Anglers enlisted in water fight

By COLLEEN OTTE
Capital News Service
LANSING — Alert anglers are to the Great Lakes what the military is to the United States: the last line of defense against invaders. “Anglers are kind of the eyes and ears on the water for us,” said Seth Herbst, aquatic invasive species coordinator for the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Fisheries Division. A recent study by researchers at Cornell University found that anglers in the Great Lakes region are aware of and concerned about the threat of aquatic invasive species. Already such invaders have significantly altered the ecological makeup of the Great Lakes. In the 1950s and 1980s, populations of alewife, a herring species, peaked in Lake Huron and Lake Michigan.