When zebra mussels colonized Lake Erie, it began to recover
ecosophia.net
ecosophia.net
Some background: as a kid, my family boated on the SF Bay. I can remember when cormorants were rare on the bay. There were no porpoises or dolphins in the bay. It was rare for a whale to enter the bay. There were zero brown pelicans. All of those observations are entirely opposite of today's bay. Acts of government have seriously improved water ecosystems.
Now that memory is a data point of one. But we also all should know that the Cuyahoga has not caught fire in 50 years and that's not because of the work of zebra mussels -- they don't consume stuff which is volatile enough to catch fire spontaneously.
In summary, before reading the piece everyone should be aware that waterways have generally been substantially cleaned up in the last 50 years.
With that as background, I have immediate questions: What evidence is there that Erie was cleaned up by mussels and not by new environmental laws? Even if the mussels helped, were they a necessary condition to cleaning this up? Or did they simply advance the cleanup by a few years?
The piece contains good skeptical thinking, but it does not sufficiently lay evidence that Zebra Mussels were a cause of Erie's cleanup, rather than a coincidence. It's pretense at being a factual explanation of history is unearned.
No doubt, if left alone without any government policy, Lake Erie may not have recovered from purely natural means, such as the introduction of an invasive species. I believe, like you, that government policy has helped in the restoration, at least has helped speed it up.
But I don't think that's the author's real point. The point he is ultimately making is stated in the article:
> "Our culture — meaning here the collective culture of modern Western industrial society — is obsessed by the false belief that nature can’t adapt to our actions."
and:
> "Our habitual way of dealing with Mother Nature assumes that we talk and she listens, full stop, end of sentence. [...] What we need to recognize, rather, is that we’re engaged in a conversation with the old broad. We said “pollution,” she quipped “zebra mussels;” we said “internal combustion engines,” and she smiled and said “coastal flooding.” We can listen to her responses and learn from them - or not, and find out the hard way what else she has to say."
I think the author is suggesting that nature will, in the end, restore balance and that we, as species, could possibly help by simply getting out of the way or maybe working with natural processes. Understanding nature's process rather than fighting it is likely the best way out of the messes that we've created for ourselves.
Shellfish like oysters are present in the San Francisco bay too. They are a key part of the lifecycle, and the colonization of Lake Eire by the mussels helped other life appear.
It’s also hilarious to declare the mussels invasive. The lake was a pitiful, dead environment. Any life is invasive.
Quite interesting read - about the author, from that website:
> John Michael Greer is a widely read author and blogger whose work focuses on the overlaps between ecology, spirituality, and the future of industrial society.
> He served twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, and currently heads the Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn. He currently lives in East Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife Sara.
"Ancient Order of Druids in America" and "Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn" - who has heard of those before?
I looked them up and found
- http://www.druidical-gd.org/
I'm not one to dismiss something just because it is... unusual. I must admit I would not ask if this was some professor of biology at XYZ University. I have no idea what to think about an American Grand Archdruid. Does anybody have any well-founded opinions about those organizations? I like their page title "Frequently Thrown Tantrums" though -- http://www.druidical-gd.org/ftt.html
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan
It's incredibly well researched and written, and gave me a much better understanding of what's going with the ecosystems.
This actually understates the situation; the Cuyahoga caught fire no less than thirteen times since 1868. The 1969 fire was merely the one that served as a rallying cry to pass legislation to take action. https://www.alleghenyfront.org/how-a-burning-river-helped-cr...
This recent video of just one small, insignificant shop in China for example. It needs to somehow dispose of thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83GDV0xsTTs) and my suspicion is that it goes into local rivers.
We were that bad. The EPA (signed by Nixon!) is what turned that around.
The introduction of mammals to New Zealand is a disaster for the birds that live there and that have evolved into all the niches available. But for the planetary biosphere, it's a win because the mammals are better suited to living there (otherwise they wouldn't be so successful).
Cane toads, though... that one is going to be interesting.
It's not a win in either case. It's just what happened. Evolution and nature and the biosphere don't have goals.
As for me it sounds better. Yes, local people could be annoyed by lions or venomous snakes, but for the most humans lions and snakes are just a curiosity that makes world more interesting.
Losing highly-adapted, very fragile species to a more robust invader is a loss of biodiversity. But that holds biodiversity as a higher virtue than survivability and adaptability. Is that justified?
This is the thing: if species A out-performs species B in a given ecosystem niche, and species B becomes extinct as a result, that's how nature works. That's evolution. There's nothing "wrong" or "bad" about that. Survival of the fittest.
If humans caused species A to be there, that's irrelevant. It doesn't make Species A's survival (or species B's extinction) "unnatural" or "wrong". We were just a transport mechanism, like any other "natural" transport mechanism.
Surely evolution and survival of the fittest overrules biodiversity?
In stable-ish conditions, ecosystems evolve towards stable configurations where the sun's energy can be optimally tapped.
Those disruptions bring unstability (boom-bust cycles of high amplitude) and thus danger for us.
As TFA says, we're highly adaptable omnivore generalists. We thrive on change, adapt to it quickly. We live in every single land-based biome in the world (and may be the only large life form to do so).
Wishing for everything to be stable in a chaotic system like the Earth is futile. Instead, we have evolved to be antifragile and thrive on constant change.
Changing mentalities takes generations (think "Science progresses one funeral at a time") and we may not adapt fast enough this time. What more, those in power, who are reluctant to change, endanger those that would readily change but don't have the power to even though they'll likely pay the price.
