned up the power on an electric barrier in the Sanitary and Ship Canal. I fear the barrier isn't going to be able to hold these voracious eaters back forever. In the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jeff Goldblum's character in "Jurassic Park," "Life... finds a way."