By Gretchen Gerrish – Published October 11, 2024
This summer, plant and algal blooms in northern Wisconsin lakes have been a hot topic of discussion. At UW Trout Lake Station, we have received reports of surface-covering purple bladderwort, heard stories of bright green threads rising from rocky lake bottoms in new locations, and have had concerned lake residents stop in with jars full of soupy blue-green waters. Discussions with our natural resource partners indicate that plant and algal concerns are prominent this summer.
Seasonal blooms are common and often monitored in warm and high nutrient lakes throughout southern Wisconsin, but are less commonly reported in lakes up north. This makes it challenging to track and manage across the 1,000s of regional lakes. Here, I hope to shed some light on what’s creating the bountiful blooms in our water bodies.
The evolutionary history of algae and aquatic plants includes repeated loss and gain of cell structures, and a process called endosymbiosis. Originally, photosynthesis took place within ocean-dwelling bacterial cells that evolved the ability to capture sunlight’s energy in pigments and chemical pathways. As long as 2.4 billion years ago photosynthetic bacteria played a huge role in oxygenating the earth’s atmosphere and creating the trajectory for our current oxygen and green plant dependent existence.