119 



What have been the costs? Substantial over time, but primarily with the sea lam- 

 prey in the Great Lakes. GAO says that about $10 million per year is spent on lam- 

 prey control, an equal amount in stocking fishes in the Great Lakes, an admitted 

 drop in the bucket of Federal spending, but to not do so could cost $500 million an- 

 nually in lost values. The recently (about 1986) introduced rufFe, a fish from Europe, 

 could cost $90 million per year in lost revenue as a result of its future potential 

 damage to Great Lakes fisheries and related businesses. Some State and Federal 

 agencies are now trying to eradicate previously transplanted native fishes to assure 

 survival of equally economically important native fishes. Nevertheless, dollar values 

 cannot be placed on any one or all species within a biological community, and is 

 a patently unjust way to judge their worth. The health of aquatic resources is in 

 its biodiversity, water quality, and the inner workings of ecological interactions of 

 each species with its environment — unmeasurable in economic terms. Only when, by 

 human error (including introductions), habitats or parts of ecosystems collapse do 

 we begin to feel an economic impact at the time it effects some species that we de- 

 pend on. Our value system seems to lack a sense of recognition that everything can- 

 not be measured in dollars, and pays little attention to necessary stewardship for 

 our biological resources, whether or not they are consumable. 



How did this situation come about? It happened because fi"om the start, fisheries 

 resource agencies, Federal and State, were created to provide the public with 

 catchable fishes, for commercial or recreational purposes. None of these agencies 

 was established to be a conservation agency, although that is how most of the public 

 views them. Thus, those agencies have often opted to manage for fishing — not nec- 

 essarily for fishes. The Federal Government set the example, and the other entities 

 followed. States inherited most of this task because the Constitution allowed them 

 to do so. 



Where do we go from here? First, the Federal Government must set a new exam- 

 ple to be followed by creating a policy on introductions that recognizes the non-eco- 

 nomic values of biological entities and requires extensive research and peer review 

 on potential impacts before (or if) introductions are permitted to be made. Without 

 that leadership, this mission will fail. Secondly, States need to be cooperating on 

 an ecosystem basis rather than doing what each one feels best for its own interests 

 (= fishes do not recognize political boundaries) with introductions. The weapon to 

 make certain that these things happen is financial aid to States, under control of 

 the Federal Government. 



PREPARED STATEMENT OF BRUCE E. COBLENTZ 



Non-indigenous species (hereafter called exotics) are those species not native to 

 a particular biotic community that have been introduced via human activity. Exotics 

 that undergo rapid population growth and range extension from their point of intro- 

 duction are generally referred to as being invasive. 



Exotics, and especially invasive exotics, are substantially different from other 

 forms of ecological disturbance. Whereas the environmental effects of pollution, 

 overharvesting, poor grazing practices, and even strip-mining can be expected to di- 

 minish over time after the offending activity is halted, exotic organisms, once estab- 

 lished in a community, are usually permanent. Thus, if we are having a severe ef- 

 fect on the biota of a river by allowing some pollutant to enter, that effect will pro- 

 gressively diminish once the source of the pollution is terminated. Conversely, if a 

 handful of zebra mussels {Dreissena) are put into the same river, the effects of those 

 mussels and their multitudinous descendants will probably be permanent. Although 

 the zebra mussel example is perhaps the most discussed recent exotic species night- 

 mare, and projected costs associated with it are over $4 billion over the decade of 

 the 90*8, it is far from being the most calamitous introduction into North America, 

 even when considering that the $4 billion estimate does not begin to account for loss 

 of productivity of native species or even extinctions of native species due to usurped 

 space or nutrient resources. 



In 1492, Columbus and his party landed on the island of Hispanola in the Carib- 

 bean. There may have been over one million indigenous people living there at the 

 time of first contact. When Columbus again landed on Hispanola only 2 years later, 

 the majority of the indigenous people had perished due to smallpox {Variola), a 

 virus not native to the new world. In fact, smallpox was not even native to the Eu- 

 rope that it so thoroughly infected for several centuries. Its origin was apparently 

 in East Asia, having been brought by traders first to the middle east: from there 

 it travelled on to Europe with the returning crusaders. Considering that after Euro- 

 pean contact, more indigenous North and South American humans died fi"om small- 



