Project connects emerald shiners between the Niagara River and Lake Erie
Lake Erie offers one of the best freshwater fisheries in the world, featuring walleye, perch, trout and bass. People around Buffalo appreciate access to the great lake and its natural beauty. There are financial benefits as well. Some estimate that fishing in Lake Erie generates a $1 billion revenue stream.
Neither the beauty nor the economic gain, however, could exist without the emerald shiner, a small minnow at the base of the food chain. Approximately three inches long, emerald shiners are eaten by larger fish and birds, making them vital to the lake’s health.
The emerald shiner population has seesawed across seasons, affecting the overall prosperity of Lake Erie. It has taken some time to understand an evolving ecosystem, but researchers have pinpointed the cause: increased current in the Niagara River, just north of the Peace Bridge. The emerald shiner cannot swim for long against that strong current. A logical question followed: to maintain the health of Lake Erie, could the river’s current be slowed?
“It’s a bit of a wonky story, but the solution is very cool,” said Tim Noon, a project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Buffalo.
A wonky story that addresses science, ecology, fishing and overall regional prosperity. Scientists from the University at Buffalo, Buffalo State University, and several government agencies are working together, using local innovation and technology to reverse the trend of decreasing fish and bird populations.
Fast water
“In the Niagara River, Lake Erie, and really all the Great Lakes, the emerald shiner are the base of the food web for a lot of fish and birds,” Noon explained. “Anything the lives in or around the river depends on these little minnows. In the food chain, all the bigger fish eat these tiny fish. So the healthy populations of other fish depend on the healthy populations of the emerald shiner.
“You can see them from the shore, so they would seem to be in relative abundance. People yard them out by the bucketful. The nearby Burmese community cooks with them. Some people use them as bait. You see them and think there’s a lot of them.”
Science, however, tells a different story — a result of the changing landscape around Buffalo. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is aware of such changes. The Buffalo office addresses issues along Lake Erie, from Toledo, Ohio, to Massena, a town in Northern New York near the St. Lawrence Seaway. Noon, 42, coordinates several projects at once, specializing in invasive species and habitat work. Part of his job is understanding geography and history.
The former Broderick Park, at the tip of Unity Island just north of the Peace Bridge, was renamed Freedom Park in 2023. With its proximity to Canada, this was a key site for the Underground Railroad. Before the Civil War, many slaves migrated north, shuttling to freedom on the Black Rock Ferry.
“This is an important spot for shiner,” Noon noted, “but culturally, this is an important piece of American history.”
In the shadow of the I-190 highway that clings to the river’s edge, Freedom Park occupies a man-made island.
“Long ago, in the 1800s, the Niagara River emerged from Lake Erie and took a big sweeping bend into the city near Black Rock,” Noon explained. “The island didn’t exist. It was made by garbage that the city filled in over time, to effectively make an island. When they did that, the river got narrower, the river got faster, and instead of having a natural shoreline, the river is lined by vertical steel and concrete walls to protect the island. Typically what happens on a natural shoreline is that rocks and trees and curves would slow the water down. When you have a vertical wall, velocity just rips along it.”
Between the island and Canada, current flows fast and strong. Water is turbulent, Noon said, and treacherous for humans. Several people have died in this stretch of the Niagara River after becoming submerged, unable to navigate its currents.
Through the 1980s and 90s, observers noticed a decline in the common tern population along the breakwaters in Buffalo. The tern is a bird that lives along the Niagara River.
“They also noticed that certain fish populations would crash and not be healthy,” Noon said. “There was a long study period to figure out why, involving partners from the University at Buffalo, Buffalo State University, and Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper. The Army Corps got involved. People asked, ‘What’s going on here? What’s the problem?’”
Emerald shiners were the problem.
“We came to realize that there was a barrier to emerald shiner passage in the Niagara River,” Noon said. “The water velocities are too fast at Freedom Park to allow shiners to move up and downstream. We studied up and down the river, to see where shiners are moving and not moving.”
