You can try to make Winnebago many things to many people, but it has its own agenda

By Jim Lundstrom

When algae blooms started stinking up corners of Lake this summer, a widely distributed Gannett news story that originated with the Appleton Post-Crescent quoted a county health official who said of the algae: “It’s toxic. You don’t want to swim in water that’s toxic.”

Surely the health official did not mean the blue-green algae – known to scientists as cyanobacteria – had turned the largest lake in the state into a toxic pool? Wouldn’t an ecological meltdown of that scale have prompted evacuations, a state of emergency, prime time coverage?

Or did the official misspeak? Did she really mean to say, “You don’t want to swim in algae that’s toxic”?

Because it is the algae, not the water, that is toxic. Once again, Lake Winnebago takes a hit for something visited upon it by outside forces.

The lake was not covered by the algal bloom, and where it did appear near shorelines, it was so disgusting that only an idiot or a lake biologist would go near it.

“I picked some up and looked at it under the microscope,” said Michael Lizotte, director of the Aquatic Research Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. “It’s an algae that’s very distinctive. It’s easy to identify, so I pretty much knew it right away.”

So, should it be cause for widespread concern?

“The health risk would require ingesting huge amounts of it, and the places where it blooms, most people wouldn’t get into that water. It looks like the top of the lake is filled with tiny fish eggs,” Lizotte said. “It can give people rashes. Depends on the person. I don’t get it. Someone else might be very sensitive to it.”

However, this bloom of cyanobacteria was unusual, Lizotte said.

“There’s not a database that I can go and look up, but I’ve been here since 1994 and I had not seen this bloom since coming here, other than finding it in a sample every now and then, a rare thing,” he said.

But, he added, it was common at one time.

“The textbooks all say it’s common to this area, and when I go back to look at data from Wisconsin lakes, it is really common here. We just haven’t seen it for decades,” he said. “An interesting thing about that organism, it’s a marker of cleaner water.

“I’ve been trying to tell people, sometimes nature gives you these signals. Sometimes we read them wrong.”

Art Techlow III, Winnebago system biologist with the Oshkosh office of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resource, agrees with Lizotte that Lake Winnebago water quality has improved. He has spent much of his adult life working toward that end.

“When I was a kid in the ’60s, Winnebago was pretty dirty,” he said. “It was notorious for blue-green algae blooms. We had the dog days of August with big algae blooms out there. The lake is cleared up, cleaned up. As the water cleans up there’s better sunlight penetration, so plants are back in areas where they haven’t been for a while.”

This means a lot to Techlow, an Oshkosh native (“cut me open and you’ll find fish guts and sawdust”) with fond childhood memories of joining his father on adventures on the Winnebago system when his dad was the outdoor writer for the Oshkosh Northwestern.

“I loved the lakes,” he said. “My dad would take me fishing and hunting and just outdoors all the time. I met some of the original biologists who were hired by the old Wisconsin Conservation Dept. I just thought they had the greatest job in the world. I’m one of the few people nowadays that got to do what they always wanted to do.”

Techlow worked at a plywood mill while earning undergraduate geology and biology degrees, with an emphasis on ecology, at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. In 1981, while earning his master’s degree in zoology, he became a student intern with the DNR. He became an employee in 1986, and but for a brief time spent working on some shallow southern lakes he has spent all his time on the Winnebago system.

“It’s a big lake that’s hard to manage,” he said. “We’ve seen huge losses in habitat. I like to believe we’re making some inroads in reversing that trend. We’ve seen a decline and subsequent reversal in water quality. I think we hit the bottom in the ’60, where at some point we had a wholesale collapse of rooted aquatic plants, particularly wild celery, which was the dominant one.”

Techlow has seen the once vast wild rice beds disappear, the wild celery beds in Lake Poygan vanish and with them the canvasback duck population that fed on wild celery. Bulrushes, gone. Many of the existing aquatic plants suffered “a long, slow drowning process,” Techlow said.

“We’ve lost some key native plants. In 1982 we measured wild rice in 5 ½ feet of water,” he said. “That was the last good year for wild rice. We had it all over the lakes. By ’83 there was 50%. By ’84, 10%. Now you might see it in shallow sloughs and very protected shallow bays.”

Techlow has also studied historical accounts of the system.

“If you read those early accounts of people who did write something down of what they saw, they’d come up the lower Fox into Winnebago. Accounts of Lake Butte des Morts describe it as a sea of wild rice with a barely discernible river channel. I’m sure the two upper lakes were similar. The shore of Lake Winnebago was extensive wetlands. By some accounts, the Fox River coming through Oshkosh was about three times wider than it is now. It probably had extensive wetlands and was filled. A very different picture. The upper lakes would be described as a pristine-riverine-marsh landscape. Large delta marshes built up. Extensive submersive plants. Very clear water. Fly up the wolf River and it clears up dramatically about where navigation ends. I don’t want to blame boaters. It’s a thing people have a right to do, but it does have an impact and it shows in the rivers with the sediment load they have to carry. And that’s being reflected in the water quality of the upper lakes.”

