Michigan State University researchers are tackling a problem no one has ever solved: How do you stop an invasive fish from entering a river without entirely blocking all fish?
A behavioral ecologist and two engineers are on a team commissioned by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, or GLFC. Their objective? Over the next decade, they’re charged with creating a groundbreaking selective fish barrier in Traverse City that’s hailed as the “Holy Grail” of invasive species control. If successful, the barrier, called FishPass, will be the first ever barrier to sort and selectively pass desirable fish, such as lake sturgeon and walleye, into the river, while blocking the invasive and parasitic sea lamprey.
FishPass is the culmination of an effort to reconnect the Boardman/Ottaway River in Traverse City with Lake Michigan. Construction workers broke ground on the project in May, and the state of Michigan recently earmarked $1 million in its budget to support the GLFC efforts. Once FishPass is complete, the goal is to create replicable technology that can be used around the world as a model for invasive species control.
Michael Wagner, an associate professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife’s Applied Behavioral Ecology Lab, is helping the team as an expert on sea lampreys. In a concurrent project, MSU engineers Xiaobo Tan, MSU Research Foundation Professor and Richard M. Hong Endowed Chair in electrical engineering, and Nelson Sepulveda professor of electrical engineering and interim chairperson of Electrical and Computer Engineering, are developing smart panels that could potentially be used as a tool in FishPass.
They’re joining researchers from other universities as well as a core team from state and federal organizations, including the U.S. Geological Survey, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.
Researchers are using what they know about sea lamprey behavior to stop them from reaching the Boardman/Ottaway River before they get a chance to spawn, while letting native fish pass through. How will it work? The team will spend the next 10 years figuring that out, experimenting and testing different techniques to determine how they’ll accomplish selective passage.
A project of this magnitude could only be accomplished through collaboration, said Tan, who is also director of the Smart Microsystems Lab in the College of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Tan is known worldwide for developing a robotic fish, and while he’s an expert in his field, he couldn’t have approached this project without collaborating with researchers in other disciplines, he said.
“When we talk about aquatic ecosystems or animals in water, there’s naturally a need for collaboration,” Tan said. “You have water experts, you have fish ecology experts, and you have engineers like me. Solving these real-world problems requires partnerships across different disciplines and even different institutions.”
See more on invasive species control on MSUToday.
Story written by Bethany Mauger, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
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