Lake Invaders by William Rapai

Author:William Rapai
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wayne State University Press

6

THEN CAME HYDRILLA

Lake Manitou is one of the gems of Indiana’s inland lakes.

The lake’s shoreline is crammed with six hundred houses, ranging from one-bedroom cottages to beautiful mansions. There are also condominiums, a marina, and a restaurant. Many of the people who live on this north-central Indiana lake were lured there by the great fishing, and nearly everybody owns a boat.

Unfortunately, nonresidents love Lake Manitou also. As one of the largest bodies of water for miles around, the 735-acre lake is often overrun on weekends by boaters with powerful ski boats and wave runners. On summer weekends and holidays, it gets so crowded that residents avoid going out—there are just too many boats in too small an area.

The lake’s popularity caused another problem: an infestation of Eurasian watermilfoil, an invasive aquatic plant that is native to Europe and Asia. It’s widely despised by boaters and swimmers everywhere because it spreads rapidly, grows in dense mats on the surface in shallow areas, and makes boating difficult and swimming uncomfortable.

Eurasian watermilfoil (Myriophyllum spicatum) has become a major problem in the Great Lakes basin. Introduced into the United States through the aquarium trade, the plant was first found in the wild in a pond in Washington, DC, in 1942. In 1949, the plant was found in Lake Erie at Put-in-Bay, Ohio, and has since spread into the western United States. In the Great Lakes, it can be found in bays and marinas and other places with slow-moving water. It spreads easily because plant fragments in one lake can be carried by a boat, by a trailer, or even attached to the feet or feathers of a duck or goose and can establish in another lake. Eric Fischer, the invasive-species coordinator for the state of Indiana, says Eurasian watermilfoil was likely introduced to Lake Manitou as far back as 1987 on a boat or trailer of a weekend visitor who brought it from another lake. If the conditions are right, Fischer says, the plant can stay viable out of the water for as long as five days.

The plant may have been introduced into Lake Manitou by one of those weekend boaters, but it became the property owners’ problem. Within a few years of the discovery of Eurasian watermilfoil, the surface of the lake’s shallow areas was covered with a dense mat of green weeds. Boaters found it difficult to navigate all but the deepest portions of the lake. Just getting a boat to and from a dock became difficult, and boat owners trying to navigate through the weeds risked having their motors clogged and destroyed. If it was tough to get a boat through this tangle, the simple and joyous act of jumping off a dock on a summer afternoon became something to avoid.

In 2005, homeowners decided to tackle the issue head-on. Working closely with the state, the homeowners’ association hired a company to apply herbicide to control the milfoil. The state, meanwhile, started regular surveys of the lake to ensure that the milfoil was being killed but that other plants and wildlife weren’t being harmed.

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