The Patrick Leahy-Lake Champlain Basin Program has issued its 2024 State of the Lake and Ecosystems Indicators report. Produced every three years, it documents efforts to manage the lake, its watershed and address challenges. Representatives from the Basin Program recently spoke with WAMC’s North Country Bureau Chief Pat Bradley about the report and potential threats from invasive species.
Lake Champlain is the 6th largest freshwater lake in the United States. It runs 120 miles from Whitehall, New York to the Richelieu River in Quebec. It’s basin of more than 8,000 square miles includes Vermont, New York and Quebec.
The State of the Lake Report indicates that several components being tracked are showing improvement, including lower mercury levels and phosphorus concentrations.
Program Director Eric Howe noted that there has been considerable stakeholder investment over the years to make those reductions.
“Great news there. We need to maintain that level of effort if not continue to increase it to meet our goals and maintain our success in the coming years. Cyanobacteria continue to be a challenge despite our improvements in phosphorus concentrations in the lake. There are a lot of other elements, things happening in the watershed and in the lake that contribute to the presence of cyanobacteria blooms and we’re working to address those,” Howe noted. “These flood events that seem to be happening more and more frequently pose a big challenge frankly to the success of our programs! But we’re working with many different partners to monitor the results and the impacts of the floods and try to install different management practices to reduce those impacts and stabilize our streambanks in the coming years.”
There has not been a new invasive species detected in Lake Champlain since 2018. But the Round Goby may be the next. The invasive fish has made its way from the Great Lakes to the Champlain Canal south of Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River to the north. Aquatic Invasive Species Management Coordinator Meg Modley says the Round Goby faces some barriers before it can enter Lake Champlain.
"To the north they are known to occur in some numbers in the St. Lawrence Seaway and they’ve started to come upriver or south towards Lake Champlain in the Richelieu River and the first obstacle they need to pass is the Saint Ours Dam which has a fish ladder, a dam and a lock,” Modley notes. “Unfortunately there was positive detection of Environmental-DNA closer to Lake Champlain on the upstream side of that first barrier. And then they were able to catch a few Goby, fish in hand, above that dam. And they have quite a distance to go before they get to the Chambly Basin where there’s another series of nine or ten locks that they would have to move through to get towards Lake Champlain.”
“It sounds like it’s more difficult for them to come in from the north than from the Champlain Canal,” comments Bradley.
“There’s some barriers in both systems. Both involve locks and dams and fish passage places,” affirms Modley. “What we do know is that the Round Goby moved across the Erie Canal and to the confluence of the Mohawk and the Hudson and now our concern for the Champlain Canal system. On the Champlain Canal if they were unfortunately to get to Lock C-7 it would be easier yet for them to move through the remainder of the system. We’ve had an early detection monitoring program with New York state DEC and the New York state Canal Corporation and when we detected Goby moving up towards Lock C-1 they implemented some operational changes to prevent Goby from moving upstream. And we are collecting more data. We are conducting a number of different ways of looking for Goby both with Environmental-DNA as well as with physical collection measures.”
Modley says it’s not known exactly what the impact will be if the Round Goby enters Lake Champlain, but other lakes have seen it displace native species.
“This is a small fish that doesn’t get really longer than five or six inches. They’re going to out-compete our native fish by eating the food that they want to eat. But they also voraciously eat eggs of other fish species. It may not be able to out-compete a bass, but it sure can eat the bass eggs. And one of the things that we’re experiencing in Lake Champlain is this great success story of natural recruitment of lake trout. So it’s just one concern that we have is that they would aggressively eat eggs of some of our prized fishery species, bass, lake trout, salmon, sturgeon.” Modley adds that’s not the only potential problem with the Goby. “And then they have been known to carry a disease called viral hemorrhagic septicemia. And that’s a disease that really triggered the creation of our bait fish regulations in the state of New York and Vermont in the early 2000’s was concern about moving bait and bait water from one body of water that might be infested to another. And so those regulations really shut that down. We really don’t want that to get in the lake and affect other fish species.”
Water chestnut, an invasive aquatic plant, has been an annoyance in many lakes and ponds for years. Modley says a new infestation was recently found in Scomotion Creek which flows into Lake Champlain on the north end of Plattsburgh.
"Water chestnut first entered Lake Champlain we believe through the Champlain Canal in the early ‘40’s and that population has been managed for decades and we have successfully beat the very dense populations of it in the south lake from the Crown Point Bridge down to the Dresden Narrows getting down closer to Whitehall to the source of where we believe it entered. However, there are some satellite populations of water chestnut that occur in the lake and this is a new one,” explains Modley. “The Scomotion Creek population was first discovered when a young participant in the Plattsburgh Mayor’s Cup brought up a piece of the plant to our Lake Champlain Basin Program tent at the event and said ‘hey what’s this?’ and our boat launch stewards were there and were trained and knew what it was and said ‘hey where did you find that?’ And so the New York state DEC and our boat stewards went out and started looking and found that in fact there is a fairly dense population that somehow has been seeded in that creek. And the threat is that if it comes out of the creek the mats can float with the wind, the prevailing wind directions, to the north and northwest and maybe create new populations. And so we’re strategizing right now with local partners and the state on how to get in and better assess the population and figure out if we can contain it and possibly manage it so it doesn’t source new populations in the lake.”
The Basin Program is known for supporting scientific research across the basin. But it is also fostering an artist-in-residence program. Howe says it helps educate more people about lake issues.
“We have been slowly developing this program over the last four or five years and it’s a really neat way to augment our education and outreach work that we do. It’s been really interesting to see some of the different perspectives that artists have and those interpretations are generally more accessible to folks to help them better understand the health of Lake Champlain,” muses Howe. “One of the original artist-in-residence programs that we supported was with an artist who took different invasive species that are either in Lake Champlain or that we’re concerned about getting into the lake and created what’s called a mandala. And we had that printed onto a sail and gave that sail to the Lake Champlain Community Sailing Center and they put it up on one of their boats. So the mandala was visible throughout the Burlington waterfront for several years. Another artist-in-residence program, folks at Paul Smith’s College have been using music to interpret data trends. One of the other pieces that’s been produced as part of these programs is a really amazing painter Dave Fadden, who’s part of the Haudenosaunee band here in the New York portion of the Champlain Valley, and he produced this amazing painting of a woman dipping her hands into, presumably, the river of Lake Champlain. And it’s just a really cool piece that highlights the connection of our heritage and communities to the lake.”
The Patrick Leahy Lake Champlain Basin Program was created in 1990 with the passage of the Lake Champlain Special Designation Act which amended the Clean Water Act to designate the lake a resource of national significance.
