Aquacide Blog

Once a clean lake in the 1980s, Squaw Lake in Oxford Township is slowly being taken over by Eurasian Milfoil.  Thick beds of Eurasian Milfoil now blanket most of the lake bottom. The lake is shrinking because the shore is thick with weed growth.  Squaw Lake was once used for water skiing and swimming, kids don’t swim there anymore. Eurasian Milfoil spread from boat propellers chopping fragments and raking it free and dumping fragments back into the water.  Eurasian Milfoil has the ability to root from fragmentation so new  colonies developed from just one small stem. Mechanical harvesting does not...

Just like the 1958 science fiction classic movie “The Blob”, Giant Salvinia burst onto the scene in the United States, becoming one of the world’s worst invasive aquatic plants.  In 1998 Giant Salvinia was recognized as a U.S. problem when eradication was resisted near Houston, Texas. Giant Salvinia has an “explosive” growth rate and can easily double in size in just a few days. Native to Southern Brazil, Giant Salvinia is now found in India, South East Asia, Africa, New Guinea, Australia, Indonesia, Philippines, New Zealand and a host of other countries including the United States. Biologists believe Giant Salvinia was...

WASHINGTON (CN) - The Environmental Protection Agency is allowing Arkansas cotton growers to use fluridone on cotton through 2014, to avoid an expected 25 percent crop loss from aggressive weeds resistant to glyphosate, the commonly used pesticide, according to a new regulation. Click here to check out Courthouse News' Environmental Law Review. "Since the introduction of glyphosate resistant cotton in 1997, twenty-one weed species have developed resistance to [it]," the regulation notes. Glyphosate-resistant palmer amaranth has become the most severe weed problem that Arkansas cotton growers face, according to the regulation. Fluridone is generally used on pond weeds such as...

West Nile Virus was first identified in 1937 in Uganda in eastern Africa.  It was first discovered in the United States in the summer of 1999 in New York.  The virus has not spread throughout the entire United States. West Nile Virus is known as a flavivirus.   It is spread by mosquitoes that first bite an infected bird then a human or healthy animal.  Signs and symptoms develop within 3-14 days after being bitten. The highest amounts of West Nile Virus are found in late August to early September.  As weather cools, mosquitoes die. Most people with West Nile Virus...

Hot weather prompted the DNR to warn lake goers about the potential dangers of blue-green algae. While it is not uncommon to see algae blooms in the lake area in late summer, recent hot weather has prompted a warning.  Blue-green algae tends to show up in small, shallow, mucky ponds.  It looks exactly like its name; “blue-green” scum that resembles pea soup or spilled paint on the water surface.  It also has a strong, unpleasant, swampy odor.  It can erupt suddenly and be deadly. Ninety-nine percent of green algae are harmless; a nuisance and ugly, but harmless and not ALL...