WORT 89.9FM Madison

Invasive Species In Wisconsin Lakes

Jake Vander Zanden joins the Friday 8 O’Clock Buzz this week to talk about the species invading our Wisconsin lakes. Jake is the Director of the UW Madison’s Center for Limnology and the lead author of a study looking into data collected from eleven lakes over the course of forty years. Jake explains how the impact threatening the ecosystems of 39% of the lakes across Wisconsin. Species like the rusty crayfish, spiny water flea, and Chinese mystery snail disrupt the balance of the lakes. The interview digs into the descriptions of several of these species and what might be done to disrupt their shocking advance throughout the country since the 80s. Jake explains what Madison area listeners can do to help protect our local lakes. The maintaining our lake health and mitigating the impact of these persistent invaders is no more urgent, and mitigating the impact of the invasive species is a task we can all help with. Photo by Bruno Guerrero on Unsplash

Broadcast on:: 20 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

Hi, I'm Andy Moore, your Friday host of 8 o'clock buzz. Thanks for spending your mornings with us. We love bringing you this blend of art and music and news and politics and more. In return, we ask that you spend a little to support this show. And it's easy. Go to w-o-r-t-f-m dot org slash donate. You think that a segment about invasive species would be a look at the southern border proclamations of Donald Trump. But think again. We're talking, in days of species into Wisconsin lakes, 39% of Wisconsin lakes are home to at least one form of invasive species, species that don't belong in the ecosystem and can cause different kinds of havoc on the body of water. They call home. The UW-Madison Lemnology Department has been collecting data of 11 lakes in over 40 years of research. The most recent review of the status of the lakes came out last month in the journal Bioscience. Jake van Der Zanden is a director of the UW-Madison Center for Lemnology and the lead author of the study. He joins us now by phone. Good morning, Jake. And welcome to the Friday buzz. Thank you, Andy. Good to hear from you. It's great to have you. This is an awkward way to start. What else would you expect, right? But is there any such thing as a good invasive species, a form that wasn't there from the start, but is benign in the lake or maybe even does something good? Well, boy, an invasive species, the whole idea is somewhat in the eye of the beholder, right? So a change to an ecosystem could be viewed as a positive change by someone. And then another person would view that as a negative change, right? So let's say the zebra mussels come in and they can clear the water. Well, that's great if you like your recreational swim, you want clear water. But the lake also becomes less productive. And so if you are a deficient, maybe the fish productivity will decrease. And so there is an element of people's values when we sort of judge impacts of an invasive species. I want to get to some of the individual species you guys are keeping track of in a moment. But the 11 lakes, I hope I got that right, that I mentioned in the intro that your department has monitored. Those bodies are all over the state. Well, okay, so four of them are in the Madison area. And seven of them are in the area of our field station in northern Wisconsin, specifically Violet County. So we have a field station called Trout Lake station and we have seven lakes that are very much striking distance of Crout Lake. Well, I think many of us have passed that station and seen the sign for it. Yeah. If you're heading north, you're going to see that sign, on 51 you'll see that sign that says Crout Lake station. How many years have you been with the department in this study, Jake? Well, I have been around for about 22 years. I came to UW Madison in 2001, but this work monitoring the set of 11 lakes goes back to 1982. Right. So this is a remarkably long data collection. But that means that you've been in on it, it seems for slightly more than half of that duration, when you go to these lakes, you must know them like you know your children. Well, I do. I mean, I've been paying attention to these lakes. I mean, I am not the lead of the long term ecological research program. There are people who are much spending much more time out on these lakes than I am. But yeah, I mean, I'll say collectively our community of researchers has gotten to know these specific lakes exceptionally well, and we see changes in these lakes kind of with our eyes just from being out there all the time, right. So, I mean, again, like there have been times when, oh my, you know, some really large changes happen and we do see that, see that. Let's get to these dreaded invasive species. Your study shows the presence of at least one of six invasive species in these Wisconsin waters. It would take a whole hour to talk about each one in depth. But give us like a little lightning flash or 10 to 15 second description of each one. Plus, I have to admit, the names of these things are pretty nutty and kind of nutty just to say them. So, 10 to 15 seconds on where each one came from and the threat they posed. The first one is the rusty crayfish. Right. The rusty crayfish is actually from more than Midwestern sort of central Midwestern United States, so Ohio River Valley. And this crayfish has spread throughout lakes, Minnesota, Wisconsin. And it displaces the native crayfish and it can become a really abundant takeover and it eats aquatic plants and so it'll just wipe out my aquatic plant. So, how did the rusty crayfish come to these parts? We don't always know, but we think that it has moved around in bait buckets. So, an angler fishes with crayfish and then they'll transport them from some other