Experts say Grand Lake saw good improvement in 2021

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 recent Lake Improvement Association.

“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.”