1. What's happening to the tourism in towns that are the perfect tourist location? The fish are dying, poachers in places are hunting, There is destruction and construction in natural resources. I want to point out Port Dover as my proof. There have been die offs for 2 years in this town. Fish have been killed from die offs because new fish entered Lake Erie by foreign freighters and they are stirring up natural botulism in our waters. It kills our fish and has a chain reaction throughout the food web. These diseased and dead fish are then eaten by seagulls and other fish-eating birds which then diseases the birds. The birds die. These are die offs and it's wrecking our tourism industry.
2. Why do we care? It's our town and, if we don't have tourists, that means no money. No money means no fancy lights and stores and that means Port Dover is dead. We don't need any fancy gadgets. We need plain old-fashioned fishermen to try to catch these fish and, when they do, just kill the gobies. It's not too complicated to do this. I caught a bunch of gobies once and I threw them back in the water. That was the worst mistake in my life. I must have killed half of Port Dover's gobies by now. I should have thrown them all in the in the shrubs or something, but instead I threw them back in... that was a mistake!

What is a goby ? A goby is a foreign species of fish that came over here on a European freighter. Now their population is in the trillions. I am amazed at how fast these bottom feeders can destroy wonderful Lake Erie. It's quite pathetic how these small critters can kill such a big lake! They kill everything to do with the lake: the fish, the beach, the water, and the whole fishing sport!

I say inspect these boats bringing goods from across the ocean. Use planes. They're faster and twice as efficient. With this, no fish are smuggled aboard. There's air pollution but we can handle it. Freighters may be here to stay because there is no air pollution. Now with the gobies, we can just hire fisherman volunteers to fish and catch these gobies. But there are oil spills and the freighters don't have oil clean-up teams. Planes should be the solution to the problem. Use solar energy to power the engine, so it can go across the ocean in no time flat with no pollution. Boats can do the same thing but it takes way too long to do this. I say planes. Boats can't be stolen or pilots can't held hostage. So, as you can see, solar-powered planes are the solution to our problem.

Why do we keep hurting natural resources? It does effect tourism and tourism-related things. It kills us: the mountains, the caves, the lake and our towns? Why does it happen? We should double the number of trash cans and solar panels on houses, cars, and restaurants. When tourists come, we can have less trash on streets, less polluted air, and more tourists. Be here for the family fun fish fest or get some rays at the beach or chill out at the waterfall. Go to Waitomo caves in New Zealand and see the glow worms or even black water raft . But, to do this, keep the caves clean, don't breathe much, and don't throw trash in the water, or the caves and glow worms will not be there long. The mountains of West Virginia will sparkle if we don't litter. We need to keep it beautiful.

Lake and River Samples

We (our class) went down to the lake to get water samples from it and the river so we could test it in the lab. It turns out that 2 of 4 samples were bad. One sample was bad from the river and beach while one sample was good from each. The strange thing is that they were taken near the same part of the lake and near the same part of the river. So, do you think that the parts are not mixing because the oil (or whatever it is) has chemical substances that just won't stir together?

You can always read the article in Canadian Geographic. September 2003. We did and were scared stiff.

We did a lot of investigating into what is known around here as Die-offs and have more information if you click here.

You can also do some more reading here

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