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Location: Essexville, MI./Saginaw Bay. | I've been called "Chicken Little" and a lot worse on fishing boards for ringing the alarm bell that lake Erie and it abundance of BIG walleyes and shortfall of little ones, could spell a walleye decline in future years. But there is another poison pill hidden in the bottle of good ones that could supersede that. And I'm not happy one bit about posting this.
Lake Erie Death Watch
BY BARRY YEOMAN
August 31, 2011
Brought back from the brink once before, a Great Lake again faces biological collapse.
On a cloudy morning in early August, Peter Bichier steers a 26-foot motorboat from an Ohio marina toward the Canadian border. The waters of Lake Erie are nearly transparent here, a reminder of why this southernmost of the Great Lakes supports a multi-billion-dollar fishing and vacation industry. But as the research vessel turns west toward the Michigan shoreline, the water grows murky, clogged with a toxic blue-green algae called microcystis that, on sunnier days, forms a stinky scum on the lake’s surface.
Bichier, a research technician at the University of Toledo’s Lake Erie Center, dangles a long, white plankton net off the side of the boat, then hauls it in and filters the sludgy water into a canister for testing back in the lab. "Dogs get sick when they drink this," he says: three in Ohio died last year after swimming in a contaminated inland lake not far from here, and nine people got sick (including one with memory loss and partial blindness) after skin contact.
After a decades-long absence, blue-green algae is again flourishing in Lake Erie -- and it’s never been worse than it is this summer. The algal infestation is just one of many factors that biologists in Ohio, Michigan, and elsewhere say are pointing toward an ecosystem in danger of collapse.
The lake’s center contains a growing dead zone, devoid of oxygen during summer months. Invasive species such as zebra and quagga mussels are wreaking havoc with its ecology. The fish that make Lake Erie a tourism draw, including yellow perch and smallmouth bass, are seeing their predators grow and their habitats shrink. Ducks, loons, and mergansers that feed on lake fish have died in recent summers from botulism poisoning. Swimmers in some areas have been advised this year not to swallow the water.
What would it mean to lose one of our Great Lakes? The environmental and economic calamity could devastate the region’s tourism, sport fishing industry, drinking water supply, and wildlife, and could also take a toll on human health. And there would be plenty of blame to go around, from changing agricultural methods to inattentive politicians to weaknesses in our nation’s bedrock
environmental protections -- many of which can partially trace their existence to concern over Lake Erie in the first place.
Erie is the most fertile of the Great Lakes: It contains only 2 percent of their water but 50 percent of their fish. Its biological abundance, and its location in a densely settled corner of the Midwest, make the prospect of collapse all the more frightening. If conditions grow worse, imploding native fish populations could decimate Lake Erie’s recreational fishing industry. (Fishing generates $7 billion a year throughout the Great Lakes.) The water supply for 11 million people could become undrinkable without expensive treatment. And blue-green algae, linked to liver cancer in China and fatal poisonings in Brazil, could pose a grave threat to people here, too, particularly if ingested.
"If we don’t turn this around, someone whose health is already compromised -- a very young person, a very old person, someone less tolerant of the toxin -- is likely to die," says aquatic biologist Jeffrey Reutter, director of Ohio Sea Grant and Ohio State University’s Stone Laboratory in Lake Erie.
The lake itself nearly died once before. In 1969, Time magazine practically wrote its obituary, describing how "each day, Detroit, Cleveland and 120 other municipalities fill Erie with 1.5 billion gallons of inadequately treated wastes, including nitrates and phosphates. These chemicals act as fertilizer for growths of algae that suck oxygen from the lower depths and rise to the surface as odoriferous green scum." Between human sewage and pollution from steel, paper, and automobile plants, Time said, Lake Erie was "in danger of dying by suffocation."
