Iconic whitefish on edge of collapse as Great Lakes biodiversity crisis deepens

• Whitefish have remained a staple in the Great Lakes for millennia, surviving threats that decimated other species
• Now, they are on the brink themselves; catches have plummeted, newborns are dying and adults are approaching old age
• Some fear the fish could disappear entirely from their once-prime habitat in the lower Great Lakes

LELAND — Locals and tourists alike flock to The Cove restaurant for Great Lakes whitefish, served 10 ways with a view of the docks where fishermen have hauled in Lake Michigan’s bounty for nearly two centuries.

“Why get something else?” said Bob Hasse, a lifelong Michigander who visits the place every summer. “I can get a hamburger anywhere.”

Fried, baked, smoked, whipped into a pâté or dried and ground into powder in the Anishinaabe tradition, whitefish have been a cornerstone of Great Lakes cuisine and culture for millenia, revered for their mild taste, tenderness and abundance.

Like lobster to Maine and salmon to Alaska, “it is perhaps one of, if not the signature animals in all of the state’s long history,” said Matthew Daley, a Great Lakes historian at Grand Valley State University.

But these days, stocks in Lake Michigan have grown so thin that The Cove often buys whitefish caught hundreds of miles away, rather than from the waters off those historic docks. 

After decades of slow decline, the fish are now on the brink of collapse in most of lakes Michigan and Huron. Invasive mussels at the bottom of the lakes have filtered away microorganisms, leaving behind crystal-clear waters that are a veritable desert for whitefish.

“We’ve literally watched a population (grow old) and disappear in front of our eyes,” said Jason Smith, a Great Lakes biologist with the Bay Mills Indian Community. 

“It makes me sick to say it, but I can’t imagine any way we can change the ecosystem in the amount of time that we have left.”

In lakes that once produced tens of millions of new adult whitefish each year, reproduction has been abysmal since the early 2000s. Commercial harvests have plummeted from 6.9 million pounds in 2009 to less than 2 million in 2024.

Many fish still alive today are in their mid-20s and will soon die of old age if humans or predators don’t kill them first. Like humans, aging fish have a harder time reproducing. And most of the offspring they do produce are dying within days, likely starved or sunburned to death in the unnaturally clear water.

To fix the problem, society must figure out how to subdue the invasive mussels. But at the current level of investment in research, such a discovery is years to decades away.

Alarmed by the decline, state and tribal regulators this year set the most conservative commercial harvest limits on record in central Lake Michigan, slashing catches 94% to 10,000 pounds from 170,200 last year.

Scientists attempting to recover whitefish by hatching them into rivers are struggling to even catch enough fish for the experiment.

More than a blow to the region’s culture, economy and dinner plates, the collapse threatens to tear a hole in the food web, with unpredictable consequences for other species. Some fear whitefish won’t be the last victims as a 21st century biodiversity crisis sweeps over the Great Lakes and the world.

Related: 

• What’s more Michigan than whitefish? Collapse erodes bit of state’s identity
• It’s not just whitefish: 407 Michigan species on brink amid historic die-off
• What are your whitefish memories, Michigan? Beloved fish on the brink
• Whitefish are on brink in Michigan. Can they learn to love rivers to survive?

Life on Earth is vanishing at a rate unmatched in human history. Birds, insects and bats are all in sharp decline and 58 species joined Michigan’s threatened and endangered species list during the most recent update. 

Whitefish command public attention because they’re delicious and beloved. Other species, from sculpin fish to skipperling butterflies, risk fading away largely unnoticed.

“We are losing, by increments, these things that if you made the choice all at once, you’d say ‘Oh, that’s a disaster,’” said Frank Ettawageshik, executive director of the United Tribes of Michigan. 

The end result is “a loss of part of our own identity.”

‘Innocent until proven guilty’

The losses are caused by a web of human threats: fossil fuel consumption is heating the globe faster than plants and animals can adapt. Sprawling development is gobbling up habitat. Pollution is filling seabird bellies with plastic shards and pumping fish full of toxic chemicals.

In the Great Lakes, a startling amount of loss is attributable to the spread of invasive species across land and water, a product of a global economy that allows stowaways to easily travel on ships and planes.  

