Wisconsin Watch Media Partners Center (https://partners.wisconsinwatch.org/tag/yahara-river-system/)
The stories are intended to hover at what Center for Limnology director Steve Carpenter calls “the edge of plausibility,” and encourage something people are terrible at: long-term ecological thinking and planning.
Daphnia, tiny crustaceans in Lake Mendota that graze on algae, and their good works are in danger. Each year their population is now crashing in the late summer as they are decimated by a voracious new predator called the spiny waterflea.
All lakes are not created equal. And in the Madison area’s Yahara chain, Lake Kegonsa is the redheaded steplake.
“Developers are often demonized, but I have probably planted more trees than 99 percent of citizens and the city of Madison,” said Wall, the 2009 recipient of the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Energy Efficiency and a one-time Republican U.S. Senate candidate who lost to Ron Johnson. “There is nothing worse than a town filled with concrete.”
The Yahara watershed is crawling with scientists who keep trying new ways to clean up the lakes.
The Yahara lakes — Mendota, Monona, Wingra, Waubesa and Kegonsa — are no clearer than they were 30 years ago, despite intensive efforts to improve them.
The cutthroat trout virus was found among hundreds of thousands of brown trout that the state Department of Natural Resources released from state hatcheries into surrounding waterways.
