The Cancer of the Great Lakes
The first day of June 1988 was sunny, hot, and mostly calm—perfect weather for the three young researchers from the University of Windsor who were hunting for critters crawling across the bottom of Lake St. Clair. Sonya Santavy was a freshly graduated biologist aboard a 16-foot-long runabout as the whining outboard pushed the boat toward the middle of the lake that straddles the United States and Canadian border.
On a map, Lake St. Clair looks like a 24-mile-wide aneurysm in the river system east of Detroit that connects Lake Huron to Lake Erie, and that is essentially what it is. Water pools in it and then churns through as the outflows from Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron tumble down into Erie, then continue flowing east over Niagara Falls into Lake Ontario, and finally down the St. Lawrence Seaway and out to the Atlantic Ocean. The current pulsing through Lake St. Clair is so strong that if you were to hop in an inflatable raft at the top of the lake you’d flush out the other side in about two days—without having to paddle a stroke.
Water rushes so quickly through Lake St. Clair because it is as shallow as a swimming pool in most places, except for an approximately 30-foot-deep navigation channel down its middle. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers carved that pathway in the late 1950s as part of the Seaway project to allow oceangoing freighters to sail between Lake Erie and the lakes upstream from it. When water levels were low or sediment high, sometimes that channel still wasn’t deep enough, forcing ships to lighten their loads to squeeze through. This often meant dumping water from the ship-steadying ballast tanks—water taken onboard outside the Great Lakes. Water that could be swarming with exotic life picked up at ports across the planet.
As Santavy and her University of Windsor colleagues puttered over a rocky-bottomed portion of Lake St. Clair in the early summer of 1988, she whimsically dropped her sampling scoop into the cobble below. She was hunting for muck-loving worms but figured she’d take a poke into the rocks below because—well, to this day, she still doesn’t know. “I can’t even explain why it popped into my head,” Santavy told me. “I thought—if we get nothing, we get nothing, and I’ll just mark it off that this is not an area to sample.”
Up came a wormless scoop of stones, the smallest of which were not much bigger than her fingertips. But there was something odd about two of those tinier pebbles. They were stuck together. She tried to pull them apart but she couldn’t. Then she realized that one of them wasn’t a pebble at all. It was alive.
Nobody gave it much thought at the time, but in the years following the Seaway’s opening in 1959, species not native to the Great Lakes, ranging from algae to mollusks to fish, started turning up at a rate never before seen. In the Seaway’s inaugural season it was the humpbacked peaclam native to Europe and Asia. In 1962 came Thalassiosira weissflogii, a single-celled alga capable of both sexual and asexual reproduction and, unlike sea lampreys, incapable of being controlled ecosystem-wide by any human measures.
Five more exotic species of algae showed up during the next two years and a tubificid (lake bottom–burrowing) worm native to the Black and Caspian Sea basins arrived in 1965. A water flea from Europe turned up the year after and a European flatworm two years after that. A crustacean native to the Black and Caspian Seas arrived in 1972. Three more exotic species of algae turned up the following year. And the alien organisms continued to arrive, year after year,