An 800-foot stretch of the Niagara River was identified as too fast for shiners. It was time to formulate a solution.
Flume study
Why would it matter if emerald shiners couldn’t swim for a limited distance in the Niagara River? They already existed there and in Lake Erie.
“Physical connectivity is important to the health of an entire ecosystem,” said Dr. Sean J. Bennett, Associate Dean for Social Sciences and a geography professor at the University at Buffalo. “If fish cannot move freely up or downstream, that impairs the health and integrity of all the animals in that ecosystem.”
Bennett, 61, has been a UB professor for 21 years. He and a team of fellow professors and students, including Joseph Atkinson, civil engineering professor, have been researching emerald shiner behavior for approximately five years. Bennett credits Alicia Perez-Fuentetaja, a colleague from Buffalo State University, for starting the process of addressing emerald shiner population decreases.
“She’s a biologist who was monitoring populations of emerald shiners,” Bennett said. “She coordinated an effort with the Corps of Engineers that was funded by the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.”
The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, nicknamed GLRI, began in 2010 with cooperation from the governors of Great Lakes states. According to their website, its aim is to “protect and restore the largest system of fresh surface water in the world.” Long term goals include having fish that are safe to eat, water that is safe for recreation and healthy to drink, eliminating nuisance algae blooms, and protecting and restoring habitats to sustain native species.
Perez-Fuentetaja collected emerald shiners and brought them to UB, where Bennett and his team ran fish swimming trials — almost like Olympic Games for minnows.
“We put these fish in a small conduit or flume,” Bennett explained. “We ran currents through the flume to determine the swimming capabilities of the fish. The emerald shiner had a sustained swimming speed of about 40 or 50 centimeters per second. The velocity along the seawall at Freedom Park is about three times faster than that.”
Like most animals, emerald shiners have a burst speed, where they are able to accelerate for a short time. They are not, however, able to maintain that burst for 800 feet. So researchers created a model to simulate flow in the Niagara River, then designed obstacles, or baffles, that might slow currents.
“We ran experiments that would achieve slower water velocity,” Bennett said. “But we didn’t know if fish would behave the way we wanted them to behave.”
In and around a baffle, water slowed to approximately one-half meter per second. Would emerald shiners maneuver in and out of crevices in the man-made baffles, or move toward the middle of the river?
“Fish swim in schools,” Bennett said. “They like to be close to edges. Maybe they feel safer. Maybe it helps their life cycle. It’s an innate behavioral response for a fish this small to remain close to a boundary. If given the choice, our demonstrations showed that 80 or 90 percent of time, fish swim near the baffles.”
What if larger baffles were attached to the Unity Island seawall? That design slowed current in lab trials, but would it work in the mighty Niagara River? And more importantly, would emerald shiners benefit?
Baffles
“From that study, they devised a conceptual design to slow the current enough that shiners can pass,” Noon said. “Their design used staggered baffles along the sea wall, and it was modeled in their flume. In those tests, they were able to slow the water down.”
On the other side of Unity Island, the current is slower in the Black Rock canal. But there is not enough prime habitat for emerald shiner to thrive there. The canal’s edges are hardened, and food is minimal.
“And they aren’t advanced enough as a creature to say, ‘let’s shoot up the canal and take a right,’” Noon said.
Eight hundred feet is a long stretch of river, so in 2022, as part of a larger effort to strengthen Unity Island’s seawall, the Army Corps of Engineers built just 78 feet of a demonstration project. The total cost of improving the infrastructure was $1.6 million, funded through the GLRI. Nine baffles are visible when looking over the railing near the right angle of Ferry’s Landing. Contoured like a hexagon split in two, or a trapezoid without a base, the baffles are bolted to the steel seawall in a staggered formation. As seen in the lead photo with this story, they span six feet vertically, emerging above the water line.
In January 2022, baffles were installed by a local industrial diving company.
