Why are invasive species returned to Canada's waterways?
Hundreds of comments on a recent post. It’s an invasive species sparked questions. What do you do with them afterwards? Go down the water slide into the Hamilton Harbor. So let’s get to the bottom of this. Why are invasive species being thrown back into our waterways instead of just eliminating them? Ideally, we would remove them from the system. What do you do with them after you remove them from the system? In wetland areas like Hamilton Harbor, which are contaminated, their tissues are contaminated too. So these are compounds like PCBS and heavy metals. Fertilizer is applied specifically to grow plants. We don’t want that stuff in our food chain. The second an important consideration is what kind of process would you use to euthanize the fish? If you’re dealing with 10s of thousands of these big carp every year, how do you humanely put them down? The rules and regulations say that if you happen to find a prohibited invasive species well recreationally fishing that you must destroy it immediately. So why can this operation do otherwise? We would be dealing with thousands of fish. The disposal problem becomes huge. The decision was made and approved by the the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry and DFO and everybody else involved that the best solution for this situation was to turn the fish back to the harbor.