John Hartig remembers riding his bicycle down to the Detroit River, which flows into Lake Erie, to fish -- and seeing its water turned black and purple from industrial waste. Now a biologist who manages the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, Hartig also watched as the oil-fouled Rouge River, which eventually empties into Lake Erie, caught fire in 1969, sending flames 50 feet into the air. (He chronicled the disaster in his 2010 book Burning Rivers.) "I saw the smoke from my house," he says. "You don’t get that image out of your brain."
Back then, Americans responded -- not just to "what they were seeing, but also to what they were smelling," says Hartig. "There were front-end loaders taking algae off the bathing beaches and dead fish. The lake had gone anaerobic. That means no oxygen. That means the smell of rotten eggs." Those scenes, and the fires on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, which empties into Lake Erie, provoked an outcry that helped trigger some of the great advances of the early 1970s: the first Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Endangered Species Act -- and the Clean Water Act, which (along with a U.S.-Canadian agreement) forced wastewater-treatment plants to sharply reduce the phosphorus they were dumping into Lake Erie. Coupled with bans on phosphate laundry detergents (which supplied up to 50 percent of the phosphorus in sewage), those reforms led to a two-thirds reduction in the main nutrient feeding the lake’s harmful algae.
Without phosphorus, the organisms couldn’t bloom, die, and deplete oxygen from the lake as they decomposed (creating a condition called hypoxia). Moreover, restrictions on mercury, DDT, and other toxins helped bring back fish such as walleye, a popular local dish, and birds such as the bald
eagle. "We literally went from being the poster child for pollution problems to the Walleye Capital of the World," Reutter says.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, though, harmful algae and the dead zone began reappearing. The problem has accelerated steadily over the past decade. The magnitude of this year’s problem became evident two weeks ago, when Thomas Bridgeman, an aquatic ecologist at Toledo’s Lake Erie Center, notified his colleagues that there was twice as much microcystis in the water this summer as last. It was the largest crop since the center began measuring the algae in 2002 and considerably greater than the next-largest year, 2009.
In late August, Ohio state officials posted signs on two Lake Erie beaches, Kelleys Island and Maumee Bay State Park, warning swimmers not to swallow the water and to avoid algae scum. Fishermen were distributing photos showing water the color of pesto. And in an August 29 NASA satellite photo, the lake’s westernmost portion looked as though it were covered entirely by a garish green cloud.
"We are now at the levels of algal blooms and hypoxia that we were at in the 1970s," says Bridgeman. "We’re back to the bad old days."
And this time, with clean-water regulations and programs already under attack and a whole new set of scientific challenges, the problem could be much harder to fix.
Deadly Intruders
As big as the forces arrayed against Erie’s recovery are, some of the modern culprits driving it back toward collapse are the size of a fingernail.
In the late 1980s, oceangoing ships accidentally discharged zebra and quagga mussels into the Great Lakes. The mussels, which come from river deltas around Europe’s Black and Caspian Seas, hitchhiked in the water those ships draw into their "ballast" tanks at port to provide stability. Once the ballast water and the mussels were dumped in Lake Erie, they colonized its bottom and fundamentally altered its ecology. In essence, they teamed up with another invasive species, the round goby, a fish from the same region that feeds on the mussels.
The gobies not only outcompete other small bottom dwellers; they also prey on smallmouth bass, a favorite Lake Erie sport fish. "We’ve been scuba diving out in the lake," says Tyler Lawson, a biologist at Stone Laboratory. "The bottom is literally crawling with these round gobies. We’ve seen at times 20 gobies sitting in a circle around a smallmouth-bass nest, just waiting to rush in to eat all those eggs."
The mussels weren’t around in the 1960s, the last time the lake nearly choked on algae, but they’ve proven to be important players in its return and in the growth of the lake’s hypoxic dead zone. Zebras and quaggas are efficient feeders; they consume algae so thoroughly that they initially make
the water clearer. But they’re also picky eaters: As they feast on "good algae" that forms the base of Lake Erie’s food chain, they reject toxic blue-green algae like microcystis. This gives microcystis an advantage by removing its competitors. Clear water also helps sunlight penetrate the lake’s surface, which in turn stimulates more algal growth. Finally, the mussels excrete phosphorus in a form algae can easily consume. You could hardly design a more deadly toxic-algae-creating machine.
