(Wahpeton)– It appears the treatment for eurasian watermilfoil on West Lake Okoboji was a success. Mike Hawkins of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources tells KUOO news the treatments were made a couple of weeks or so ago in the area of the harbor, the canals at Little Miller’s Bay and the Lazy Lagoon vicinity…
“We’ve gone back and checked a couple of times and it looks like the eurasian watermilfoil is gone. The plant is all dead. There’s other plants there, other native plants, that don’t seem to have been effected although it’s a little hard to tell this time of year because a lot of things are starting to die back for the year. They do that in the fall. But it looks like the eurasian watermilfoil is dead. We’ll go back in in the spring and check all those areas again to make sure we’ve got everything we need to tended to so. From here on out it’s just monitoring. So we’ll continue to monitor the lakes, we’ll continue to look for eurasian watermilfoil in our surveillance program and take appropriate action if we find anything else. But for now it looks like we were successful.”
Hawkins says the number and diversity of native aquatic plants in the Iowa Great Lakes is also important…
“We have a good diversity out there, good native plant growth in our lakes is probably one of our best tools for working with invasive plants. Those invasive plants are much less likely to take a strong foothold and dominate if we have good native diversity out there. And we also really want to re-emphasize prevention. These plants don’t travel down the road on their own. They are dragged from water body to water body on boats and trailers and water-related equipment, so clean, drain and dry.”
Hawkins adds the DNR has a new Aquatic Plant Management Biologist for the state of Iowa has a team that goes out to lakes throughout the state to assist in the monitoring process.
