But there is something you can do.
Growing up, my family’s summer vacations always centered on water. Whether it was camping along the St. Lawrence River and exploring the Thousand Islands on my Dad’s boat, or jumping off the dock at our favorite lake in Ontario, or searching for stoneflies and tubing in the Delaware River, my childhood’s most enjoyable moments had a tie to clean water. In fact, it is easy to trace all of my schooling and my current job as Watershed Ecologist with the Huron River Watershed Council directly back to all of these experiences. This is why it makes me profoundly sad when I now take similar summer vacations and see degradation in our water resources that simply wasn’t there when I was growing up.
Four years ago my family spent a week on one of the smaller Finger Lakes in the central New York area. It was a new lake for us, but the pictures looked good. Imagine our disappointment upon arriving to find the entire shoreline choked with Eurasian Milfoil. Swimming along the shoreline was impossible, which ruined the experience for the kids, and getting the boat out to the deeper, weed-free water required oars because the plant wrapped around and locked up the propeller. No summer vacation is free from invasive species anymore; I see zebra mussels, quagga mussles, round gobies, eurasian milfoil, curly-leaf pond weed, and starry stonewort wherever I go. They are in the Great Lakes, inland lakes, rivers and creeks… they are everywhere.
One part of my job here at the Watershed Council has me working with lake groups across Michigan as a part of the Cooperative Lakes Monitoring Program (CLMP). A terrific part of the CLMP is the Aquatic Exotic Plant Watch, in which volunteers are trained to identify common invasive plants and are then asked to patrol the shallow areas of their lakes where the plants are likely to be found. Early detection is key to keeping invasive plants out. If volunteers can find a plant before it becomes established throughout the lake, preventing the spread of the plant is much easier, cheaper, and effective. It is virtually impossible to remove the plants once they are established in a lake- chemical treatments and weed harvesting are like taking an aspirin to fix a broken leg.
However, I am often left scratching my head over resounding unpopularity of the Aquatic Exotic Plant Watch. Of the 220 lakes regularly enrolled in the various programs offered by the CLMP, we rarely get more than 20 lakes join the plant watch each year. Why don’t more people care? If I lived on a lake, most of my free time would be spent on the water; swimming, snorkeling, fishing, and kayaking. My family would spend vacations there; in 30 years my grandchildren would be visiting me there and building their own wonderful connections to water. If I lived on a lake, and maybe someday I’ll be lucky enough to do so, keeping these exotic weeds out would be my number one priority. I would do everything possible to keep my lake clean, free from invasive species.
For those of you that do live on a lake… don’t you love it? Don’t you want to keep it clean and free from invasive plants? Don’t you want your kids and your grandkids and great-grandkids to enjoy it as much as you do? Now is the time to act; before it is too late. A first step would be to join the CLMP Program and get involved in the Aquatic Exotic Plant Watch, or get involved in another preventative program like Clean Boats Clean Waters. No one else is going to do this for you; it is your lake, and it is yours to protect.