The algae at the surface, in turn, plays its part to make the lake’s depths more toxic. When microcystis dies and sinks in the lake’s waters, the decomposition process sucks up oxygen. This is a special problem in Erie’s Central Basin, where the lake is exactly the wrong depth. It’s deep enough to form a colder, self-contained bottom layer in the summer -- so much colder, in fact, that it doesn’t mix with the upper layer. It’s as if an invisible barrier separates them. But that bottom layer is so shallow that it contains limited oxygen. If rotting algae uses all the oxygen, it creates a perfect breeding ground for botulism toxin, which the mussels and gobies transfer efficiently up the food chain when they are preyed on by larger animals.
And woe be to the creatures that depend on that oxygen for survival. Yellow perch, which are popular sport and commercial fish, prefer living and feeding in Erie’s bottom waters, says Don Scavia, director of the University of Michigan’s Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute. When that cold layer goes hypoxic, it forces the perch to Erie’s surface water. There, the temperatures are too warm and their preferred food from near the seabed is unavailable. Driven from their normal habitat, the fish also become easy pickings for predatory walleye and bass. "They’re calling this the squeeze play on the yellow perch," Scavia says.
Poison Harvest
While the mussels and gobies are doing their best to destroy the lake from within, outside forces are also threatening Erie, which "has become a different lake since the ’80s," says Scavia. Not only have zebras and quaggas altered the food web, but climate change appears to have lengthened the hypoxia-prone warm season. Lake temperatures, measured at municipal intake pipes, have increased steadily over the past half-century. So have air temperatures.
On top of that, the amount of phosphorus pouring into the lake is on the rise again -- often in a form that microcystis can easily consume.
Researchers studying where this phosphorus comes from have identified multiple sources, ranging from garden chemicals to sewer overflows containing human waste. But the prime suspect is agriculture. In 1974, 56 percent of Lake Erie’s phosphorus came from "point sources" like wastewater treatment plants, where contaminants run out of a pipe, whereas 35 percent came from "non-point sources" such as agriculture, according to researchers at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio, and the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. (The rest came from other sources like the atmosphere.)
By 2007 that ratio had inverted: 72 percent of the phosphorus in the lake came from non-point sources and 16 percent from point sources.
Part of the problem is that farmers are using fertilizers in new ways -- applying it in the fall and winter, when there are no crops to absorb the nutrients, and spreading it onto the surface rather than tilling it into the soil. "So it sits there for six months, waiting to be washed away by the rainwater," says Peter Richards, a research scientist at Heidelberg University’s National Center for Water Quality Research.
The result is more runoff into Lake Erie and its tributaries. While the total amount of phosphorus is lower than 20th century levels, more of today’s phosphorus comes in a chemical form that makes it easier for both crops and algae to absorb. As climate change triggers more extreme weather, adds Scavia, fiercer storms seem to be flushing more of the chemicals into the lake.
"There’s not a whole lot we can do, in the near term, about the changing climate," Scavia says. "It’s baked in. And we can’t do a whole lot about the zebra and quagga mussels. They’re already here. So we have to adjust what we can adjust to compensate -- and that’s reducing the loads from those agricultural sources."
Which is as politically daunting a prospect as one could imagine.
Can We Save Lake Erie Again?
One afternoon I take a ferry to Put-in-Bay, Ohio, a Victorian-style resort town on a Lake Erie island. Built around a waterfront park, it’s packed with vacation amenities like kayak rentals and an old wooden carousel. Children wearing funny hats dodge golf carts on the downtown streets. Pleasure boats bob near the harbor. The scene reminds me of what a clean lake means for the region’s economy, particularly as the Midwest loses manufacturing jobs.
