February 9th, 2017

Ever since I can remember I have been going to my family’s cabin in Oscoda, Michigan. When I was young I would go down to the Au Sable river, which feeds directly from Lake Huron, in the spring and watch everyone fish for salmon until I was old enough to join in. It used to be packed shoulder to shoulder with people catching these delicious fish. The parking lots would be packed with cars and campers. As the years went by there were less and less people catching salmon. The crowds slowly died down to the handful of people who still fish there in the spring today. I had been fishing since I was two but when you are young you tend not to think about why there are less fish than there used to be. I can remember fishing at a young age in the Au Sable river and pulling out something that looked like an alien on the end of my line. I was told that was called a goby and you could not throw those back in the water because they did not belong there. That is when I started asking more questions and discovered the source of the declining population. Gobies, along with many other invasive species, have been taking over the Great Lakes for years. I have always had a passion for fishing and along with that comes a responsibility to help keep the waters clean. That is why I chose to research the effects of invasive species in the Great Lakes. This is something everyone should be concerned about especially if you live near the Great Lakes. These invasive species or “aquatic hitchhikers” get spread by careless people who either intentionally release a non-native species into the water or unintentionally introduce the species by transferring their boat from other waters and not making sure that there is nothing stuck to the bottom of it. The biggest problem with invasive species is that they consume all the food sources that the native fish would usually eat ultimately killing off the native species. If the native species die off it would destroy the nearly seven-billion-dollar fishing industry that exists in the Great Lakes. The battle with keeping invasive species out of the Great Lakes is happening right now and there is nearly zero news coverage about this problem. I believe that if everyone who uses the waters does not pitch in to help that there is no stopping the invasion of these underwater aliens.