Just to allude to some of the comments I made in my opening remarks, you don't have to take our word for it; all you have to do is look back to fairly recent history. In the early part of the 1900s, for a series of reasons, there really wasn't effective control and effective regulation of the Great Lakes. We saw, in the simplest of terms, the near collapse of the fishery.
I grew up on Lake Huron. Our cottage looks out onto the lake. That was the place where we fished and canoed and camped and did all those things. Imagine that without fish. Sea lamprey really enjoy fish at the top of the food chain, the same kind of things that humans seem to value most from a sport fishing or commercial fishing perspective. Imagine those things gone. We target about 7.5 million sea lamprey [Technical difficulty—Editor] numbers. The estimates say that we could lose approximately 13.9 million kilograms of fish, or $389 million worth of economic value, if we were to have those particular larvae mature and begin to do what they do best.
We're really talking about devastation on a large scale and then everything that goes with it. If you take the fish out of the Great Lakes, you're not going to have anglers coming. It's going to have an impact on tourism. It's going to have an impact on local communities, on the people who sell boats or sell fuel to people passing through, and on the restaurants. All of those kind of peripheral industries that make up our Great Lakes communities would be impacted. They were 100 years ago, 80 years ago, and that would all come full circle today.