This summer’s scary algae bloom had more to do with the weather and the health of the lake, Techlow said.

“Local meteorological conditions determine what the algae does,” he said. “Algae is phototropic. That means it moves toward a light source, the sun. In the lake, the closest it can get to the sun is at the surface. If you get extended hot, calm days, particularly a drought period, the algae just drifts to the surface.”

Despite the algae, Techlow maintains Winnebago is cleaner than when he started with the DNR.

“I am convinced, and so are others, the lake is cleaner, i.e., clearer,” he said. “Winnebago has been clearing up, in my opinion, since the early to mid ’90s. That’s been reflected in the growth of aquatic plant life. The plants are back in areas where they haven’t been for a while. People complain about the vegetation on Lake Winnebago. Those plants provide buffering capacity to protect the shoreline from erosion. They provide filtering capacity. They clear the water up themselves. And they provide habitat for a lot of fish and wildlife on that lake.”

Techlow traces today’s cleaner Lake Winnebago to work that began decades ago with efforts to stop pollution discharge into the lake by industries and municipalities.

“Efforts to clean up point source discharge started in the ’60s, ’70s and into the ’80s,” he said. “That’s very highly regulated now and those points of discharge were really cleaned up. I think that had an impact on Lake Winnebago water clarity.”

Another high point for the lake came in the 1980s when the state began giving funding to counties for better watershed management.

“The Winnebago Pool watershed is huge, approximately 6,000 square miles. That was divided into sub-watersheds,” Techlow said.

When he was hired in 1986, one of those Winnebago Pool sub-watersheds had received state funding as a priority watershed.

“By the early to mid ’90s, there were 10 operating,” Techlow said. “I think that had a significant impact.”

With a 6,000 square mile area draining into the Winnebago system (which includes the Wolf and upper Fox Rivers, as well as Lakes Butte des Morts, Poygan and Winneconne), everyone living in that area can be considered a lakefront property owner.

“You live away from the lake and think you’re not having an impact? What’s running in that storm sewer?” Techlow said. “Pollution from non-point source, or what’s running off the landscape, that’s big. We aren’t addressing the watershed.”

“This is a huge problem,” said Tami Jackson, development and communications director of the Madison-based Wisconsin Association of Lakes. “To put it into perspective, polluted runoff is impairing or threatening an estimated 90% of inland lakes. We didn’t get here alone. We all contributed to the problem and there’s something that everyone can do to help improve the water quality of the lakes that we love. It’s really important for people to feel like they can participate and make a difference and you can.”

“There’s almost no environmental problem you can’t trace back to population size.” Techlow said.

While he sympathizes with lakefront homeowners who have to endure the algae blooms, he explains to them that they are helping to create the conditions that make the blooms thrive.

“It smells horrible,” he said. “There are people out there who are convinced by the look and smell of this stuff that the local sewage treatment plant bypassed their overflow. It smells like it and it looks like it, but it ain’t.

“At the same time, I’ll be on their front lawn, which is well manicured and not a weed in sight, and you know they are applying a lot of herbicide and fertilizer,” he said. “People are putting this stuff on lawns way more than they need to at way higher rates than they need. Everyone’s got a beautiful lawn because you’re a moral degenerate if you’ve got dandelions. That shallow-rooted turf doesn’t hold back much in the form of runoff. What happens on that land has a direct impact on the lakes. It’s a fertile system. You could call it hyper-eutrophic now because we’ve got excess fertility, above what nature would give us. When algae dies, some of it goes downstream, but much of it settles like money in the bank and stores nutrients in the sediment.

“If everyone changed their ways tomorrow, would that make a difference on the Winnebago Pool?” Techlow said. “It might, but there are so many nutrients stored out there it might be decades before we see really dramatic changes.”

Bart De Stasio describes Lake Winnebago as “a huge reactor.”

“Keep adding water with new nutrients and stuff grows,” he said.

De Stasio has been studying Lake Winnebago since arriving to teach biology at Lawrence University in 1992. The associate professor of biology and 1982 Lawrence graduate leads students on the school’s research vessels on Winnebago and Green Bay.

“We’ve been studying the lake every summer since 1992, looking at the status of water quality and the food web interactions,” he said. “During that time period we also had the invasion of zebra mussels, so we’ve had a good way of looking at how the lake has changed and responded to that. I’ve also looked at some historical data as well. We have a pretty good idea of what’s going on in the lake.”

