The Ample Charms of a Well-Fed Lake The Old Man Peter J. Richerson Department of Environmental Science and Policy
[email protected] The Young Man Scott O. Richerson Department of English
[email protected] Draft 3.6 March 2000. Selected parts will appear in Putah/Cache Bioregion Guidebook. Ó 2000 Peter J. and Scott O. Richerson. Comments welcome! Richerson And Richerson Clear Lake Chapter A Tour The science of inland waters is called limnology, from the Greek limnaea for lake or pool. Limnologists array lakes on a continuum from oligotrophic to eutropic, Greek again meaning “poorly fed” and “well fed” respectively. At the poorly fed end of the continuum are the nearly sterile lakes like Lake Tahoe. Deep, clear, and cold, these lakes appear often on postcards and calendars. Clear Lake on the other hand, is well into the eutrophic range. Well fed lakes tend to be shallow, turbid, warm, and not quite so beautiful to look at, at least in the traditional sense. Clear Lake is seldom clear; the 19th Century journalist-historian Lyman Palmer, quoting an 1877 article in the San Francisco Post, ascribed the epithet “clear” to the clarity of the air not the water. (Lake County to this day enjoys extra-ordinarily clear air, partly because of zealous air quality enforcement and partly because prevailing westerly breezes bring untainted Pacific air over very lightly populated country before spilling it into the basin.) Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and to all the animals that inhabit these fat lakes, eutrophy is indeed beautiful.