Published: October 02, 2009 11:30 pm      

History of bay discussed at summit

TRAVERSE CITY -- Grand Traverse Bay has come a long way.

A glacier more than a mile high once covered it, and today it's the heart of a bustling watershed that supports both fishing and northwestern Lower Michigan's thriving tourism industry.

Trouble is, European settlement in the region made a lasting impact, often negatively.

Tom Kelly, executive director of the Inland Seas Education Association in Suttons Bay, spoke to about 100 people who attended the second Freshwater Summit on Friday at the Hagerty Center in Traverse City. He discussed the history of Grand Traverse Bay, from the days indigenous people used it for transportation and fishing, and through industrialization into modern times.

In 1885, more than 935,000 pounds of whitefish, lake trout and herring were pulled from area waters.

"An enormous amount of fish were taken out of these waters during these days," Kelly said.

Certain types of fish were completely wiped out, including types of cisco and the grayling.

Kelly showed a photograph of the Manistee River fully loaded with logs headed downstream, activity that destroyed fish habitat.

"The grayling lived in the stream and tried to spawn at the exact same time as these log runs," he said.

Then came dam-building, a practice that cut off miles of inland streams for fish spawning and led to the loss of genetic diversity among fish populations. It was a "huge" impact, though now dams close to river's mouths serve as barriers to invasive species like the sea lamprey, Kelly said.

Kelly also discussed the heavy use of the Traverse City waterfront in past decades, including how each year the water became stained red from cherry processing and rafts of cherry pits washed onto beaches.

But the biggest complication came with the opening of the Great Lakes to ocean-going ships that brought dozens of new and invasive species into North America's freshwater inland seas, a system that makes up 20 percent of the world's freshwater supply.

"By far the greatest number of critters that have gotten in here came in ballast waters," Kelly said.

He said zebra and quagga mussels have been the most destructive. Studies show the creatures are the first link in a chain that led to increased algae and plant growth and also to outbreaks of Type E botulism in recent years that killed thousands of birds and fish, Kelly said.