"It’s a driver for being a competitive region," John Hartig had told me. "Progressive cities throughout the world would give their eye teeth to look out and see Lake Erie, to see the fish, to see the bird migrations."
From Put-in-Bay, I hop a smaller vessel to Gibraltar Island, home to Ohio State’s Stone Laboratory. The biological field station is hosting some of the region’s state legislators and congressional staffers, part of a two-day teach-in about lake issues. We meet zebra mussels up close. We watch a trawl pull in round gobies alongside their native competitors. We take in panoramic views of surrounding islands as we learn about the 114,500 tourism jobs and $10 billion a year in visitor spending that Lake Erie generates in Ohio alone. We meet a fearsome (albeit dead) Asian carp and hear about the chaos that would ensue if the exotic fish made it into the Great Lakes from the Illinois River Basin.
Overseeing the event is Reutter, Stone Lab’s director. His job today is convincing these policymakers that the region’s future depends on their swift action. Lake Erie is fixable, he says, because it replenishes itself so quickly. Much like a river flowing downstream, the lake flows from the Detroit River in the west to Niagara Falls in the east. It has a replacement rate of 2.7 years -- meaning that’s how long it would take the last drop to flow over Niagara Falls if its source were somehow plugged. (By contrast, Lake Superior, the largest Great Lake, would take almost two centuries to empty.)
"If we could again reduce the loading of phosphorus by two-thirds -- that’s the same amount that we had to reduce it in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s -- the lake will again respond," the biologist says. "We would probably be done with the harmful forms of algae. And we’d have a great fishery." Reutter is old enough to glean hope from Erie’s first turnaround. "I remember in the ’70s thinking we’d never be able to accomplish that two-thirds reduction," he says. "But we did."
Can we do it again? Or have we lost this sort of can-do spirit of the 20th century? Have we grown so politically and culturally polarized that another Lake Erie rebirth becomes impossible? Among many people I interviewed, a Midwestern optimism prevailed. Not only do technologies improve, they reminded me, but political climates shift. Regionally, Erie’s deterioration has created a consensus that the status quo is no longer acceptable. In June, representatives from the private sector, local governments, regulatory agencies, and civic and environmental groups formed the Lake Erie Improvement Forum, which hopes to develop solutions to specific problems such as agricultural runoff and wastewater treatment.
Still, the obstacles are formidable. The Clean Water Act primarily regulates point sources of pollution from the likes of wastewater treatment facilities and power plants, which can be clearly measured. It takes a less direct approach to non-point sources like agriculture. Regulators, as a result, are forced to rely on voluntary cooperation from farmers. "I don’t have a legal hook on non-point source," says Ohio EPA Director Scott
Nally. "So we need to use the tools we have today."
And don’t expect those tools to expand any time soon. "The agricultural community is trying to resist regulation," Reutter says, flatly.
In fact, the current fight is to keep from losing the existing tools. When it returns from summer recess, the U.S. Congress is planning to take up environmental spending. House Republicans declared their priorities in an appropriations bill that would hack funding for the EPA’s Great Lakes Restoration Initiative to about half its 2010 level. The initiative cleans up toxic chemicals, fights invasive species, and protects watersheds from runoff -- many of the things that are necessary to keep Lake Erie from biological collapse.
The bill would also withhold EPA funding from any Great Lakes state that tries to control invasive species with ballast-water standards tougher than the U.S. Coast Guard’s, a provision favored by the shipping industry, which says it’s too hard to comply with a patchwork of state regulations.
"Clearly our economy is suffering," says Reutter. "People can misuse that opportunity to try to reduce regulation and claim the regulations are causing the problem. We know that’s not true on Lake Erie. The improvement in the ecosystem created thousands and thousands of jobs between 1975 and the late 1980s. Charter-fishing businesses increased from 34 to over 800. We now have 300 marinas just on the Ohio shoreline. We have over 12,000 people employed in the boating industry. If we do damage to the system, we’re going to hurt all of those businesses."
