Grapefruit Halves

A few weeks back I told someone that working in LA and thinking about New Orleans was like splitting my brain into two halves of a grapefruit and trying to eat them simultaneously.

Well, even though it’s a ludicrous metaphor, I’m still proud that the LA half of my grapefruit did some good work lately.

This week KPCC aired a three part series on aquatic invasive species I did. Stories here, here, and here.

At an Academy of Sciences meeting at Fullerton back in June, I sort of wandered into an invasive species panel because I saw the word “trout.” (We love the trout in my family: my dad taught us how to bait fish, then use spinners and flies, before I could go on roller coasters.)

That’s where I found out that the New Zealand Mud Snail — an invasive snail from, uh, New Zealand — had infested the Hot Creek Hatchery. Now, we love the trout, but we also love California’s long and strange history with fish stocking. Fun facts:
* The eastern side of the Sierra range never had trout in its waters before mountain men got there and put them there.
* The state used to stock more fingerlings before World War II. Now the state stocks grown fish. The fishing burdens are different now, you see; back in the pre-war day, fingerlings had time to grow into wily adversaries for fishermen. Not so much now. I’ve met old guys who say that the fish are dumber now, which I don’t know how to scientifically quantify; but if they are, this might be the reason.
* State (and state-condoned) methods of fish stocking historically have included: milk jugs full of fish on pack mules, air cargo drops, and tanker trucks of mostly-fish-and-some-water lumbering along 395.
* The bodies of water where the golden trout — the state fish — live aren’t where they probably originally lived. Coffeepot transfers are suspected in moving them.

See? So it’s an invasve snail in a hatchery for trout — some of which are non-native and invasive. It’s just that the trout have a little history behind ‘em.

Bigger than this, though, the big stories in invasives this summer are ocean-related: ballast water is the subject of a federal court case and a federal policy debate. In California, some environmentalists represented by the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic are suing the EPA to force it to treat ballast water as pollution; having won at the district court, they’ve just argued at the 9th circuit. And in Washington, Congress has been discussing S. 1578, the catchily titled Federal Ballast Water Management Act of 2007.

I really like the poster the State Lands Commission distributes as part of its public education campaign. It’s beautifully illustrated.

My brother made one of his trademark noises when he saw it (“bleargh”) and pointed out that it could be construed as warning against dumping psychedelic paisley in Golden State ports.

The other freshwater invasion to keep an eye on is the Quagga mussel. The Great Lakes has been in a full figured froth for years over its cousin, the Zebra mussel. All the numbers about cost to infrastructure and the economy are somewhat speculative, but the 750 million to a billion that the EPA used in Congressional testimony seems a start; they get everywhere. It’s not that they haven’t been expecting it to keep moving further west, from lake to lake in the US; it’s that they’ve been trying so hard to prevent it.

These stories have legs now because of money. How California supports the sportfishing industry, though, is a drop in the bucket compared to the international cargo industry…which is not thrilled about being asked to spend money on ballast water testing and research and inspections and preventative management, especially by a piddly little state that might have a different standard than the federal government.

There seems to be nothing harder than to change the way people think about what they do. With the exception of some species in the San Francisco Bay believed introduced by Asian fishermen for food, these invasions are happening because people and the companies that employ them aren’t thoughtful enough in a way that would prevent them. I find that fascinating. A lot of what’s interesting in covering environmental stories is how we can choose to spend money up front to prevent and manage something before it becomes an out-of-hand problem. When we don’t, it’s because we’re assuming a risk. So why not ask this: Is it the right risk to assume this way?