Fisheries committee  Thank you very much. Good afternoon. My name is Hugh MacIsaac. I'm a professor at the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research at the University of Windsor. I'm also the director of the Canadian Aquatic Invasive Species Network. I've been working on invasive species for

Fisheries committee  This is one of the problems that we have in sampling organisms, particularly underwater organisms and if they're microscopic. We go out and we collect samples with nets. We bring them back to our lab and we analyze them under a microscope. It's very painstaking work. Typically, w

Fisheries committee  It's a good question. In our CAISN network in this particular project, we actually are doing three complementary studies at the same time. Number one, we're doing this pyrosequencing. Number two, we're collecting and we're splitting that sample. For a species for which we can

Fisheries committee  Transport doesn't have a research arm, unlike DFO, but what Transport has done is they have provided funding to research groups to try to get work done that they feel needs to be done. We have been working with Transport funding for up to 10 years now. When Transport came up wi

Fisheries committee  I'd hate to say that we ought to be regulating those ships because before we regulated the other vessels, we had to determine the risks they posed. That risk, for the Great Lakes at least, was determined largely by the evidence that we saw—that somewhere between 55% and 70% of th

Fisheries committee  There are actually two ways to analyze environmental DNA. Some of you are familiar with this technique being used in the Chicago area to analyze for the presence of two Asian carp species. In that case, they selected a single gene, a sequence of DNA bases, that they knew was spec

Fisheries committee  A very good question. Every time we go out sampling, we collect replicate samples with a tow net. We go from near the bottom of the port to the surface water of the port. The net is one-half metre in diameter. We use two different nets: one that has 80-micrometre mesh, a very fi

Fisheries committee  That's another good question. We're trying to be as comprehensive as possible, because we recognize some species occur in the spring, some occur in the summer, and some occur perhaps in late fall. What we're doing with our research sampling is we're going to each of those 16 po

Fisheries committee  This is why it's expensive.

Fisheries committee  The shipping industry has been very accommodating. They don't like to be portrayed as environmental villains. They know they have a problem. From the time that I first started working with them 10 years ago, even before Transport Canada brought in their regulations in 2006, we ha

Fisheries committee  Thank you. It's a huge issue. Some of these species we're dealing with are from the Black Sea basin. You hear the word “sea”, and you say, why are marine species coming into the Great Lakes? They're not strictly marine species. They live in coastal areas, in river outflows in the

Fisheries committee  Okay. So it's a big problem. There are lots of secondary vectors, which is what we would call them, that allow them to spread.

Fisheries committee  In this case in terms of transmitting information, ultimately I am in charge for our research network. We just began a new five-year installment last year of this network. But with our previous one, when we finished that network we came up with, essentially, a book in which we

Fisheries committee  Absolutely. With respect to the ships, I don't think there is any education that needs to be done. What we need there is regulation, if and when it's required.

Fisheries committee  In terms of outreach, the primary group that we work with is called the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, and I believe you're going to have one of their representatives speak here, if they haven't already. They try to educate boaters on how to prevent aquatic invasive s