(lighthearted music) - The canal system, it can potentially act as a highway for aquatic invasive species, whether they're plants or animals or inverts.

Round goby are native to Eurasia, the Black and Caspian Sea, and they were first introduced to North America in the Great Lakes in the early 1990s.

The original introduction of round goby occurred through ballast water, which is water stored within ships to keep them at a certain elevation in the water.

In the early 1990s, ballast water from Europe was released in the Great Lakes themselves.

Since that time, laws have changed and now ballast water is exchanged at sea.

By the late 1990s, they were documented in Lockport, New York, on the western edge of the Erie Canal.

Over the next 10 years or so, they dispersed eastward on the Erie Canal into Oneida Lake.

Round goby first reached the Hudson River in, I believe, 2021, and there was kind of very rapid dispersal downstream to Newburgh.

They'll be impacting all the macroinvertebrates, the other small benthic fish in that area.

They'll also feed on eggs of other fish, as well as can transfer several diseases between round goby and other fish species, so they can lead to mortality events.

If round goby were to make it into Lake Champlain, it would negatively impact economic activities within the region, - The Canal Corporation, New York State DEC, and other partners who have vested interest in maintaining a healthy fishery in Lake Champlain, a thriving economy in the communities that live along the canals, and figuring out what the future use of the system is, it's largely recreational, the goal is to continue recreation through the Champlain Canal and not interrupt or end that use, but to look very seriously at how we can alter how people move through the system and prevent the invasives from moving through the system.

Where we know that they're present is we've got fish in hand right below Lock C-1.

Part of our role at the Lake Champlain Basin Program is we have a rapid response task force with experts from New York, Vermont, and Quebec that get together regularly and help utilize a rapid response fund to do early detection, monitoring, and management of invasive species in Lake Champlain and the surrounding watershed.

And so in this case, we've been supporting USGS to do early detection, monitoring of round goby using a number of different methods.

- We have seven sites that are being studied routinely, trying to screen for the possible upstream movement of round goby.

(soft music) You know, we've captured and identified and took data on and released, say, you know, 50 fish here today and probably even more than that at the upstream site at Fort Edwards.

So those fish will be used to form a baseline dataset of what the fish community looked like prior to round goby invasion.

Obviously, we're hoping that, you know, round goby don't reach this point.

But if they were to reach this point, we would be able to actually quantify their impacts on the fish community by looking, essentially, at a before and after invasion, you know, study.

There has been a detection of round goby DNA immediately upstream of the Lock C-2.

We've been sampling multiple times a year since 2022.

We anticipate we will likely continue that until the invasion front of round goby, you know, changes in some significant way that causes us to revisit that study plan.

- We developed a threshold action response plan, and that's a partnership, a document that was developed by the DEC and NYPA Canals.

Some of those actions include scheduled locking before any boats use the locks moving upstream.

The lock is emptied twice in a row, and that creates a lot of turbulence at the base where round goby might be to kinda flush them out.

Oftentimes, once an aquatic species is introduced, it becomes really difficult to manage if you don't catch it early.

(pensive music) - So right now we're in Broadalbin, New York, and we're at a boat inspection station, and we have boat stewards here throughout the summer months and all throughout New York State, over 200 different launches throughout New York State.

And what we're doing here today is we're checking boaters entering the water, figuring out where they've been, and making sure the boat have been cleaned, drained, dried.

There's a lot of different cavities in the boat, which can have water in them, and we'll hit it with 140-degree hot pressured water and flush it out, and then it flushes onto this mat, and then the sun will kill anything in it.

We're really trying to team up with canals, put a few more decons in the Mohawk, the Hudson River.

We wanna put a boat, a wash system there in the Fort Edward area, which ties into Lake Champlain.

So stopping the round gobies on their march northward.

- Over the last 30, 40 years, quite a bit has changed in the way we're managing invasive species.

Here in New York, we have a fairly large invasive species management program now that didn't really exist back in the 1990s.

It's grown to this Bureau of Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health.

Some of the species that we're concerned with other than round goby are things like zebra mussels or quagga mussels.

There are a number of aquatic plants that we're concerned with.

Hydrilla, that has been reported in the Erie Canal and it's being managed.

Water chestnut is a major problem in the Erie Canal, in the Mohawk section of that and moving further west.

It's also in the Champlain Canal.

- The long vision is looking at a number of different taxa that might enter the lake through the canal system and thinking about an invasive species solution that could address plants and animals and pathogens as well as clams and mussels and things like that.

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