We've seen a lot of change happen over the last few decades (though possibly not in academia, as you say). It's been tough for some, but for most of us it's been great. The world is undeniably a better place now than it was 50 years ago, despite those 50 years being full of incredibly fast changes.
On a smaller scale there are many people that died in fire they themselves had started.
Culture (information stored in the brain) changes faster than DNA, but its ability to change is still limited, especially in older folks.
In order to survive, we need our environmental conditions to remain in a reasonable range (temperature, atmospheric composition, weather). According to some predictions, some parts of the world around the equator will be to hot for people to live at the turn of the 22th century. The ocean (50 to 80% of the photosynthesis) is already in a sorry state and we keep on pushing.
So far, so good... https://soundcloud.com/user-876103472/grow
The earth is like an Apple pie,
let's eat it and let's eat it and let's die!
Do you want some more? It's ...hmm... delicious!
There is however inertia both in infrastructure building and in changing mentalities that means it isn't the case.
I'm not sure we'll adapt fast enough to the current challenges (assuming it's not already too late for a large scale disaster). The future will tell who was right.
And maybe just this ecosystem. As noted elsewhere here, zebra mussels have caused tons of other problems. In less-polluted lakes, they filter the water clear, which not only reduces fish populations but can lead to massive growth of algae.
In the other hand, some of this billions of dollars could be used in nature conservation, or cleaning the lake by our own means and forever, or...
Example: Is clear water inherently "good" or is it just something humans like? These mussels prefer the dirty water. Maybe in the Zebra Mussel Bible, the cleaning of the lake water is called "the coming apocalypse due to our greedy exploitation of nature" and the polluted years are remembered fondly as "the good times."
Is an island populated by a larger number of species more finely-adapted to smaller niches, "better" than an island overrun with mostly generalists (cats and a couple of prey species)? In other words is biodiversity "good" or is it just something humans like? Certainly greater biodiversity is associated with longer periods of unchanging climate/geology/etc. that, to us, resemble our (maybe fitting, maybe not) concept of an "equilibrium." Not coincidentally these periods include the one we've been in for a few thousand years now, during which all writing, agriculture, cities and civilization developed. So we tend to think of them as "natural" and as a "norm," that we maybe will or maybe won't disturb. But those periods are only part of the story. There are also those dynamic, changing, cataclysmic periods. And when those are going on, biodiversity tends to be less initially, as shown by the mass extinctions visible in the fossil record.
Just to completely take it over the top, is life better than death? Cuz the natural order seems to think they both should happen in almost exactly equal measure. Plus, "An empty glass is full of opportunity." A dead tree is a great boon to the next generation of little trees that grow on the rotting trunk, not to mention all the fungi etc. that survive by doing the rotting.
I dunno, it's hard to formulate any "puny huuu-mon" judgments about anything that don't just fall apart.
Would someone be so nice to explain this, please?
The river used to be filthy. Lots of industry on the U.S. and Canadian sides and in the Great Lakes dumped all kinds of untreated waste into the ecosystem. I also remember a major oil slick which I believe was caused by a maritime accident. This was before the advent of better navigation technology and environmental protection laws.
The water may have become cleaner over time, but I noticed that by the early 2000s, the types of fish that I had caught off the dock by the dozens as a child in the 70s and 80s -- perch, sunfish, bass -- were becoming extremely rare. Ten years later, these shore species had all but disappeared except for a few bays and harbors.
The disappearance of these fish coincided with the appearance of the zebra mussel. The lore told here is that the zebra mussels were carried over by Ukrainian freighters in the 1990s (similar to the story in TFA). But other new species have appeared on the river, too -- cormorants, carp, and Canadian geese are very visible now, and they weren't in the past.
We also seem to have more extreme variations in water levels, with flooding this year and in 2017, and very low levels in other years. Surely that impacts water temperature and breeding conditions for some aquatic species.
I think some people blamed the zebra mussels and the cormorants for the disappearance of many species of fish, but I think there's a larger story taking place, with many factors contributing to changes in the ecosystem.
I cursed and still cursed stepping on the sharp mussel shells lining the now clean and swimmable beach waters of Lake Michigan. Decades of misplaced vitriol.
Mmmmm! Good eating:
"Eat The Enemy: The Delicious Solution To Menacing Asian Carp"
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/eat-the-enemy-asian-carp_n_63...
> And the human reaction? That’s where things get interesting. The human reaction was all-out panic
Zebra mussels grabbed headlines in the local paper for years. Everyone went nuts. We all thought it was doomsday and believed you'd never be able to float a boat in the bay ever again.
Can it be done?
If it's an effluent or sewer pipe, do you think "it's just water"?
It never recovered.
"Some of my readers may remember media stories from 1969, when the Cuyahoga River, which flows into Lake Erie, caught fire one hot summer day—yes, it had that much toxic waste in it."
”The fouling of the vessel is the main reason for the increase in the roughness of the part of the vessel below sea level and therefore the increase in hull frictional resistance as it moves through water. As a result fuel consumption increases and vessel speed decreases. The slime (bio film – silt) on the submerged part of the vessel is responsible for an increase in vessel drag of approximately 2%. Seaweed increases the vessel drag by 10% and mussels by up to 40%. Increase in drag will directly impact on enhanced fuel consumption and significantly increased harmful gas emissions.”
And of course it cuts human skin
I just checked, the Wikipedia article opens with a statement claiming it's caught fire thirteen times. To say that the Cuyahoga river was polluted is a pretty dramatic understatement.