area. Okay. The spiny water flea, what's that individual like? Okay. This is a tiny crustacean that swims around in the water column to have a very long spine. And they are from Eurasia, so Europe, Asia kind of broadly distributed there. And they appeared several decades ago. They feed on some of our native crustaceans and have caused some remarkable ecological changes in Wisconsin lakes. When you say tiny, how tiny are we talking about? Boy, less than a centimeter for sure. Oh, man. So, you're like half a centimeter. Looking over the side of your boat, you're not going to see the spiny water. Generally not now. I mean, unless you look really, really carefully. Yeah. Okay. The Dresden did, if I said that correctly, muscle. Trichineed muscles, right. This is zebra muscle. And there's another muscle that's related to zebra muscle called quark muscle. This is a big one. Maybe the zebra muscles themselves are not big, but they have had remarkable impacts. They live on the bottom, they attach to some sort of a hard substrate, like a rock. And they are incredibly efficient at filtering the water. And so we will see in some lakes, the water becomes clearer, which is a good thing. Yeah. But the bad thing that they do is they, they foul infrastructure, so like water intake pipes get encrusted in these and they need to be cleaned off. They also cause, in some lakes, they cause an increase of harmful cyano bacteria blooms, which can be toxic. And you know, that may have been, by the name of zebra muscles, one of the only invasive species that a lot of people could mention on their own these days. This next one is especially curious sounding. What's the Chinese mystery snail? Right. Okay. Yeah. So I'll mention these two together. Chinese mystery snail and banded mystery snail. They are these two snails that are, again, not native to North America and they have come in and they have been spreading around in Wisconsin over the past several decades. They're really big. They're really chunky snails. So if you are out on a lake and you find a snail that's incredibly chunky, that's possibly a Chinese-repanded mystery snail, and they can become really, really abundant, we don't really have a great understanding of what ecological impacts they have. And so this might be an example of species that, yeah, we don't want to spread them around. You know, let's try to make sure that they don't get everywhere, but I don't feel like we're seeing, like, cataclysmic impact of these things. Yeah. So the jury is still out on the Chinese mystery snail and the banded mystery snail. Who gets to name these things, by the way? Oh, I see. Yeah. Most of these things were named up very long. I'm sure. Yeah. And then there's one more. Your race, Eurasian water, milk foil. Right. Yeah. This is a big one too. This is an aquatic plant. People will often see this and would just call it a weed. They are from Eurasia and they grow in lakes. They have this characteristic of they will go, they'll start at the bottom because it's in a water, rooted aquatic plant and they'll grow up to the surface and you'll often get Eurasian water, milk foil coming all the way up to the surface of the lake and you'll get these mats of weeds that cover the surface. And so aesthetically, it can be really bad. It can clog waterways and we see Eurasian water, milk foil in high levels in the Madison lakes at times. So if you go over to Manona Bay and you see it's all kind of weedy, that's a problem with Eurasian water, milk foil. If you're just joining us, we're talking with Dr. Jake Vander-Zanden, he's the director of UW Center for Limnology. You gave us a great overview there, by the way. When I talk to scholars, they sometimes, I don't mean to demean, but they sometimes have, it's challenging to compress and so anyway, I want to just thank you for walking us through six invasive species. A lot. But you also gave us a nice snapshot of sort of the junk that they can do. Of those six species, if you had to pick which one do you think that we should be the most concerned about? Dressing in muscles, in other words, the zebra muscles, they're the one that is truly the most worrisome and has had the most dramatic impacts. And then I will also throw in the spiny water flea. I don't think we often recognize the impact that spiny water flea have had because they're not easy to see, but their impact can be really dramatic as well. Let's stay with the muscles just for a moment. You talked a little bit about the harm and the mess they can make of infrastructure and things like that. But if you would, how do muscles translate to humans either, I don't know, some kind of physical health effect or what is their presence? Talk more about their presence, impact on the ecosystem, water recreation, things like that. Yeah, right, well, zebra muscles they've spread into around 100 plus lakes in Wisconsin. And they really can change the ecosystem. They feed on phytoplankton, which are the floating algae in the water. And there are some sometimes perceived benefits in that they would clear the water. So what happens is that they then cause these mats of green gopey algae on the bottom of the lake. So they're sort of shifting the algae from up in the water down to the bottom. So you get these gopey mats of algae growing on the bottom. And then those become dislodged from the wash up on beaches. And so we'll often see in zebra muscle infested lakes, the beaches are kind of covered with the decomposing material and it's really, really gross. And we see that in the Madison Lakes more now than we used to because we've had a zebra muscle invasion in 2015 here in Madison Lakes. Yeah, we went camping at Peninsula State Park early summer. And wow, what you just described is exactly what was on the beautiful shoreline, formerly beautiful shoreline. And so that was