Lake Apopka
Sigh.
This is a local issue mostly of interest only to me and possibly
jcbemis, but it's illustrative of a lot of problems right now, so, let's chat.
I love Lake Apopka. I'm about 3/4 of a mile from it now, but I used to live right on it, and I feel it's important to stay in touch, with frequent visits, as friends do. It's Florida' fourth largest lake by surface area, a huge, shallow lake seemingly built to catch the waves of the sun. It is almost always free of boats, partly because of the shallowness, and partly because of the multiple issues with the fish in the lake, but often teeming with alligators shifting back and forth in its fairly warm waters. (The lake is fed by a constant temperature spring, so, hot in winter, cool to warm in summer, since it's shallow enough to heat quickly.) And birds - eagles, herons of all sizes, seagulls, little brown things, anhingas, little red and brown things. (No magnificent sandhill cranes, though - they like drier land.) I've featured it in a couple of short tales here and there.
Unfortunately, the lake was badly poisoned from agricultural misuse, and still has problems with choking levels of phosphorus and other pollutants. People who fish in the lake (and contrary to the article I'm about to link to, yes, I've definitely see some people fishing in it) throw everything back, and I'm with them - I like fish but I really would not recommend eating anything from this lake. Unlike many other central Florida lakes (not retention ponds, lakes), the water is turbid, brown and green, not the crystal clear water that allows you to look straight down to the limestone beneath. Although in this case the lake bottom is covered by so much muck (which was not present in the 19th century) that it might be just as well that we can't see through the water. It still looks mostly blue on the surface, but sometimes you can see the brown and green lines.)
Some people now want to dump concrete rubble in it and allow invasive species in so that the lake will gain large sports fish.
I'd like to note, incidentally, that one reason birds come to Lake Apopka is to eat the fish. That this leads to many of the birds flopping over dead is not to say that the goals of more fish or more birds are all that incompatible.
The dredging idea mentioned in the article has a bit more merit, especially since the muck (a combination of agricultural misuse, very poor water management and the plant and other lake life that died from lack of oxygen and sank and became muck) is not exactly jumping out of the lake and walking elsewhere, and waiting for it to vanish may require a millennia long wait. But this is also a hugely expensive engineering project, at a time when Florida is saying firmly that it has no money for anything, thank you, and at a time when people want to throw MORE things into the lake, not less.
Sometimes, just throwing things into a mucky situation to see what might work is the right response. Sometimes it isn't.
This is a local issue mostly of interest only to me and possibly
jcbemis, but it's illustrative of a lot of problems right now, so, let's chat.
I love Lake Apopka. I'm about 3/4 of a mile from it now, but I used to live right on it, and I feel it's important to stay in touch, with frequent visits, as friends do. It's Florida' fourth largest lake by surface area, a huge, shallow lake seemingly built to catch the waves of the sun. It is almost always free of boats, partly because of the shallowness, and partly because of the multiple issues with the fish in the lake, but often teeming with alligators shifting back and forth in its fairly warm waters. (The lake is fed by a constant temperature spring, so, hot in winter, cool to warm in summer, since it's shallow enough to heat quickly.) And birds - eagles, herons of all sizes, seagulls, little brown things, anhingas, little red and brown things. (No magnificent sandhill cranes, though - they like drier land.) I've featured it in a couple of short tales here and there.
Unfortunately, the lake was badly poisoned from agricultural misuse, and still has problems with choking levels of phosphorus and other pollutants. People who fish in the lake (and contrary to the article I'm about to link to, yes, I've definitely see some people fishing in it) throw everything back, and I'm with them - I like fish but I really would not recommend eating anything from this lake. Unlike many other central Florida lakes (not retention ponds, lakes), the water is turbid, brown and green, not the crystal clear water that allows you to look straight down to the limestone beneath. Although in this case the lake bottom is covered by so much muck (which was not present in the 19th century) that it might be just as well that we can't see through the water. It still looks mostly blue on the surface, but sometimes you can see the brown and green lines.)
Some people now want to dump concrete rubble in it and allow invasive species in so that the lake will gain large sports fish.
I'd like to note, incidentally, that one reason birds come to Lake Apopka is to eat the fish. That this leads to many of the birds flopping over dead is not to say that the goals of more fish or more birds are all that incompatible.
The dredging idea mentioned in the article has a bit more merit, especially since the muck (a combination of agricultural misuse, very poor water management and the plant and other lake life that died from lack of oxygen and sank and became muck) is not exactly jumping out of the lake and walking elsewhere, and waiting for it to vanish may require a millennia long wait. But this is also a hugely expensive engineering project, at a time when Florida is saying firmly that it has no money for anything, thank you, and at a time when people want to throw MORE things into the lake, not less.
Sometimes, just throwing things into a mucky situation to see what might work is the right response. Sometimes it isn't.