When I visited Toledo’s Lake Erie Center, aquatic biologist Thomas Bridgeman gave me a stark political assessment. "I worry that, as a society, we won’t be able to summon the will to change our watershed practices in a way that reduces nutrient loading," he said. "We’ve done all the easy things, and agriculture is a large and entrenched system of economics and politics and all sorts of factors that to me seem hard to budge."
If his fears prove correct, Lake Erie will further deteriorate. Only this time it might not rise from the dead again. |
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Location: Essexville, MI./Saginaw Bay. | Some fallow-up.
NRDC: Saving a Great Lake
By OnEarth Editors
August 31, 2011
Inside NRDC
One of the seminal moments in the history of environmental law was when the Cuyahoga River, which flows into Lake Erie, caught fire in the late 1960s. That event, as much as any other, created the awareness that we needed a more stringent, science-based framework to address water and air pollution. At the time, Lake Erie was widely declared to be dead, because it had massive inputs of pollution from factories and wastewater treatment plants. (See "Lake Erie Death Watch.") The Clean Water Act was passed in 1972 in part to address that problem, and it worked, but it wasn’t a perfect success. In the law, Congress set a goal that we would stop discharging pollution into U.S. waterways by 1985. That obviously didn’t happen. A lot of what I do today, what NRDC does today, is try to get closer and closer to that perpetually receding horizon. We’ve made huge progress in dealing with these major dischargers.
Then why have the problems returned?
You’ve got urban runoff from a whole series of cities around Lake Erie’s western basin, from Detroit to Toledo. Plus, while their wastewater treatment plants are discharging less phosphorus than they used to, they’re still discharging significant amounts. And, in that area, we’ve got a huge concentration of agriculture, which is much more difficult to regulate.
Feature Story: Lake Erie Death Watch
Why is that?
The Clean Water Act, as a political compromise, does not apply to agricultural runoff. That means, in order to reduce agricultural pollution, the government has to resort to things like providing money to farmers to engage in better practices. But the programs are voluntary, and the bad actors are unlikely to enroll unless the incentives are so high that they become cost-prohibitive. You can’t solve this problem simply by throwing money at it -- ultimately, farmers need to decide on their own that better practices make sense.
What are the most critical steps that need to be taken to ensure Lake Erie survives?
Federal and state agencies, working together, need to determine the baseline amount of phosphorus that can be safely discharged into Lake Erie, then work backwards from there to identify how to reduce pollution to that amount. The Clean Water Act provides authority to do this, and it’s starting to happen in other places like the Chesapeake Bay after years of effort (and lawsuits). Once you have a baseline, creative approaches to get below that safe level could include programs where some farmers would pay for the right to continue their operations as is, while others would reduce their nutrient pollution (and might be able to get money for doing so). It can also set the basis for progressively more stringent limits on phosphorus when major dischargers are issued permits. And it creates a sense of metrics—here is where we need to go.
What are the chances of that happening in a political climate adverse to regulation?
Look, you can see these algae blooms from space. There’s no hiding from the problem and people throughout the region are starting to get concerned, no matter what their politics are. It’s true that there are active efforts in Congress to repeal even the basic protections we have had for decades, which have led to progress that many people now take for granted. If we’re going to succeed in our goal of fully restoring and revitalizing our natural resources, we have to be able to save places like Lake Erie. We have to be able to strengthen environmental and public health protections and not roll them back to the bad old days when the Cuyahoga River burned on the edge of the Great Lakes. And make no mistake: that’s what many in Congress are talking about doing right now, and Lake Erie will suffer for it.
