David Lodge Great Quotations

The electric barrier is crude but it's the best thing we have now. The irony is the barrier was first proposed to keep round gobies (another fish invader in the Great Lakes) from colonizing the Mississippi River watershed, but by the time the barrier was built they had already passed it. Now the motivation is to keep the carp from coming from the other direction.

We might have been able to say 20 years ago that it was unanticipated consequence, but we know now that a shipload could bring in a bunch of invasive species into the Great Lakes.

The damages are far reaching - from the shoreline, to the pipes of power plants and municipal waterworks, to the many other lakes and rivers that are under threat and indeed under harm as zebra mussels and many other species spread from the Great Lakes across the continent.