Few have been more destructive than the quagga mussel, a thumbnail-sized European shellfish that crossed the Atlantic in a cargo ship’s ballast water in the late 1980s. When biologist J. Ellen Marsden sounded alarms a few years later, the response was mostly a shrug.

By then, the lakes had already been transformed multiple times over by other invasives. And the quaggas looked strikingly similar to the invasive zebra mussels that had already colonized the shallow waters.

“There is this really bad tendency to say, well, innocent until proven guilty, " said Marsden, now a professor emeritus at the University of Vermont. 

“People just said…is this really going to be any worse?” 

The answer was yes — far worse. 

Unlike zebras, quaggas can survive in water hundreds of feet deep. They now blanket the lake bottom in 4 out of 5 Great Lakes. Superior has been largely spared because it lacks the calcium mussels need to grow their shells.

The mussels filter the entire volume of lakes Michigan and Huron every couple of weeks, stripping away nutrient-dense plankton and algae and spitting out Carribean-clear water devoid of life.

Spring zooplankton blooms, the primary food source for baby whitefish, have plummeted. Diporeia, a shrimp-like organism eaten by adult whitefish, have also disappeared.

Adults pulled from the lake are thin, their stomachs frequently empty. Beaches that once teemed with billions of juvenile whitefish, called adikameg in the Anishinaabe language, are now desolate. 

Each spring, scientists tow large seine nets along the shoreline to monitor the population. Last year, biologist Tina Van Doornik’s team caught just one whitefish in 36 tows. 

This year hasn't been much better.

“They just don’t exist,” said Van Doornik, who works for Little River Band of Ottawa Indians in Manistee.

“Somewhere between the larval and the juvenile, it just drops off.”

If famine wasn’t bad enough, shorter winters caused by climate change may be destroying whitefish eggs and causing survivors to hatch prematurely into waters where they risk deadly sunburns.

 Sunlight penetrates nearly twice as deep now that plankton and beneficial algae have largely vanished from the lakes. Lab tests at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, showed that after 12 hours under a low dose of UV light, most larval whitefish died within days, their bodies sometimes contorted into a grotesque corkscrew. 

“Wild fish aren't just getting 12 hours of UV exposure,” said Nicole Berry, a US Geological Survey biologist who led the study. “They’re getting exposed every day.”

‘People don’t care’

There are no reliable estimates of how many whitefish are left in the waters that ring the Mitten. 

But Joel Petersen can tell you how empty his nets have become.

On a recent morning, the commercial fisherman who splits his time between Muskegon and Leland pulled just 12 keepers from a net capable of holding thousands.

With that amount, he said, “you can't even pay the property taxes on the dock.”

The fish have long been the backbone of Michigan’s commercial fishing industry, comprising about 90% of sales with a dockside value of about $5 million from state-regulated boats, plus more from tribally-regulated boats. But harvest from Lake Michigan is down 70% since 2009. In Huron, where declines started earlier, it’s down 80% since 2000.

A fourth-generation fisherman, Petersen now takes welding jobs on the side to make ends meet and hopes to hold his license as long as his 73-year-old dad is willing to fish with him.

Some scientists have theorized the mussel population could peak, subside and reach a new equilibrium that allows whitefish to recover. 

If not, “10 years from now there won’t be anybody left fishing,” said Petersen, 45.

Nowadays, what little fish is caught in Lakes Huron and Michigan mostly comes from Saginaw and Green bays, where nutrients from farm run-off compensate for the mussels. But pollution in the bays — from farms and industry — also fuels nuisance algae blooms and makes it unsafe to eat too many fish.

It’s an irony not lost on Steve Lenart, a longtime fish biologist who now works for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. 

“I would have never thought in my life that we'd be saying, ‘Yeah, southern Green Bay is where it’s at for lake whitefish,’” Lenart said.

With the lower lakes increasingly barren, fishing efforts are shifting to the mostly mussel-free waters of Lake Superior.

Outside of those strongholds, scientists are split on whether whitefish might disappear entirely from the waters that ring the Lower Peninsula, or merely dwindle to a tiny remnant population.

It's a shocking prediction for a fish known as one of the Great Lakes’ greatest survivors.

Whitefish survived the logging era, when species like the Arctic grayling disappeared from Michigan’s waters. 

