Excellent question. There are case studies we can look at. I can cite two where I know they've been very successful. There's an animal called the black-striped mussel, it's like a zebra mussel; it attaches to things. They found it in a port in Australia. The cordoned off the port and they blasted it with chemicals to kill it. In another case, an algae called the killer algae, which came from the Mediterranean Sea, was found down in San Diego. It lives on the bottom of the sea and grows up. Scuba divers found patches of this stuff and so they were able to put tarps over top of it and then they threw chlorine pucks underneath the tarps and they managed to kill it.
The important thing there is that there are two success stories and both of them have involved aquatic ecosystems, but we're talking essentially about a two-dimensional environment. It's not open water. These are things that are living on the bottom.
So if we have organisms that are living in the water, like spiny water fleas, we're not likely going to be successful in trying to eradicate them if they get in. If that happens, then you've just lost the game. If zebra mussels get into your lake, you've lost the game. It's highly unlikely you're ever going to get permission to go in and chlorinate or put sufficient potassium in to kill all the animals in the lake; people aren't going to tolerate that.
So what we're trying to determine is whether there are cases where success can be predicted or failure can be predicted. What I can tell you is that I know of a couple of cases where... For example, there is this macrophyte I mentioned in my opening comments, which is in the Trent-Severn waterway, and they've spent at least two years now trying to eradicate the plant. The problem is that if you miss only a couple of seeds, then you think you got everything and you come back the next year and the thing's growing again. In some cases you may have to return repeatedly before you're actually going to be able to claim victory on that.
We're only at the stage now where we're assembling cases from throughout the world where people have either been successful or unsuccessful, and we're trying to relate it to the size of the habitat, the type of intervention, and ask, “Were they trying to eradicate the species?”—such as with the black-striped mussel that I mentioned—or “Were they trying to control the spread?”
In Ontario we had the emerald ash borer. How many people know what an emerald ash borer is? It's a beetle. It arrived in wood packing materials on a ship, literally, into almost my backyard. This thing just took off and it's spreading through. I think it's into Quebec now and it's over in Wisconsin. It's like a big bomb has gone off with this thing.
Initially, they tried to reduce its spread by cutting a 10 kilometre swath from Lake St. Clair down to Lake Erie where they said we can prevent the dispersal of the beetle if we remove all the ash trees it lives in. They went onto both public and private property and cut all the ash trees out, and they found it was unsuccessful because someone had already moved the beetles east of where they were cutting. So there are case studies like that where you have to be very certain that someone hasn't already taken them beyond what you're trying to do.
A third strategy is suppression, and the most common example of that.... And you may hear about it from the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, whose mandate is largely to reduce the problems caused by sea lamprey in the Great Lakes. So they have a wide array of techniques that they're using to try to kill the larvae of the fish before they can go in and cause problems in the Great Lakes. That's a successful example of a suppression, but you notice that they're not exterminating the fish from the Great Lakes. That doesn't appear to be possible.
We are looking at that, though. I think it's an important thing so you can then tell the government, look, before you try to remove this fish from a stream, you should be aware that 15 previous studies have tried this and only one of them worked.