Highland Lake on the brink

WINSTED — Although the current water quality of Highland Lake is good, data collected over the last several years indicates the lake is moving toward a tipping point that could lead to a sharp downturn in its overall health.

That message of caution was delivered to Highland-area residents by water management consultant Dr. George Knoecklein, a limnologist from Mansfield Center, during the Highland Lake Watershed Association’s Annual Meeting at The Gilbert School Saturday, July 11.

According to Knoecklein, the lake’s water clarity appears to be decreasing, while phosphorus levels appear to be increasing — both trends that, if not stabilized or reversed, could spell bad news for the future health of the lake.

“It’s really important to stress that I can’t tell you, if the phosphorus in the lake increases, what the lake will do,� Knoecklein said.

He added that while some Connecticut lakes with higher phosphorus levels than Highland actually have better water quality-related readings, others with lower phosphorus levels have poorer overall water quality.

“The upshot of that is that it could get dramatically worse. It could very easily get pushed over the edge,� Knoecklein said.

In an effort to limit pollutants that might be entering the lake and/or its watershed, association president Dick Labich pledged during Saturday’s meeting not to use fertilizer on his lawn. He then urged other residents to do the same.

“You can see what’s happening and we’ve got to stop this ridiculous trend,� Labich said.

According to Knoecklein, there are three main layers to lake water.

The first is the warmer, oxygen-rich “lit zone� near the surface of the lake. This is the area into which the sunlight penetrates. It usually is about 15 feet deep in the summer.

The next zone is in the middle. It has less oxygen, little light penetration and much cooler temperatures than the lit zone.

The third zone is the bottom portion of the lake where no light penetrates, no oxygen is dissolved in the water, and temperatures are very cold.

Knoecklein said somewhere in the middle of every lake is the line where the oxygen zone meets the no-oxygen zone. Below this line, only anaerobic organisms, such as bacteria, can grow and thrive.

Over the last few decades, that line in Highland Lake has been creeping closer to the surface, Knoecklein said, and the overall area of oxygen-less water has been increasing.

“It’s already at the point now in August and September where there’s probably zero trout habitat in the lake,� Knoecklein said, adding that lake trout prefer cold, well-oxygenated water. “And there is no water in that lake that meets that criteria.�

In addition, Knoecklein said once the lake bottom is exposed to water with no oxygen in it, “the phosphorus comes out of the sediment.� The larger the oxygen-less zone is, the more opportunity for phosphorus to be released.

“And phosphorus governs water clarity,� he said.

Jumps in phosphorus levels set favorable conditions for blue-green algae to grow and significantly multiply their numbers.

“And this leads to less light penetration,� he said, which further exacerbates the dangerous cycle of reduced oxygen, increased phosphorus, decreased water clarity and algae blooms.

Also, once the algae begin to take hold of a lake, Knoecklein said, they are very adaptive. The organism has the ability to self-regulate its buoyancy, taking in air to float to the surface or releasing it to sink farther into the lake. Once this blooming process begins, he said, it can be very difficult and costly to reverse.

“At some point the phytoplankton [algae] might start doing that� in Highland Lake, Knoecklein said.

He added, however, that it could happen sometime in the near or the distant future — or not at all — but it was too difficult to make a sound prediction.

“But the scene is set for it to happen,� Knoecklein said.

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