Status of non-indigenous benthic invertebrates in the Duluth–Superior Harbor and the role of sampling methods in their detection

Potential for DNA-based identification of Great Lakes fauna: match and mismatch between taxa inventories and DNA barcode libraries

“… 62 . Extant benthic macroinvertebrates were compiled from refs 43 , 56 , 57 , 59 , 60 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 and lists provided by U.S. EPA’s Great Lakes National Program Office. Threatening-to-invade lists for all the target taxonomic groups were compiled from refs 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 75 and 76 .…”

Establishment patterns of non-native fishes: Lessons from the Duluth–Superior harbor and lower St. Louis River, an invasion-prone Great Lakes coastal ecosystem

“…We must recognize that an "observer-and-his-chosen-reference frame-and-ruler" bias (Levin, 1992) comes with any phenomenological description and overcome it to the extent possible through sampling design and survey approaches (Trebitz et al, 2009(Trebitz et al, , 2010.…”

Dreissena veligers in western Lake Superior – Inference from new low-density detection

“…Settled zebra and quagga mussels now occur and persist within APIS waters but remain very localized and low-density (Lafrancois et al 2019), and our own benthos sampling effort yielded no new finds. It could be argued that PONAR samplers, whose effectiveness is limited to soft substrates, would miss Dreissena that preferentially occupy hard substrates (where diver surveys found them; Lafrancois et al 2019), but our Hester-Dendy and rockbag samplers also yielded no Dreissena at APIS (despite proving attractive to them in other locations; Trebitz et al 2010), and none of the videos over hard or mixed hardness substrates (N=36) had Dreissena either. Furthermore, we found no Dreissena settling on the ropes, buoys, and cinderblock anchors used to deploy our samplers, even though multiple previous studies show Dreissena settlement on such materials (e.g., Kobak 2004;Muetig et al 2010).…”

“…All invertebrate samples were rinsed through 64 micron sieves and preserved in 95% ethanol in the field, with ethanol later refreshed in the lab to ensure adequate preservation. Organisms collected in benthic invertebrate samples were enumerated according to protocols described in Trebitz et al (2010), which consist of complete counts and best-possible taxonomic resolution for all taxa except oligochaetes and chironomids where a subsample is slide-mounted for best-possible resolution identification.…”

“…Lake Superior stands as an exception to the other Laurentian Great Lakes when it comes to Dreissena. Dreissenid mussels have been established in the St. Louis River estuary (also known as the Duluth-Superior harbor) at the far western end of Lake Superior since 1989 (Grigorovich et al 2008;Trebitz et al 2010) but barring isolated reports representing a few individual mussels (GLANSIS 2018), had not colonized Lake Superior proper. An introduction vector is clearly present --Dreissena are readily transported by boats (adults attached to hulls, veligers in live wells and ballast water) and Lake Superior is regularly transited by commercial and recreational boats from the lower Great Lakes and the St. Louis River estuary (De Ventura et al 2016;Holeck et al 2004) --so researchers had thought the failure of Dreissena to establish was because Lake Superior proper was inhospitable to their survival and growth (too cold, too unproductive, insufficient calcium for shell formation; Grigorovich et al 2003;Whittier et al 2008).…”