Lake officials weigh in on water quality

CELINA — The 2021 season at Grand Lake St. Marys will go down as one of the best ones in recent memory.

Dr. Stephen Jacquemin, associate professor of biology at Wright State University – Lake Campus, talked about the improvement the water quality saw this year at the Lake Improvement Association meeting on Saturday morning.

“You don’t have to be a water quality scientist to have been around the area and to have seen just the complete and total swings and shifts in water quality,” joked Jacquemin.

He discussed the low runoffs from the streams into the lake for reasons for higher clarity in the water this year.

External runoff into the lake carries nutrients that help fuel algal blooms and though several efforts from lake officials, the amount of runoff was drastically low in 2021.

“[There was] tremendously low runoff of the streams,” he said.

The equation he described was volume of water going into the lake, multiplied by concentration of phosphorus or nitrogen.

“It really doesn’t matter how concentrated the nutrients are, when there’s simply not any water flushing to the lake, by definition the load is going to be tremendously low,” he said. “In 2021, we are on track to be the lowest year in terms of stream flow in the last decade.”

April saw the lowest volume of flow that lake officials have on record while January, February and March were all some of the lowest months on record.

While the winter months and early spring saw low runoff, Jacquemin said it was very noticeable when the algae in the lake stopped feeding from the external load and turned its attention to the internal load.

“Once you get to mid-summer, the external load ceases to be as important and the internal load becomes infinitely more important,” he said, which occurred in the last week of June and the beginning of July. “The shift of June to July, that was the moment the algae stopped caring about external load and shifted to internal load. You could see it.”

Internal loading continues to be one of the major problems that fuels algal bloom, but dredging efforts have worked to reduce the amount of nutrients in the lake.

Jacquemin noted the number of diversity of health green algae and diatoms that were able to thrive in the lake.

“We saw things underneath the microscope that we never saw before in Grand Lake,” he said. “It was really an impressive testimony to the kinds of healthy algae that are still out there

that just get outcompeted by the blue-greens.”

Jacquemin said he and his team at Wright State are working to quantify and identify “hundreds” of different species of algae that were in the lake this year.

“It’s important to know what you got,” he said.

The workload has become too much for his group and he said he approached the LIA a couple of weeks ago to see if they would help fund to pay for an outside consulting company to help out.

He was happy to hear they were on board and he was hopeful that the company would have their findings back in a few months.

ODNR Wildlife Officer Brad Buening also spoke on Saturday at the meeting.

He said he participated in a fishery program offered by the Division of Wildlife where they set out 10 nets for five days in Grand Lake to collect crappie.

“They found lots of crappies between 5 and 8 inches long. It’s pretty good news for the upcoming years regarding the potential population and diversity of crappies,” he said. “They have a lot of room to grow here.”

Buening also reported that ODNR is conducting chronic wasting disease (CWD) studies in Mercer County.

According to the United State Geological Survey, CWD is a “fatal, neurological illness occurring in North American cervids, including white-tailed deer, mule deer, elk and moose.

Buening said they are taking samples from roadkill deer as well as harvested deer from hunters.

He mentioned, at the refuge on state Route 703, there’s a box there labeled “CWD” where anyone can put in harvested deer heads and fill out information so they can study it.

In other business, the LIA will hold its annual election at their meeting next month, Dec. 4, at the Celina Moose.