Fisheries Committee on April 25th, 2012

[Dr. Ladd Johnson]

Agreed. And perhaps it could even correct it by obviously putting a law on the books that says that it's illegal to do it. I don't know what that costs. I'm sure it doesn't come free, but I'm sure it's pretty inexpensive in comparison. I would follow it up again with enforcement, because without enforcement it's hard to attain the goal.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Yes, and I think that is the direction the minister is going in. The statement was longer than that, and it covered other areas with respect to habitat and protection and so on.

This is a pretty important priority for our government. In fact, some members were here in 2006 and 2007, when we introduced a whole new Fisheries Act. Both times we didn't get through the process, but both of them had a section on aquatic invasive species.

We're aware that there is kind of a gap there in terms of policy and legislation, and in the very near future we may see that gap filled.

[Dr. Ladd Johnson]

Could I follow with a question on that to help perhaps clarify something for me?

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Sure.

[Dr. Ladd Johnson]

I know that in the province of Quebec authority over fish, especially freshwater fish, is pretty much a provincial concern. How does the new law apply to cooperation between federal and provincial authorities?

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Well, in some cases the management of fisheries has been under agreement to the inland provinces, but the protection of habitat is not. It's completely under federal jurisdiction at this point. What the future is, I don't know. I think there's some promise there. The problem at least has been recognized and the minister has referred to it.

My question is more of a theoretical one. Can a biological invasion also be a natural phenomenon? Is it accurate to say that there would be non-native invasions of even harmful species if there were no human interaction with the ecosystem? In other words, does it happen naturally as well?

[Dr. Anthony Ricciardi]

Yes. The process of invasion is just as natural as the process of extinction. And like extinction, under human influence it has been altered; it has been accelerated.

In fact I have compared rates of invasion from the prehistoric record and modern record, and the differences are many orders of magnitude. If you take as an extreme case Hawaii, which has been invaded at a rate of—let's say before humans arrived, before Polynesians arrived—one every 30,000 years, now you will get 20 new invaders per year. That's an 800,000-fold acceleration.

We've accelerated the rate to levels that have no historical precedent. Unlike extinction, which, pointing to the past when an asteroid hit the planet, let's say, you could find a mass extinction event similar to what's going on now—it's not much consolation, but you can find that—you cannot find any analogy in the fossil record of the mass invasion event that's occurring now.

You can take New Zealand as an example, which we brought up before. It has 35 European mammals on it. There is no way any of them could have arrived in New Zealand on their own. There are 12 birds that normally occur in Britain. There's not a single chance that any one of them could have arrived and established a population in New Zealand on its own.

These big jumps that we're seeing, like zebra mussels coming out of the Great Lakes, could not have happened without human vectors.

So it can happen naturally. It is happening naturally, on very small scales and at far slower rates than it is without our influence.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Dr. Johnson.

[Dr. Ladd Johnson]

Just to follow up, the invasion of South America with the formation of the Isthmus of Panama was actually a natural catastrophic invasion.

[Dr. Anthony Ricciardi]

You would have to move all the continents together at the same time and still you wouldn't approach what's happening now. Mass invasions have occurred in the past when continents collided together.

What we're seeing now is something that still does not compare to what's happened in the past that may have happened regionally. What we're talking about is global. It has no precedent.

[Randy Kamp, Conservative, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, BC]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rodney Weston]

Thank you.

Mr. Allen.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our folks for being here.

Any Canadian who thinks that dumping a fish into a body of water is a good idea would just have had to listen to this testimony over the last couple of meetings to understand that is not such a good thing.

You also talked about piranhas in the Great Lakes.

[Dr. Anthony Ricciardi]

Piranhas are found almost every year in the Great Lakes. They are red-bellied piranhas that are found, which are sold in pet stores. It's easy to guess how they got into the Great Lakes. Somebody decides it's getting too big and it's eating everything else in the tank so let's get rid of it.

I call this the “free Willy syndrome”, because people like dumping their fish—their goldfish and so on—into the wild. I think maybe it eases their conscience.

Every pond, natural or otherwise, on the Island of Montreal has had or now has goldfish in it. Tens of thousands of fish are estimated to have been dumped into the St. Lawrence River every year through this particular vector.

This is the reason we emphasize public education. This is an example of something involving individuals, which when multiplied by large populations creates this huge opportunity for many species to get in.