They bounced back from rampant overfishing, unlike the blue pike. 

And whitefish held on even when invasive sea lamprey drove deepwater cisco to extinction.

“They’re such a resilient, marvelous fish,” said Cindi John, a commercial fisher and member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. “The most amazing fish there is.”

Now, she fears a variety of human-caused changes to the lakes have “wiped out our buffalo.”

Other fish also face an uncertain future. 

Salmon numbers have tanked. Invasive mussels are also bad for walleye. And experts fear that lesser-known fish like burbot, gar and suckers may be quietly struggling, too.

With limited public dollars devoted to fish and wildlife management — the DNR receives just 0.5% of the state’s general fund budget — “we just don’t have the resources to evaluate all of these species,” said DNR fisheries biologist David Caroffino.

There are some hopeful stories — lake trout, for instance, have developed a taste for round gobies, an invasive preyfish that seems to thrive on a diet of mussels. But overall, the lakes’ lack of food has dramatically reduced the amount of fish they can produce. 

And the mussels aren’t done expanding their territory.

A door left open

Meanwhile, gaps in invasive species control policies leave the Great Lakes vulnerable to future invaders. 

Since 2008, federal regulations have required oceangoing ships to rinse their ballast tanks with saltwater before entering the Great Lakes, a ritual meant to kill off invasive hitchhikers. It has slowed new introductions from every few months to every three-plus years.

But there is evidence that ships that never leave the Great Lakes, known as lakers, are still spreading invasive species from lake to lake. 

Canada will require those ships to treat their ballast water by 2030. Citing concerns about the cost to industry, the US has chosen a far slower approach.

US-flagged lakers built after 2027 must be equipped with ballast water treatment systems. But existing ships — which can last indefinitely with proper maintenance — are exempt.

The regulations have been challenged in court by environmentalists who want tougher restrictions and a freighter trade group that wants weaker ones.

An industry-funded study estimated the cost to upgrade the Great Lakes fleet at $639 million, plus $11 million in yearly maintenance. A 2005 study put the economic cost of aquatic invasives in the Great Lakes region at $5.7 billion per year, mostly from decreased fishing. 

A top official with the Lake Carriers’ Association argued installing treatment systems would “put us out of business,” threatening a key piece of the $36 billion Great Lakes shipping industry.

“If you really wanted to stop the problem of the spread of invasives, you would stop commerce,” said Jim Weakley, the Lake Carriers’ Association president. 

“You would stop recreation. You would stop people from moving. Ballast water and ships aren't the only factor.”

Climate change will only bring more dramatic change, warming the water and disrupting the seasonal “turnover” cycle that regulates temperature and brings life-giving oxygen to the deepest water. The impacts on native fish likely won’t be positive.

Great Lakes advocates see it all as a rallying cry for stronger invasive species protections, swifter climate action and more effort toward researching solutions for invasive mussels while keeping new invaders out. 

Among other things, they seek more money for invasive species surveillance, boat washing stations at recreational lakes and a crackdown on the exotic species trade.

“There's no reason we can't stop the tide of new invaders coming in, and at the same time help the Great Lakes stabilize and restore where we can,” said Joel Brammeier, president and CEO of the Alliance for the Great Lakes. 

Changing tastes

Hoping to preserve some whitefish to repopulate the lakes if the mussels subside, regulators have tightened limits on both commercial fishers and the recreational anglers who once fished shoulder-to-shoulder from piers during the fall spawning season. 

Allowable catch in central Lake Michigan “will probably go to zero in three to five years,” predicted Archie Martell, fisheries manager for the Little River Band. 

It may matter little: The fish are already so scarce, most anglers have given up trying to catch them. 

Back at The Cove restaurant, executive chef Chris Smith is bracing for the worst.

Whitefish has been a mainstay at the restaurant for decades. A vintage menu from the 1970s advertises a filet baked in lemon butter and wine for $8.50. 

During peak summer season, The Cove goes through 1,500 pounds a week. But now, Smith often must call multiple suppliers to secure that much. He’s tried supplementing with walleye, but “people want the whitefish," he said. “That’s all they want.”

And if one day there’s simply not enough to meet demand? 

Maybe diners will open their hearts to Atlantic cod.