The Great Lakes Basin is home to millions of people in Canada and the United States. They are here because the water is here. It’s where some of the oldest and largest cities in North America including Toronto, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. But back when Cleveland and Detroit were economic hubs, the health of the aquatic ecosystem was far from a priority.
As a result, pollution was rampant culminating in the infamous Cuyahoga River fire where, in 1969, the river– or more accurately, the pollution therein – burned.
But things changed over time and by 1981 the University of Windsor located on the shores of the Detroit River, just across from Detroit itself, opened an entirely new department known simply as GLIER (rhymes with clear, not flyer).
It’s an acronym for the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research. When I was in Windsor filming our Canada’s South Coast episode I stopped by my alma mater to learn about a department I’d only ever driven past. It does a lot of things from monitoring quality standards and fish stocks to advanced research. I’m told that GLIER is one of the few environmental analytical laboratories in Canada accredited to international standards by the Canadian Association for Laboratory Accreditation (CALA). Sounds legit to me! Trevor Pitcher, PhD, met me at the facilities in LaSalle, a suburb of Windsor. In a non-descript building that sits beside one of the town’s parks that is home to a well-kept boat launch. Inside that building are rows of tanks, some filled with fish.
The facility is another acronym: FREC, which stands for the Freshwater Restoration Ecology Centre. The modest building houses a lofty ambition: the restore ecological balance to the Great Lakes basin. For one thing, they help manage the stocks of salmon in the lakes and in one of the huge round barrel-shaped tanks – that looked almost like a small-sized above-ground pool – were shimmering silver fish that “went crazy” when a scoop of pellets were thrown in under the lid. The pellets were food and the fish are salmon. The lid is there because Pitcher walked in one morning to find a salmon dead on the floor that had jumped out of the tank, a good 10-feet away which, in a tragic twist of fate spoke to the health of the now-dead fish.
Putting lids on the salmon basins cut the death-by-unexpected-basin-exit down to zero, but cutting back on the deaths of other fish is significantly more complex. To me, the most impressive efforts come in a tiny package, the size of a minnow.
“This is literally the poster child for extinction,” Pitcher said as he scooped a few little fish into a small observation tank.
“The Redisde Dace the brink of extinction in Canada and we’re looking to captively breed them and hopefully reintroduce them to the wild in the next 5 years.”
You may say ‘why is this little minnow so important?’ Well, essentially, they’re a great indicator of the health of the ecosystem. They require clean, cool water, and when they leave from an area we know we’re in trouble. We hold the only captive population in Canada. And the purpose of this is to learn how to captively breed them so we can give Mother Nature a helping hand.”
The other benefit is the broader scientific impact of reintroduction of a captively bred species into the wild. There’s no playbook for this stuff and it’s much more complex than to simply plop them back in the wild. They need to try and get them robust enough to survive the harsh realities of the wild and find ways to boost what Mother Nature would do herself, albeit a little too slow to get to critical, sustainable population numbers.
It's been a long journey but the progress has been significant and the GLIER’s of the world continue to keep the pressure on so that we all have clean and safe waters to enjoy, fish from, and swim in. As we wrapped up our chat, Pitcher told me there was light at the end of the tunnel. It’s not all doom and gloom and species at risk.
“By the 1960s and 1970s the Detroit River just behind this building was in rough shape, but the University of Windsor and other stakeholders had the foresight to take action and after a lot of hard work, the river is coming back.”
Check out my visit to GLIER from Season 2 of Water Ways TV below:
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