(Orleans)– Some property owners along portions of Big Spirit Lake have been reporting relatively large amounts of vegetation washing up on the shoreline. Mike Hawkins, a fisheries biologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, says most of that is curly leaf pondweed, which typically dies off about this time of the year…
“By mid to late June most of the curly leaf has disappeared but we’re starting to actually see some of those plants starting to die back. And then you get a windy day and some of those plant fragments will break off and end up on shorelines and cause some problems for folks but rest assured it is dying back and so this is an issue that won’t last a whole lot longer.”
Hawkins says unlike East Lake Okoboji and some of the smaller lakes in the lower chain of the Iowa Great Lakes, Big Spirit Lake is NOT part of the treatment program for curly leaf pondweed…
“Big Spirit is a totally different animal there. It’s a lot of water volume. Spot treatments become pretty ineffective for what folks would expect. There’s really no possibility for the whole lake treatment. It just would be vastly, too expensive. I think we had calculated the value at one million a year to do some type of a whole lake treatment for curly leaf, so it really makes it very unfeasible. And the plant would continue to come back year after year, so it’s not really an option for Big Spirit Lake.”
Hawkins says a vegetation survey of Big Spirit indicated the volume of curly leaf pondweed in that lake was actually down somewhat this year.
