Tom Spears, reporting for the Ottawa Citizen:
Macomb Paynes; Flickr
“Jereme Gaeta and his research group at the University of Wisconsin were studying what biologists call coarse woody habitat — trees that die and fall into the water near shore, where they become waterlogged and sink. Property owners often get rid of these slimy old logs. They get in the way of swimmers and boats. They look messy.
But Gaeta’s team says it’s better to let fallen logs lie. This is going to do bad things to fish. In their little lake just south of Lake Superior, the Wisconsin group watched as species either became more rare or disappeared completely. “When lake levels go down,” Jereme Gaeta says in a news release, “they lose all that refuge, so they’re pretty much forced to live in the foraging arena, where they’re directly interacting with their predators — in our case largemouth bass.” He said the vulnerability of the small fish goes “through the roof.””
Drought-driven lake level decline: effects on coarse woody habitat and fishes by Jereme W. Gaeta, Greg G. Sass, Stephen R. Carpenter
