“Northern riffleshell, snuffbox, clubshell and rayed bean” Remember those names for soon they may indeed be nothing more than memories. An invader has come to America from the mysterious seas of Central Asia. This interloper stowed away and came to America 30 years ago. Authorities are powerless to stop the rampage of terror. It has already conquered the sinister-sounding Lake Erie, a freshwater sea which is found deep in the hinterlands of…wait…Lake Erie borders New York ? [checks notes]
What on Earth is going on here?
You may think this absurd looking creature is a sentient hockey puck or the ghost of Jim Backus. It is instead a goby…a tribe of fish which are sort of the prairie dogs of the sea. This is the round goby (Neogobius melanostomus). It is a hard-headed omnivorous fish which can live in both fresh and salt water. Originally native to the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, the tiny fish is thought to have come to the Great Lakes by stowing away in ballast water of a freighter. Since its arrival in the Saint Lawrence Seaway, it has made the entire Great Lakes its home and it is now spreading along the rivers and creeks radiating from the lakes.
This is a pretty impressive feat and nobody is castigating the ugly little fish for being lazy or weak. In fact it is even sort of endearing in a crude 1970s cartoon sort of way.
My god, what happened during that decade?
Unfortunately the gobies’ unstoppable appetite is leading to the extinction of indigenous freshwater mussels like the Northern riffleshell and clubshell mussels. Freshwater mussels were already in trouble because of pollution, habitat loss, and stream degradation. Now they have to contend with this formidable 9 inch long 2 ounce predator. I have written this article with a joking touch, but, sadly, this sequence of events is no joke. Ecologists are worried that the gobies will continue to spread (particularly with the help of careless anglers, who use them as live bait). Understanding and curtailing the proliferation of alien species causing havoc in unprepared ecosystems is one of the defining environmental challenges of our times (which are filled with environmental challenges), but so far nobody has figured out how to do so. Perhaps in the future the Great Lakes will be filled with the descendants of round gobies eating zebra mussels. Sometimes it seems like nobody and nothing can keep up with the pace of change.
ferrebeekeeper 
Leave a comment
Comments feed for this article