Eurasian Watermilfoil - A Conservation Confession
By Liz Wade, Higgins Lake Watershed Partnership

"One thing that you as a recreational user can do to help prevent additional transportation of invasive exotic species is to remove all tangled plant fragments from your boat when you remove it from the water. "

After forty years, I have had to face up to something I did in 1960, with due apologies to the State of New York. You see, I was doing graduate work at Cornell in the elementary education field, and we had to do a science project which could be "taught" to our children later in the year. Feeling impoverished, I found an unused gallon jar, filled it with water and some gravel, letting the water clear before introducing plants, snails, and guppies.

The aquarium was wonderful. My guppies kept reproducing; the snails kept it clean, and it was really nice having it sit there on my standard dormitory desk while the year went by. But the end of the year came, and I was three weeks from our wedding, had to move out, and was faced with the age-old problem – "What will I do with the aquarium?"

Well, I didn’t do what so many have done in the past – used the toilet for disposal. I couldn’t do that. I took it down to Cayuga and gave the fish a new home. So, I wasn’t feeling so guilty, until many years later when I found out that the plant we all were using in our fish tanks at the time was Eurasian watermilfoil! I now know that I did the worst possible thing for that beautiful lake in New York – I introduced an invasive exotic species to that fresh water lake. Invasive exotic species can be very harmful when introduced into a new environment. Since they are not native to the area, they can easily flourish without any predators to hinder them and quickly encroach on native species habitat and food sources.

Cayuga, like Higgins Lake, is a spring-fed and deep lake, which will probably never have the complete infestation that a shallower lake has (such as Houghton). It can and does have some infestation, however, and it may have been my guppy tank that did it!

Of course, there are other ways of bringing Eurasian watermilfoil to a lake. Higgins, like so many others, probably had plants introduced when boats coming from infested lakes either had living plants on the trailers or in their bilge or bait containers. Although there is no pinpointed source of the original infestation of the United States lakes with the European sub-species, most scientists believe it arrived in the bilge water of the large shipping boats. This is one of the reasons there has been such an active campaign to control what bilge water comes to the States. And in my case, as in many others, it was used in or sold for aquariums.

Wherever it came from, it was documented in the 1940’s in Lake Erie, California, Arizona and Washington, D.C. Subsequently it was found in many places in Canada during the 1960’s. By 1985, it had become a major problem throughout North America.

Eurasian watermilfoil impacts existing native plants by displacing them, eventually affecting fish populations, human use of the habitat for recreational use or transportation, and can even become a nuisance in water reservoirs.

Most of us are aware of the thorough studies being done for the Houghton Lake area. Several groups in the Higgins Lake watershed are studying the situation there. Questions being asked are: How likely is it that Eurasian watermilfoil will become so thick as to become a problem for all the lake’s uses? How do we best track the growth, or lack of expansion, at Higgins Lake? What would be the best approach to management at Higgins Lake? One thing that you as a recreational user can do to help prevent additional transportation of invasive exotic species is to remove all tangled plant fragments from your boat when you remove it from the water.

I just wish I had known in 1960 what I know now, as I will always feel guilty about that trip to Cayuga’s shores with my gallon jar.