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3 August 2011

Keeping invasive species from spoiling Flathead Lake

A tiny quagga mussel was found on a sailboat at the Dayton Yacht Harbor on Flathead Lake back on 4 March, so I was interested in hearing Erik Hanson’s presentation on aquatic invasive species last night at the Flathead Lakers’ annual meeting. I was not disappointed.

Speaking to a science savvy audience, Hanson made three points worth mentioning here:

Prevention — basically educating boaters and inspecting their vessels — the approach Minnesota employs, works. Only 20 or so of that state’s thousands of lakes are infested with quagga and zebra mussels.

Decontaminating a lake the size of Flathead Lake is a practical impossibility. A couple of small lakes, one and 12 acres in size respectively, have been decontaminated, the former with potassium chloride, the latter with copper sulfate, but the chemicals, especially the KCl, are expensive and not all that friendly to other living things. Scaling those treatments up to Flathead Lake’s 120,000 acres would cost tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of dollars. And I suspect it wouldn’t work.

More social scientists, not more biologists, are needed for prevention programs, which succeed by cultivating a culture of citizen vigilance and cooperation. That requires placing the biological facts in a social and economic context that encourages citizens to conclude that repelling aquatic invaders is the right thing to do.

Hanson was followed by Dr. Jack Stanford, director of the University of Montana’s biological station at Yellow Bay, who delivered the annual state of the lake address. He presented a number of sophisticated graphs and charts that I hope will be presented on the biological station’s website soon, along with a summary of the lake’s current condition.

Stanford also mentioned the recently published paper by Dr. Bonnie Ellis and others, Long-term effects of a trophic cascade in a large lake ecosystem. The link here is to the National Academy of Sciences’ PDF of the paper. You can also download the paper from the biological station’s website, but unlike the file from the NAS, it’s encumbered with silly, exasperating, politburo style security restrictions (you can print it, but even content copying for accessibility is disabled, and internet search engines cannot access the metadata). I recommend the paper — and I recommend that the biological station stop securing its PDFs.