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Location: Essexville, MI./Saginaw Bay. | I'm kind of surprised there has been no comments either way on this subject post. Personally, I'm conservative in my thinking and place myself in the "Drill baby Drill" crowd when it comes to our countries natural resources. I do not like the millions of EPA, DEQ and other Federal regulations that prevent our countries industries from their full growth potential while stifling job creations when concerning such things. Yet, appreciate and have seen the benefits of what the Clean Water Act has done over the years. I also know we should not go back to the 70's when companies simply dumped their toxic waste wherever they wanted to or could get away with. IMHO We need down to earth laws that keep the poisons out of our waterways but not the burdensome regulations that strangle to death at every point our economic growth. BP accident not withstanding: I truly think we posses the technical expertise to have it both ways.
Edited by walleye express 9/21/2011 8:31 AM
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Location: Lincoln Park, Mi | walleye express - 9/21/2011 9:28 AM
I'm kind of surprised there has been no comments either way on this subject post. Personally, I'm conservative in my thinking and place myself in the "Drill baby Drill" crowd when it comes to our countries natural resources. I do not like the millions of EPA, DEQ and other Federal regulations that prevent our countries industries from their full growth potential while stifling job creations when concerning such things. Yet, appreciate and have seen the benefits of what the Clean Water Act has done over the years. I also know we should not go back to the 70's when companies simply dumped their toxic waste wherever they wanted to or could get away with. IMHO We need down to earth laws that keep the poisons out of our waterways but not the burdensome regulations that strangle to death at every point our economic growth. BP accident not withstanding: I truly think we posses the technical expertise to have it both ways.
Well said Dan. Common sense and science is always the best approach, but when you get politics and big business involved, you can throw those two out the window. Let's hope Mother Nature keeps this problem in check and adapts, which she has for so many other threats, because I don't think anyone will be willing to throw money at the problem in these times. Erie may be on her own with this one, or if some have their way, we will be her biggest enemy again, not invasives. |
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Location: Essexville, MI./Saginaw Bay. | I was hoping we could stay on subject and leave presidents past and future as well as political factions out of this conversation Bob. But Probably not realistic to think that could happen being they (more or less) run the show. But ask yourself where and what position Obama has taken on the Asian Carp threat to all the Great Lakes. 300 long shoreman union jobs seem to have superceded stopping this most deadly of threats to the all the great lakes in it's tracks. Risking the possibility of loosing a multi billion dollar fishery for all the great lakes if this plankton gobbling monster gets loose on the fishery seems a lopsided trade off for shifting or re-assigning a few barge jobs. But it comes down to votes first and public priorities and their welfare second. And I'm not talking about the 1 in 7 who are now on welfare or the 14 million out of work in the USA. |
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Location: McFarland, WI | Many folks may not like Obama but the alternative really sucks if you care about what really matters.
Like spend 650 mil on a solar panel company that doesn't produce anything and goes bankrupt. Pull your head out Bob. Local people working together might solve this problem. |
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Location: Badgerland | Larrys - 9/21/2011 8:11 PM
Many folks may not like Obama but the alternative really sucks if you care about what really matters.
WOW... no doubting McFarland is a suburb of the Peoples Republic of Madison. |
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Location: Badgerland | MY bad Larry.... I am an example of read before you leap. my foot is in my mouth.
Edited by 620 9/22/2011 9:37 AM
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| Let's start 2 wars and give the rich a tax break and on and on and ....
We don't have any better choice.
Not the best but better then the alternative!
Yea - Perry will take Asian care of the carp - right.
Knit-picking Obama is fair but the big picture for the environment is not going to improve with tea party. That's a FACT! |
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Location: Essexville, MI./Saginaw Bay. | Yup.........Wulp I tried. I figure I only have a few years left to fish anyway's. Probably some time before the parasitic Asian Carp, Blue/Green Algae and all the GUESTS in the world interbreed, take over the Lakes, the world and live in their own perfect, socialist utopia. Feel free to dust this post Steve. It's obvious it's taken the wrong road, attracted people who love hand outs, care little for the environment, don't or cannot fish and going nowhere fast. Sorry for caring enough to start the post and share the info. Stuff like this will keep me donating to the right causes though until it hurts. 
