It basically got into Lake Ontario through the St. Lawrence River. There were absolutely no dams or anything, so it must have made its way up through the St. Lawrence River into Lake Ontario. The first mention made of it, that I found, was in 1835.
Now, of course it destroyed the fisheries in Lake Ontario in the short term. However, it was actually our doing. In fact, thank you very much for raising that issue. It was basically our fault. We allowed it to get into the upper Great Lakes when we built the Welland Canal to allow commercial shipping to get up there. At that time, nobody thought about the fact that, my God, they could get up there using the same waterway, which unfortunately they did.
I'm glad you brought this up. I know the time is very short, but if I may, in this context I think what is very important, in fact probably most important, is prevention. I mean, you have to realize that with a terminator like this, we'll be spending probably millions and millions of dollars—as long as we have money or we care about trying to control it—but this is only one of the 186 or so species that got in during only the last 10 or 20 years. So you have to think very, very carefully as a legislative body what you allow in.
To give you another example, I went to a Chinese fish market in Toronto. I went in because I love fish and I always look out for fish. When I went in there, I saw a whole bunch of fish that are not in Ontario, that are not in Canada, swimming happily around in tanks. I'm just thinking, “If somebody buys one of these....”
We buy piranhas for kids, in the aquarium trade. The kids after a while realize that as piranhas grow up, they have teeth on one end, so they put them in the nearest water body. Then you see a little newspaper in southern Ontario saying, “Oh, a kid caught a piranha in the local lake. How did that happen?”
Well, in exactly the same way, we allow, for business reasons or whatever, stuff to be introduced and then get out. Why do we suddenly have on our hands the problem with the five Asian carp species? It is for the very same reason: they were introduced to control some kind of vegetation and aquaculture purposes, I understand, in the southern states. And it's not “if” they get out; for any kind of aquatic species, it's “when”, literally. So they did get out. There was a flood and they overran the dike. They got into the Mississippi River system, and it's a wildfire coming towards Canada.
To my mind, as a scientist...and I teach invasive species biology to students. Please don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to lecture you on this. This is just kind of a desperate plea from a scientist that we have to be very careful about what we allow to come into the country in living form, because once it's in, there's absolutely no control over where it's going to be thrown or let loose. We put the goldfish into the toilet—out of sight, out of mind.
There are exotic catfish, for example, that you think won't survive Lake Ontario. One of my colleagues caught, during regular electrofishing beside the Pickering plant.... The plant puts out all that warm water from the cooling operations and it creates this kind of warm-water ecosystem, so those catfish survive in that area.
Okay, I know, that's just one individual, but these animals have been literally, over evolution, “trained” to survive everything they can. Hence we have to be very, very careful with what we allow to come in.
I'm sorry; I probably overspoke my....