Environment committee  I want to first thank the committee for inviting me to come and share my concerns about environmental threats to the integrity of the Great Lakes. I am a professor of biology at McMaster University and I also serve as the director of the life sciences program. It just occurred

Environment committee  All right. I'm going to talk about the water levels. The water levels in Lake Michigan have fluctuated in approximately 30-year cycles over the past century. They range between 175 and 177 metres, but with a long-term mean of about 176 metres, above sea level. One of the many

Environment committee  To give you an example, it cost $4 million to build the structure to exclude carp from the marsh. That was in 1990 dollars. It costs annually still for us to take carp out of there and put good fish back in and that kind of activity. If you asked the people now if they had know

Environment committee  Changing water levels have implications for the volume of the water, obviously. So whether it's in the nearshore or on the offshore are actually two different things. I'm talking about the nearshore. For the nearshore environment a drawdown of half a metre or a metre, when your

Environment committee  It's really critical that we look at habitat, because without the habitat we don't have the small fish and we don't have the big fish. This is actually one of the major things that our research is showing now. When you don't look after the breeding habitat, when you're only looki

Environment committee  No, the large muskies are still there. People can still fish them.

Environment committee  The recruitment, yes.

Environment committee  That probably has been since about 1999.

Environment committee  Yes. Well, absolutely, but it's—

Environment committee  I wouldn't say it was ineffective, no.

Environment committee  What we're talking about here is invasive species coming in. The Fisheries Act does not necessarily fix everything that—

Environment committee  No. Okay, I'm sorry; what I'm saying is that we have to look at the habitats in order to manage it—

Environment committee  Okay. I'm not a climate scientist, but I know from reading that the global circulation models do predict that with climate change there will be a drop in water levels. This is a link that I don't do research in, but this is what I've read. This drop in water levels that we're se

Environment committee  I'm sorry, how much?

Environment committee  What I was talking about was in the nearshore, in an embayment. I don't have the numbers for the actual lake. In what I was talking about, what we were measuring was from the period from about 1999 to the most recent in 2013. It's that data set we were looking at.