This short video (5:35) highlights the round goby, an invasive fish in the Great Lakes, along with research supported by Wisconsin Sea Grant investigating their impact on WI streams.

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To look at it, the round goby doesn’t seem like much. A small fish the approximate size of an average pickle, it seems like the sort of creature that’d be dominated in the aquatic universe, not the dominator.

But, the voracious goby has used strength of numbers to wreak serious damage on the gentle Goliath that is the Great Lakes food web.

Worse, in what some researchers have dubbed a “classic ecological surprise,” the gobies haven’t limited their invasive ways to the Great Lakes. Over the past decade, they’ve also migrated to Wisconsin’s streams and rivers, where researchers are very concerned they could have a similar devastating effect on the ecosystem.

Beginning in 2007, using funding provided by University of Wisconsin Sea Grant, UW-Madison ecologist Jake Vander Zanden and UW graduate student Matt Kornis set out to discover just what kind of impact the gobies might be having. Using nets and a portable electro-fishing system, Kornis and a team of student researchers sampled and analyzed goby populations at 150 different stream locations along Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan coast.

Of the 75 streams Kornis’s team sampled, 26 contained gobies. In more than 80 percent of those sample sites, the goby population was deemed small, with the remaining 10 percent described as “superabundant.” Kornis and Vander Zanden remain focused on tracking the inevitable progress of the goby. They’ve identified and mapped 1300 kilometers of Wisconsin streams that are at risk for goby invasion, based on habitat suitability and natural migration projections from areas where the fish have already become established.

Aaron R. Conklin developed this video in 2012.

Watch the video here

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