Freshly caught lake whitefish from Lake Michigan. Photograph: Carol Dembinsky/Dembinsky Photo Associates/Alamy
The Great Lakes' most emblematic fish could be consigned to history books. A delicacy for centuries and a key part of Native tradition, the lake whitefish has seen its population crash. Researchers know why … but stopping it is another matter.
From the basement of the Sandusky library, page 29 of the book Sandusky of To-Day proclaims the town to be the “largest fresh water fish market in the world”. Two pages later, an image of the lake whitefish, referred to as “Sandusky’s pride”, takes up the entire page. But the book was published in 1888.
Lake whitefish was a delicacy in this part of North America for centuries. Indigenous communities centered their lives and traditions on the fish. By the mid-1800s, settler communities on the southern shoreline of Lake Erie such as Sandusky cashed in on the demand for lake whitefish, building their economies around its popularity as a food source. But then, beginning in the 1990s, it started to vanish, at first puzzling fishers and researchers who began observing fewer fingerlings and juvenile whitefish in Lake Erie.
Invasive mussels blamed for collapse
The huge fall in the number of the lake whitefish has since been attributed to the slow, implacable march of invasive mussels across the Great Lakes region, and the disappearance of diporeia, an oil-rich, shrimp-like crustacean typically found in cold water between 100 and 400 feet that whitefish fingerlings gorge on. The arrival of freshwater quagga and zebra mussels, which reached the Great Lakes having hitched a ride in the ballast of transatlantic ships, led to their removing phytoplankton, tiny algae and bacteria that the diporeia feed on, setting off a calamitous chain reaction further up the food chain.
While the proliferation of quagga and zebra mussels, which now carpet entire lakebeds for hundreds of miles in any direction, have helped clean the lake system of phosphates and other damaging agricultural and industrial pollutants, their huge numbers are eliminating whole regions of phytoplankton growth. Now, biologists who completed an extensive survey of the fish here in western Lake Erie, the findings of which were released last year, are warning that the species could disappear from parts of the Great Lakes in the next five years.
Devastation for Indigenous fishers
For William Ortiz of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, the decline of the lake whitefish has been little short of disastrous. “It’s the biggest source of income for the tribe’s fishers. We rely on whitefish probably more than anything,” he says. Ortiz started commercially fishing for whitefish off the north-west shores of Lake Michigan in 2015. “There’s been a steady decline even since I started. From 2015 to 2020, there was a noticeable decline. I did it full-time for nine years, but it’s hard to make a living when there’s not a lot of fish out there.”
In the US waters of the Great Lakes commercial fishing for whitefish on a regular basis has fallen off a cliff. While about 200,000 pounds were harvested in Ohio in 2009, last year about 185,000lb were taken from Lake Erie as a whole. The majority of that is harvested late in the year by commercial fishing operations based in Ontario.
Ortiz says that where whitefish spawn along the shoals and shallows of the Great Lakes, zebra mussels have eliminated the diporeia that whitefish fingerlings eat after hatching, “so they’re starving out before they get to a size where they’re moving up in the food chain. “It’s heartbreaking what’s happening. It’s a treaty right; we used to be able to make a living, make enough money from spring till fall to hold yourself over through the winter. Now, it’s hard if not impossible to do that.”
In Lake Superior, the largest, deepest and most northerly of the Great Lakes, invasive mussels have thus far struggled to become as widespread as in the warmer neighboring lakes. But rising temperatures globally that have fueled the warming of Lake Superior mean that could change in the coming decades.
Search for solutions
The overwhelming spread of the mussels has sent scientists and conservationists scurrying for solutions. Recent research suggests that the freshwater drum or sheephead, a fish with powerful molar teeth, eat the mussels and can potentially control their numbers at a local level. A study published in June found that in the waters around Sandusky and western Lake Erie, “freshwater drum were estimated to consume between 611 and 2799 tonnes of dried, digestible dreissenid material [quagga and zebra mussels] annually during 2013–2023”.
Above water, conservationists and researchers are beginning to act upon the challenge, too. In Ohio, the department of wildlife has deployed large tarps secured to the lake bottom under which carbon dioxide is injected to kill the mussels, and used high-pressure water jets to destroy mussel colonies. “Both methods were very effective, but as you might imagine the scale and cost of effectively treating extremely large areas is a significant challenge,” says Travis Hartman of the Lake Erie Fisheries Program at Ohio’s department of wildlife. “It’s fair to say that we are finding ways to be successful, but we have not found cost-effective large-scale ways to meet the needs at a Great Lakes scale.”
Last year, a pair of Michigan congressional representatives introduced a bill that would see $50m each year for a decade dedicated to finding measures to control invasive mussels in the Great Lakes. The bill is currently before Congress. “Just as was the case with lamprey back 70 years ago, invasive mussels will take a huge amount of research, work and cooperation to find a control solution that can be broadly and efficiently applied throughout the Great Lakes and perhaps in freshwater systems throughout North America,” says Greg McClinchey of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. “This legislation will help to fund and manage that coordination … and hopefully lead to a second silver bullet solution.” More discussions among state and provincial leaders on ways to combat the mussels’ spread are planned for later this year.
But Ortiz, who lives in Rapid River on the southern side of Michigan’s upper peninsula, says he and other fishers are sick of the rhetoric. “It’s been studied since the 80s but no remedies have come up. We could study [the mussel problem] for another 100 years but when is somebody going to come up with a solution?” he says. He says that in the 1950s, scientists deployed a lampricide to successfully combat the sea lampreys that got into the Great Lakes and decimated populations of a host of native lake fish species. “But it seems like that in 2026 they can’t come up with a solution for quagga mussels. It kind of just blows my mind.”
McClinchey acknowledges that the challenge of removing or destroying quadrillions of mussels, often hundreds of feet beneath the lake surface, requires a monumental effort. “There is no question that we need to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. The easy part is seeing what the problems are,” he says.
Back in Sandusky, where preparations for an Ironman competition were in full swing on a recent Saturday evening, not a single fisher could be spotted along the town’s lake front. The aforementioned Sandusky of To-Day book notes how of the town’s estimated 16,000 inhabitants in the 1880s, about 1,500 were employed across 10 fishing companies. Today, by contrast, Sandusky’s largest boating store, West Marine, is in the midst of a closing down sale. These days, fishing communities such as Sandusky seem to have moved on, their once-thriving fishing heritage now largely confined to books stored in local libraries.
