Page 1 - ALA Fall 2017 Newsletter

Curt Stager Opens ALA Symposium

Every Lake Has A Secret Story

To understand your lake’s story, you must showed that it had algae blooms a
understand the world--people, molecules, thousand years ago. Impacts from Native
ecosystems and history, said Dr. Stager in his Americans farming, geese pooping into the
keynote speech to an audience of 150 at the lake and soil and sewage washing in caused
August 2017 ALA Symposium. Dr. Stager is it to go eutrophic a thousand years ago.
professor of natural sciences at Paul Smith’s “Sediment cores show it stayed that way for
College, host to the Symposium. centuries, even after the settlement moved
away.” It’s better to prevent your lake from
Dr. Stager sees lakes as both mirrors and going down that path than having to fix it,
windows into history, culture and our he notes.
connections to all life. He adopts a holistic
view in a changing world, where even the Stager sees the lake bottom as a time cap-
most remote lakes can experience sudden sule, a legacy yielding an environmental
changes. Through core sampling of a lake’s history that may still be affecting a lake
bottom, centuries-old layers of mud can be today.
read like pages in a book.
In closing, Stager emphasizes that we are
Centuries-old layers of mud the ecosystem as well. “We not only see
read like pages in a book ourselves in the lakes, but the lakes reflect
us physically. Now, more than ever, it is
essential to protect them.”
Citing recent algae blooms at Wolf Lake in
Newcomb, a pristine “heritage lake” that has
no human activity around it, core sampling
showed very little change, said Stager. Yet
something has caused it to turn green, so be
aware that even remote lakes are experienc-
ing sudden change, he cautioned.

Dr. Margaret Murphy’s team discovered non-
native jellyfish, perhaps carried in on loon
feathers, but research is ongoing as to what
caused Wolf Lake to suddenly turn green.
Crawford Lake in Ontario, another core
sampling study by Stager and his team, Curt Stager, Ph.D., author of “Still Waters: The
Secret World of Lakes”