“Attaching the baffles was wild,” Noon said. “When we design a project, we put it out for bid and let the contractor decide how to best approach the issue. We thought maybe they would cordon off a section of the river and de-water it.”
The company fabricated something similar to a shark cage that attached to the end of an excavator. On its upstream side was an angular metal arm to deflect debris, ice, and water. In the cage, a marine construction diver had hot water pumped into his wet suit so he could work through icy cold water and maintain a stable temperature. Air and oxygen attachments allowed him to weld from the cage.
Since the baffles have been installed, there is plenty of scientific and anecdotal evidence that the project is working.
“We monitored everything for two seasons,” Noon said. “Our biologists came and put cameras and velocity meters in the water to watch emerald shiner behavior. We wanted to see if current slowed along the seawall, and it did. In our pre-construction videos, there were no fish. Occasionally one would come screaming by, and it was hilarious to see. Now, there are big schools of fish. When the shiners run twice a year, usually in May and November-ish, you can see them marching up the baffles.”
The people involved are excited about the project’s potential benefits.
First Lake Erie, then globally?
“Lake Erie has a huge impact on our regional economy,” said Dr. Joelle Leclaire, chair of the Economics and Finance Department at Buffalo State University. “Think about all the boats, transports, and connections between Canada and the U.S. that go through there. There is value to cottages and cabins and fishing that goes on in the area.”
With a specialty in macroeconomics, Leclaire believes that the revitalization of Lake Erie and its surrounding waters is a testimony to improved quality of life in Western New York.
“This was a notoriously polluted place,” she said. “There were some horrific environmental stories, going back to Love Canal. There were health issues that were associated with high levels of pollution. Because of investment, there has been an amazing recovery. Reinvigorating our natural landscape allows people to take advantage of access to the lake, playing and using the beaches. I love the environmental revitalization in the area. It’s working.”
Bennett, UB’s geography professor, remains intrigued by the novelty of working with emerald shiners.
“My interests are quite varied,” he said. “I study soil and gully erosion on slopes. I look at stream restoration projects and other hydrodynamic problems like gravity currents. Everything I’ve done obeys the laws of physics. You need to know how much sediment is running through a river, that’s physics. Bank erosion is physics. The minute you put fish into a stream, they’re independent agents. They decide what to do. That, to me, is the coolest part of this project. I don’t know how smart fish are, but they are perfectly engineered to do what they do.”
Because early returns on the demonstration project are positive, there is a push to fill Unity Park’s seawall with more baffles.
“Right now, it’s a bridge to nowhere,” Noon confessed. His office is hoping to receive additional funding, perhaps from the Environmental Protection Agency, to complete the additional 700-plus feet. On either end of the seawall, the shoreline is staggered enough that current is naturally slowed so emerald shiners may pass.
This isn’t simply a Buffalo success story. Noon, Bennett and others involved hope the baffles and other local innovations can be tried in other spots around the Great Lakes, or even throughout the world.
“I hope these kinds of very simple, passive structures could be used elsewhere,” Bennett noted.
“We’ve never done anything like this design,” Noon said. “Fish passage is always a concern in waterways. Out west, in the Columbia River, there are fish ladders for salmon to run up. We are sharing our results. UB and Buffalo State have published research papers on this. Our design is out there and available, and people around the world can use that.”
text © 2024 by Jeff Schober
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Jeff Schober has a journalism degree from Bowling Green State University and a master’s degree in English and History from the University at Buffalo. He retired from teaching English and Journalism at Frontier High School and is the best-selling author of ten books, including the true crime book Bike Path Rapist with Det. Dennis Delano, and the Buffalo Crime Fiction Quartet. Visit his website at www.jeffschober.com.
Steve Desmond is an award-winning photographer. With his son, Francis, he is the author of A Life With A Purpose which raises money for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy research. To view more of Steve's work, search Facebook under "Steve Desmond" and "Desmond's PrimeFocus Photography," or on Instagram at "Stevedesmond9."
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