Carol Swinehart, communication manager for the Michigan Sea Grant program and an invasive species specialist, said invasive species are non-native species that cause damage to their new habitat.

She said the state has been economically plagued for years by invasive species such as sea lampreys and zebra mussels, which usually travel to the Great Lakes region through the ballast water of ships and then spread to other lakes.

“Municipalities that take a large amount of water from the Great Lakes, for either drinking water or other purposes, weren’t built to withstand something like hundreds of thousands of zebra mussels coming into their intake pipes,” Swinehart said.

Rick Horan, an MSU professor from the Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics, said that many of the invasive species problems have an economic component.

“We make choices that either affect the likelihood that an invasive species will invade or spread, and I mean economic choices,” Horan said.

“Sometimes it is because ships come in to trade and travel; species might hop on these ships and be transported in, so that is the result of economic activity.

Sometimes species are used as bait, and people don’t know they are invasive species and they escape.”

Some costs of invasive species are indirect, Horan said.

“When you’re an angler, and you are losing a fish you’d like to hunt, there is no market price on that. You have a loss in value,” Horan said.

“If there are fewer fish out there, you aren’t going to catch as many and you’re not going to have as much enjoyment out there, so you do suffer an economic value.”

David Lodge, director of the Center for Aquatic Conservation at Notre Dame, said he and his fellow researchers were trying to better measure the changes invasive species bring about in the Great Lakes region.

“(We are) working with economists to figure out what are the economic consequences of the introduction of these species in the Great Lakes region,” Lodge said.

“Another area is working on how we can work with policymakers, especially on the question of how science can better prevent the importation of species that are harmful to the United States.”

Premedical junior Leigh Van Timmeren said she has only heard bad things about invasive species, and the state of the Michigan economy only makes the study’s results worse news.

“That’s obviously not good. That money could be going somewhere else,” Van Timmeren said.

“If there is anything we can do that would be less costly, we definitely should.”