Edited by walleye express 9/22/2011 2:00 PM
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Location: McFarland, WI | 620
I live close enough to the Peoples Republic to hear the socialist song daily. It frosts me a little to see it here. Buy the way, under their control our lake water quality has been an algae nightmare not for a lack of rules and regulation. Seems like money corrupts them equally. |
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Location: Rhinelander | Politics aside, our lakes and rivers need more attention. I could care less which political party is in power right now, what I care about is the health of our fisheries. Make enough noise with the right people supporting you, and good things will happen.
If no one raises the alarm, no one reacts until...
It's too late.
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| I am with Steve on this one! |
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| The biggest problem is agricultural runoff. This is the problem in many of our waterways. Industry has greatly improved their treatment capabilities, to the point where many of their pollutants are minuscule in comparison to agricultural impacts. The problem is that agricultural runoff is extremely hard to control or regulate as it isn't a point source discharge. This is why the answer to the problem is extremely difficult. There isn't an easy answer. |
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Location: Lincoln Park, Mi | Lake shore residents are also a problem. The area immediately surrounding Grosse Ile in the Detroit River gets so thick with vegetation in the summer, it's barely even navagatable. They did water testing a few years ago offshore and out into the lake and the phosphorous and nitrate levels were of the charts near shore from all the fertilizers people pump onto their lawns, Sounds like an isolated problem, but when you consider the shoreline is 30 miles by a half mile wide of oxygen choking vegetation, then imagine all the Erie shoreline, and it gets into perspective a little more. |
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Location: Essexville, MI./Saginaw Bay. | My mother (originally from Ohio) ran Phil's Inn Motel in Port Clinton through the 70's. I visited her often during this time and fished the lake every time I did. So I was privy to watch and fish this lake back when it was called "The Dead Sea" and watched it slowly become the walleye fishery that is now, unmatched by any. There was a layer of Blue/Green algae back then as well every time we went out. It hung in and throughout the water column. This was 40 years ago and Global warming was somehow left out as part of the reason this algae was there. That change from dead sea to great fishing lake took only a short 4 to 6 years after the Clean Water Act was made law. And things got better as time went on. Erie unlike the other Great lakes can flush itself of it total lake water in a mere 3 years. I really do not agree with everything said in the article I posted, as I see some of Al Gores "Green/Global Warming" BS/fingerprint in parts of it. But there is enough fact about fertilizer (and other) run-off problems to give us the simple answer to the Blue/Green algae problem. IMHO People without any agenda (except to save this lake) should be the ones laying down any of the rules or new laws to help save it. |
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| Thanks for keeping the news going mr. express. I will say here in NY I saw some high water temps this year. Along with a few fish kills. Throw in a hurricane and another flood a week later and water quality a problem. |
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| Ok , Ya really got my attention , What can we do ? The bull ---- bobs have no real answer , just political talking points. I hear a lot of concern from everyone else but no specific answers as to what can we do ,r ight now! today ! to begin to remedy this problem . It is not just specific to Lake Erie . Working with various govt orginizations DNR , Corp of Engineers, has taught me that althought staffed by caring individuals Govt agencys are limited by political realities that usually do more harm than good. So again leave the political crap out , What can we do , I am not stirring the pot. I am overwelmed by the scope of the proplem . impressed by the level of concern , but feel kinda helpless as to what I and like minded others can do .  |
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Location: Essexville, MI./Saginaw Bay. | Craig.
Your feelings of helplessness (like mine and many others) are not new when it comes to these environmental or political problems facing our country and threatening both our way of life and the kind of quality of leisure time we all ultimately work for. I sometimes look back in my own life with regret, some apathy but a strange envy, when nothing really mattered to me except the last work day of the week, that paycheck I had coming and girls.
Contributing to society or paying attention to anything else in the world that didn't involve my own well being or happiness could fall off a steep cliff as far as I was concerned. I can't really say when I suddenly became aware or concerned about other people, our ecosystem, our political leadership or the world we are leaving to our kids. I'm sad and embarrassed to say I believe it was well after the birth of my own son.
