Great Lakes

The U.S. Coast Guard has a message for us: knock it off with the prank calls. 

The Coast Guard is seeing a big jump in phony distress calls: more than 160 made across the Great Lakes so far this year.

At the same time the Trump Administration is pushing to slash funding for the Great Lakes, a commercial fisherman has discovered a live Asian carp just nine miles from Lake Michigan.

Duane Chapman is a research fish biologist who leads Asian carp research for the U.S Geological Survey. He told Stateside how the Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee is formulating its next steps.

This week, experts are getting together in Ann Arbor to make a warning system for meteotsunamis in the Great Lakes. We have on average 106 meteotsunamis in the lakes each year.

Green infrastructure is the focus of a conference at Detroit’s Cobo Center this week.

The people behind it say it’s time to start thinking differently about how we handle storm water throughout the Great Lakes; but make sure we do it right.

Lawmakers across the United States, both Republicans and Democrats, have been reacting to President Trump’s White House budget proposal released Tuesday.

Among the many cuts, the budget excludes funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, and cuts research funding for the National Institutes of Health by $5 billion. Former president, Barack Obama signed a bipartisan bill that allowed for the funding.

The broad takeaway from President Trump's budget proposal, released earlier today, is this:

Military spending and high-earners win, while social safety net programs and the Great Lakes lose.

Stateside spoke with Dustin Walsh of Crain’s Detroit Business about the proposed budget and how it would affect Michigan. Walsh said, like most budget proposals, this one represents something closer to a “wish list” than an actual policy proposal.

Plastic bags are all around us. They’re a persistent litter problem on land and along the Great Lakes. Some cities have tried to ban bags or charge a fee for them. But it's hard to make these bans stick.

Lake Michigan is a giant time capsule. It swallows stuff up and spits it back out somewhere down the line, both in time and place.

All sorts of things get pushed up on the beach by waves in summer and by the freezing and thawing of ice in the winter. When the snow melts in spring, there aren’t that many people combing through the odds and ends in search of lost treasure or even just cleaning up the trash. That means it's easier to see how Lake Michigan is its own special sort of time capsule coughing up treasures up and down the shore.

The U.S. Geological Survey reports since the turn of the last century, water levels of Lake Michigan have increased in a series of even higher peaks. One was in 1964. An expensive house in St. Joseph was taken by the lake.

There was damage up and down Michigan’s coast. Another high lake water moment spanned from 1985 to 1987, and again there was a lot of damage to homes, beachfront property and industry.

Now that President Trump has signed the spending bill, Great Lakes funding is safe, at least for now.

The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative is funded in full for 2017. But Trump wants to eliminate this funding entirely in his 2018 budget proposal.

The rules for commercial fishing in Michigan are being rewritten in Lansing. The law is old and needs to be updated. There are only 21 non-tribal businesses licensed by the state to catch fish for market. Tribes fish under their own rules.

Fish consumption advisories usually focus on one chemical at a time – like mercury – and these advisories tell you how much of each kind of fish you should eat, and what to avoid. But they don’t often tell you much about mixtures of different chemicals in the environment that could be in fish.

The buildup of nutrients in western Lake Erie can trigger algae growth – and contaminate drinking water in nearby cities. That happened as recently as 2014, when Toledo residents could not drink their water for two days.