a shedding almost of that algae. And here it comes up on the sand. Right, right. It's exactly. It's a side effect of zebra mussels. You didn't see that before zebra mussels were there. Yeah. You told us how the crayfish pound its way into Wisconsin waters. So where did the zebra mussels come from, Jake? So zebra mussels were transported into the Great Lakes in the early 1980s or possibly late 70s by ballast water of large, ocean-going ships. So there are these big ships that move back and forth into the Great Lakes. They travel across the ocean and they will exchange water in their tanks, in these ballast water tanks that are used to stabilize the ship. So some ocean-going ships presumably discharged water from some other port in the world into the Great Lakes. And along with that water came the zebra mussels. And so then they established in the early 80s and from there they spread rapidly throughout the Great Lakes through the Mississippi River drainage, smaller inland lakes like the Madison Lakes here, and then also they've spread out west. So once they got that foothold then they were capable of rapidly spreading across the continents. It's almost kind of incredible what they've been able to do. And it's incredibly described in a book written by Dan Egan. I want listeners to know that the life and death of Great Lakes is a tremendous read, very accessible, but very well-researched and documented. And it goes a long way of explaining it in great and rather dramatic detail the course of that ballast water infestation from ocean-going vessels making their way through the Great Lakes. That's a good book, isn't it? It's a fantastic book. I would highly recommend it. It's very readable, too. Yeah. I'm talking to Jake Vanders and he's the director of the UW Center for Limbology. Okay, so Jake, you know, these darn things are here forever, are they not? I mean, eradication is not an option. Generally not, no. In many cases, they're here and we do need to learn how to live with them. We want to make sure that they don't continue to spread. So I would love to see that the upper muscles don't make it into more lakes than they're already in. But fundamentally, when they're in a lake, like, let's say, Lake Mendota, we can't do anything to actually eradicate them or get rid of them. But so we need to sort of think about how we might sort of manage Lake Mendota to keep populations kind of at bay and they're going to be there, but can we think about how we might keep their populations in check and balance with the ecosystem? Can you give us an example of an approach to that keeping in check? Well, I mean, yeah, one thing that we've done through our long-term ecological research program has been what we call whole ecosystem experiments. And so we have had two lakes where we've done whole lake invasive species with removals. And one of them was in Lake Wingra in 2008. We in conjunction with the DNR removed invasive carp, so not Asian carp, but common carp from Lake Wingra. And what happened was that by kind of knocking down populations of carp, the ecosystem underwent a change. And so prior to the removal of carp, the lake tended to be pea soup green color. Okay, so it looked like literally like pea soup most of the time. After carp removed, the lake shifted in a major way and the water became much clearer. So that is an example of how one intervention, sort of like knocking the lake, can shift lake from one state to another state. So we saw this improvement in water quality. And that was a really big deal. And that high water quality stayed for ever since 2008. Oh, wow. So it was persistent. It didn't just bounce back to where it was before. Fascinating. Speaking of other states, what's the overall, it's not a competition, but what's the overall health of our lakes in Wisconsin compared to other Western states? That is a very broad question. I would say many of our lakes in Wisconsin are degraded and have been impacted environmentally. And I would say, Lake Shore residential development is a huge factor. So if you go to many lakes, the shore is just ringed with homes, right? And you'll see some homes where they have intact natural vegetation along the shore and it looks natural. But on many of these lakes, people have cut down all the trees and they have long going right down to the lake. And what they've done is that they've degraded that natural habitat near the lake. And that has really negatively impacted the health of the lakes. Right. And yeah. I'm sorry, we got to close, but before we do, and people want to review the study that came out last month, where can they find that? The paper itself? Yes. Oh boy, if they want to read the paper, they can find it posted on the Center for Alumnology webpage. Okay. All right. You can Google UW Madison Center for Alumnology. You can access the paper there for those who really want to read the paper. It's a little technical, but. Good deal. And in the courts, there's Dan Egan's life and death of the Great Lakes. So we are giving some reading assignments that people, very technical and less technical. Jake Van der Zanden, thank you for joining us on the Friday buzz this morning. Have a great weekend. Thank you, Andy. It's been a pleasure. Dr. Jake Van der Zanden is the director of the UW Center for Alumnology. All righty then. We go from a plan for the lake to a plan for the vote. The vote starts early in Wisconsin. Do you have a plan to cast about it? There's lots of ways to do it. But a lot to know about how to do it. So Dane County, Clerk Scott McDonald joins us after some music and some announcements. And we have the return on course picks, which we're all looking forward to here. You're listening to the only WRTF in the world. We come to you from South Bedford Street, just a few blocks from Lake Manona in Madison, Wisconsin.