But I'm awake now. And that part alone may be the biggest part about changing anything in this world that's going on. I personally try to do what I can to wake up others to these problems. I contribute both my time, words, thoughts and as much money as I can afford to causes I believe in and know will both help and keep us truly free people. Living in a country thriving, yet respecting the laws and individuals rights the Constitution of this country laid down is what everybody can do to help. Not everybody has to be the General. The wars are won by the foot soldiers. Simply stay aware, stay involved, contribute when you can, any way you can. Fight against what's wrong and always strive to learn the truth about what's going on in any capacity you can, is what eveybody can do to help. |
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| Dan:
I had seen a link to this article on another website and only just now found it here. My gut feeling is that the major culprit would be run off from fertilizers containing lots of "P" for phosphorus. There may be some implication of nitrate fertilizers as well and this would point the finger at suburbanites fertilizing their lawns as well as farmers and their anhydrous ammonia.
There is relatively small natural lake here in Indiana, Lake of the Woods near Bremen, which sits cradled all the way around by farm land and every year it has a severe algae bloom. One would hope that the many farmers would have soil samples and have a good idea whether to apply fertilizers with a high P content such as 8-32-16
Let's hope that anti-pollution legislation can be enforced and farmers educated regarding excessive use of P fertilizers. I see this problem as a "good stewardship" issue and would hope that all who love fishing Lake Erie, as I do, can urge the powers that be to enforce the laws as they exist presently and work toward maintaining this valuable resource. |
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| Dan,
Your doing the right thing and you know it. Keep it coming. I do not post up on many of your comments lately because you cover the point so well.
Our water resourse is irreplacable and invaluable. Phosphorous and Mercury haved no placed in our water and can and should be eliminated as best possible.
If we pay more for electricity, so be it. I do not believe that fertilized lawns are at all needed. MY two cents.
Take care,
Jim O
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Location: Menasha, WI | I saw this elsewhere but thought it fit well with this discussion: The green scum shown in this image is the worst algae bloom Lake Erie has experienced in decades. Such blooms were common in the lake’s shallow western basin in the 1950s and 60s. Phosphorus from farms, sewage, and industry fertilized the waters so that huge algae blooms developed year after year. The blooms subsided a bit starting in the 1970s, when regulations and improvements in agriculture and sewage treatment limited the amount of phosphorus that reached the lake. But in 2011, a giant bloom spread across the western basin once again. The reasons for the bloom are complex, but may be related to a rainy spring and invasive mussels. The Landsat-5 satellite acquired the top image on October 5, 2011. Vibrant green filaments extend out from the northern shore. The bloom is primarily microcystis aeruginosa, an algae that is toxic to mammals, according to the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. Several days of calm winds and warm temperatures allowed the algae to gather on the surface. The bloom intensified after October 5, and by October 9—when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Aqua satellite acquired the lower image—the bloom covered much of the western basin. http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=76127
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Location: Essexville, MI./Saginaw Bay. | HOW BAD CAN IT GET?
THIS BAD.
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Location: Lincoln Park, Mi | That's CRAZY!!!! In my lifetime of living near Eire, I've never seen anything like what's going on now. |
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Location: Essexville, MI./Saginaw Bay. | It's a new ballgame. Zebra Mussels and what they do are here to stay. And new laws are not in place to stop whats happening. Add it all up and it becomes the "Perfect Storm". Cleaner/Clearer Waters spell more light penetration and heat. Creating perfect conditions for B/G algae photosynthesis. Then throw in more Phosphorus (Blue/Green algae food) created by more lawn fertilizers from the many new Lake front properties and you've successfully nullified everything that the EPA laws stifled from industries pollution in the late 70's. Now throw in this Disastrous economy that reduces the money available, along with the lac of will power to even ask for it, and problems like these get pushed down the latter a few rungs. It's not good.
Edited by walleye express 10/21/2011 8:02 AM
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