Piranhas will probably never become established in the Great Lakes, unless winter becomes far less severe than it is now. That is possible, but not in the immediate horizon.

There are other species that have been established that way. The piranhas are a signal that it's happening when we see them every year. I like bringing them up because people are surprised to hear about it.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

I think I'm going to put on a thicker set of waders when I go fishing now.

I'm a little bit concerned about this.

A number of years ago in New Brunswick, in a lake in my riding, we had a lot of goldfish, and we had to go through a major exercise to get rid of them.

One of the things I'd like to understand is how we can speed up the identification in this process. You talk about identifying them quickly.

I guess the other side is when you talked about bleaching that area in Australia. It was interesting to me, because we've had some suggest that the smallmouth bass invasive species in New Brunswick should have been taken care of by putting rotenone in the lake. There were some serious concerns about doing that.

I can't see our responding that quickly or that dramatically to an invasion of a species in the lakes.

I'd like your thoughts on how we can more quickly jump on these things, to assess and ID them quickly and then take other actions.

[Dr. Ladd Johnson]

The problem of identifying quickly is just thorny because it's often done pro bono and it's diffuse. It's getting worse at an international level. That type of expertise is no longer really well rewarded.

The bright side is...especially with the DNA bar-coding program in Windsor; it's another network where they're basically trying to get the bar code of life.

[Dr. Anthony Ricciardi]

It's in Guelph.

[Dr. Ladd Johnson]

It's Guelph. Basically, you send a piece of tissue in and they'll tell you right away.

As part of the first CAISN network, there was an invasive tunicate bank developed in P.E.I. where people could send.... I'm not sure if they could send samples to get them identified, but they could get voucher collections for different.... I don't want to get into the molecular biology, but they could get tools for identifying species quickly, if not identifying them themselves.

It would be my greatest hope that there would be some centralized area that might be able to do that. It might not be just for invasive species. Again, it might be just for identifying, but it would have to be centralized, I'm pretty sure.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Right now we're relying on fishermen and others who catch these or—

[Dr. Ladd Johnson]

Oh, that's the detection, yes.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Yes, that's the detection piece, but the other side of it is, what other proactive things could we do to get on the front end? As you indicated before, some of these things are not dormant, but they're there for a long time before we even understand they're there. I'm just wondering, how do we get onto that stuff quicker?

[Dr. Ladd Johnson]

In a couple of weeks Dr. MacIsaac can tell you a lot more about a technique called pyrosequencing, which is a very expensive technique, but as with many of these molecular techniques, we see the price coming down. You all know about all the DNA things that can be done for forensics. Well, that's happening as well for invasive species, where you can take environmental DNA and sample it. Again, you need strategies for where and when to sample, but it can probably speed up the process, although in that case it might just identify where follow-up work needs to be done.

I really think there needs to be both a mentality and an authority to react quickly, even after the identification. As I said, the European ruffe was well identified as an invasive species, and it took over a year to have any type of movement on it. By that time it was decided it was in too many rivers. It needed to be decided on within a month or two.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Based on your experience, when we've had these infestations and an action plan to get rid of them, do you ever see a situation where there would be an appetite to use something rough like a rotenone?

[Dr. Ladd Johnson]

As I said, I think we only have blunt tools right now. For me, and I think Dr. Ricciardi would agree with me, I would suffer a lot of collateral damage to put out an invasive species. It's a hard one for the public to swallow, but I think that's where the education comes in again.

[Dr. Anthony Ricciardi]

Let's take an example. Again, it's public education. Most people figure that goldfish are benign. There was a study at McGill many years ago—I wasn't involved with it—that showed goldfish act like little carp, little aquatic pigs, basically, rooting around in the sediment, and they can increase turbidity, reduce light transmission, and uproot plants. Visual predators like newts and salamanders and so on find their habitat inhospitable, so they leave. The goldfish do this because they're ecologically rewarded by it, because they're shiny, and when you decrease light transmission by creating turbidity, predators can't see you. They're basically engineers, and they re-engineer habitats.

I wouldn't imagine anyone who dumps their fish into a pond imagines that's going to happen. They don't have to know that that particular thing is going to happen, but they have to know that there's a cost to doing something like that.

I think the point is that most people who use the outdoors are not interested in damaging it, but I think most of them aren't aware of what they're doing.