Winnebago has not responded to the zebra mussel invasion the way other areas have.

“When zebra mussels invade, the population grows and feeds on algae,” he said. “Zebra mussels are very good at filtering water. Most lakes, it comes in and clears the water very quickly. In Lake Winnebago, that has not been the case. There really has not been a demonstrable effect of zebra mussels on the system the way it has happened with other places.”

The main reason, De Stasio explains, is that zebra mussels attach to hard places.

“Lake Winnebago, except for rocky shore on the edge of some places, much of it is pretty soft, mucky mud. We don’t have the wide coverage like other places, so the total number hasn’t gotten to be as high, though you will find spots where they’re very dense.”

And that soft, mucky mud at the bottom of the lake is nothing but old algae blooms.

“The kind of algae we get are not eaten by the crustaceans, the water fleas, in the lake,” De Stasio said. “Those water fleas can’t remove the algae and use it. So the algae builds up, then it dies and settles to the bottom. That’s really what the mud is made of, algae that’s died in previous years. This lake has been like this for thousands of years. This is not just something that happened with human settlement, although it hasn’t been helped by human settlement. It always has been a productive system.”

De Stasio said a colleague in geology did a core sampling of Winnebago several years ago.

“This lake has been productive like this for 4,000 or 5,000 years,” he said. “It has always drained a large part of the state, which means lots of nutrients coming in, lots of production.”

In a nutrient-rich lake like Winnebago, De Stasio said zebra mussels may be accelerating the normal process.

“Because of all the feeding they do, they release a lot of nutrients back into the water very quickly,” he said. “So they take algae out of the water, consume it, break it down, and they release the nutrients back in the water. Nitrogen and phosphorous are released. So they’re speeding everything up. As a result of that, those nutrients are available again for more algae to grow. Everything’s cycling faster with zebra mussels in place. We think that’s what’s leading to the bigger blooms we’ve had.”

And if that is the case, we have only one choice.

“The only way to effectively deal with that is to reduce the amount of nutrients you have in your system,” De Stasio said. “Now we can do that to a limited extent with regulations and policy changes. However, this drains a large area so it’s never going to be a crystal clear lake. If we can reduce the amount of nutrients going into it, we can start slowing that process down and reduce the algae problems. There’s the rub – getting people to realize that we have to reduce nutrient loading. Golf courses, lawns, agriculture, all of that plays a big role in this.”

Add to the enormous nutrient load leaking in from thousands of sources in the watershed a continued warming trend in Winnebago water.

“We’ve had a clear trend of increasing water temperatures in the lake over the last 20 years,” he said. “Those increased temperatures are changing the ecosystem. Things are growing faster and feeding more, so we have a more productive system. We’re just starting to piece together what’s going on with that.”

In short, algae blooms are not going away, and as far as toxic blooms, De Stasio says that, too, is normal.

“There are measurable toxins in blooms every summer,” he said. “It's a normal process that those algae can produce toxins. It’s part of their evolutionary heritage that they’re producing toxins to prevent grazers and prevent other algae from growing. It’s not strange, really. It’s a natural process. It’s the concentrations that can cause problems.”

 De Stasio also points out that if you correct one thing on the lake for one user, another user might not like it.

“If you want to clean up Lake Winnebago, that means reducing algae,” he said. “That’s probably going to translate into lower fish production overall. The same people that want to have clear water may also be the people who want the trophy fishery, walleye, for instance. Walleye don’t do well in clear water. They’re more of a low-light predator. They prefer murky water.”

Lizotte of the Aquatic Research Center at UW-Oshkosh agrees that the nationally famous walleye fishing in Winnebago is a result of “the Winnebago we all grew to hate – turbid, lots of algae blooms and hardly any plants. It had a lot of fish, but not necessarily a lot of diversity of fish. That’s how we got 2 million walleye. They didn’t need the plant communities or any of that kind of thing.”

But that appears to be changing, he says.

“For whatever reason, we’re getting a much stronger plant population,” he said. “Some boaters don’t like it. Some sailors don’t like. But if you’re a bass fisherman, you love it. It’s all this new habitat. The fishing for pan fish, I’m hearing, is fantastic. I’m hearing a lot of people going nuts about yellow perch. You get those because those plant communities are coming back. Some of the historical documents going back suggest that this is what the system was like say 100 years ago – not much algae, a lot of plants and a much more diverse plant and animal community.”

Despite the many challenges facing Lake Winnebago, De Stasio of Lawrence University says it could be worse.

“There’s no PCB contamination. We don’t have to worry about heavy metals. The system is clean in terms of those kind of chemical problems, unlike the lower Fox River. It’s a resource we can still use. If we can solve the nutrient problems, we’ll all be better off.”