A Step Towards Paradise

We must maintain aerobic conditions top to bottom in our freshwater settings. When we do this, we are rewarded with super abundance. When we don’t do this, we experience an anaerobic nightmare of decline

​Yesterday we launched BioHaven Floating Islands in an early spring snowstorm.  The setting was Montana’s Madison Valley, not far from Yellowstone Park.  The source water emits from the Madison range, from the ski hills of Big Sky and the back country of Cowboy Heaven.  

As we worked, large trout, some that created wakes as large as a blanket beaver, swirled nearby targeting some emergent nymph.  Wet knees notwithstanding, we had two more BioHavens in place on the water, prepped to expand and build on nature’s wetland effect, in just an hour and a half.  The wet snow on this early spring day made for cold hands, but not that cold.  The boggy riparian edge of the spring ponds made for wet feet too, but nothing that wouldn’t dry in a short while.

​Nature’s model has transitioned into practical water stewardship.  We know how to steward for healthy, beautiful fish and other appropriate biota, instead of monocultures of blue-green algae and cyanobacteria, or ultimately red tide.  We have the science, and we have a growing number of stewardship masters, we call them Island Masters, who today launch BioHavens in every kind of water imaginable, from marine settings off the coast of southeast Alaska to phosphorus poisoned waters down watershed from Piney Point off the west coast of Florida.  

Right here on Fish Fry Lake we’ve learned that hyper eutrophic water, that’s been nutrient enriched by agriculture and urbanity, can be transitioned to health (Transition Water).  Water clarity is one simple marker of this process.  We can go from 14”s, to nineteen feet, and allow sunlight, one of two primary engines of life to occur at depth.  We can design for optimization of autotrophic life, plants that require sunlight, as well as heterotrophs, that require surface area, to flourish and advance in their staircase trudge towards comprehensive utilization of every nutrient.  We can energize food webs, so that the water that leaves our systems is pure.  The water is clear, pristine, and allowed again to function as the lubricant of life.

Methane is the unnatural alternative

​Today we know that manmade nutrients are being unleashed against water on nothing more than a happenstance basis.  Farmers have been prodded towards artificial productivity, non sustainable productivity, at the terrific expense of both, watershed and human health.  And today, now, we know how to fix this.  We also know that we have no choice, unless we are prepared to dig our own grave.

Methane happens when we humans grossly mismanage water.  When water is stripped of oxygen, methane results.  The water and its associated food web is impaired, and sick.  Nutrients stack up, and build on a downward spiral.  Life, other than anaerobic bacteria, is disallowed.  

When water is mismanaged, it generates methane instead of carbon dioxide.  After time correction, methane has 25 times the impact of CO2 in our atmosphere.  The UN's directive that the world must cut methane emissions to avoid the worst of climate change applies to fresh water too.

New and more comprehensive studies track what this really means for human sustainability. And the terrific irony is that we also have the data set required to turn this nutrient impairment factor into super abundance.  

Fish Fry Lake here at our research center in Shepherd, Montana exemplifies our potential.  Imagine 17” black crappie, or largemouth bass that weigh upwards of nine pounds, here in the north, in Montana.  Or northern yellow perch pushing two pounds, or bluegill and green sunfish, the fillets of which nudge the edges of a standard size cast iron skillet.  

We know how to grow fish instead of algae.  We know how to collaborate with nature’s model.  We have the tools, and if we can sustain against conventional inertia, the pop-a-pill thinking that has led us to this current precipice, we can achieve a new level of quality of life.  Humans vector with edge habitat.  We occur around water.  Some ninety percent of humans live within range of coastal or edge water.  We vector with water, it’s really that simple.  And to keep water healthy we must employ nature’s model…surface area and circulation sustain nature’s food web.  When this combination happens in sufficient abundance, aerobic microbial life is sustained.  It rewards us with abundance.  In the presence of concentrated nutrients, it rewards us with super abundance.

A party of Bigs and Littles from Big Brothers Big Sisters fill a freezer with perch caught from Fish Fry Lake on a Saturday morning

In just a few weeks now I will snorkel on Fish Fry Lake.  I will watch heavy bass positioned under islands and fully prepped to ambush the hapless bullfrog that in turn, is prepped to intercept the smaller leopard frog. The circle of life continues, as the occasional four foot long garter snake swallows a hard to ingest nine inch long bullfrog.  Circles within circles define healthy food webs.  We humans are part of it.  It can’t be rationally denied.  We live here, and fortunately, in most settings, operate near the top of the food web.  Otherwise we’d spend a lot more time looking over our shoulders!

Here’s the bottom line…we must maintain aerobic conditions top to bottom in our freshwater settings.  When we do this, we are rewarded with super abundance.  When we don’t do this, we experience an anaerobic nightmare of decline.  Methane happens when thoughtful stewardship doesn’t.  It’s that simple.