Fair use, etc http://www.austin360.com/statesman/editions/today/metro_state_1.html "Hydrilla By Dick Stanley American-Statesman Staff Sunday, January 14, 2001

Hydrilla, the weed that's eating Lake Austin, festooned shoreline rocks Saturday, temporarily dormant because of the lake's biennial 12-foot lowering for environmental control. Shirley Coleman eyed the green mess under her docks and smelled the decomposing fish and crabs caught in the hydrilla's thick fronds. She and her neighbors are coming to realize they have a choice: Band together and demand the city find a solution, or declare the boat-stopping hydrilla the winner and give up their waterskiing, swimming and kayaking. ``It's completely changed our relation to the lake,'' said Coleman, surveying the weeds Saturday in back of her lakeside home just west of the Loop 360 bridge. ``It's going to be a chronic management problem,'' her husband, Allan Barnes, said. The lake was lowered in hopes that drying -- and perhaps even a timely hard freeze -- would help cut back the lake's major pests: Eurasian water milfoil, mistakenly called duckweed, and the hydrilla. It's worked before for the milfoil, a nuisance since 1938. But the hydrilla, which is competing with the milfoil in lake coverage a little more than a year after it got into the lake from trailered boats, is a lot hardier. The hydrilla's potato-like tuber roots also are much deeper than the milfoil's roots, and residents and city officials doubt they'll be affected by drying or even a freeze. ``It has tubers in incredible numbers,'' Coleman said. ``I don't think you could pull enough of them out." Saturday's rain kept Coleman, Barnes and their neighbors from their chore of spreading burlap and black plastic over the milfoil and hydrilla near their docks, in hopes of killing it by depriving it of sunlight. Indeed, almost 2 inches of rain in some spots last week slowed the work. But residents have more than four weeks to finish before the Lower Colorado River Authority refills the lake Feb. 12. The shore needs to dry some, Coleman said, or you sink up to your knees in mud. ``We're just going to sell them,'' she said, pointing at the couple's two Jet Skis, high and dry under a covered boat dock. ``You can't use them without sucking the weed up." They may also have to sell their ski boat, since skiers don't like being pulled through hydrilla. Skiers fear getting tangled in the weeds, and if a boat driver tries to drop them off in it, ``They're motioning, `Pull me out; pull me out,' '' Coleman said. Coleman, Barnes and some other lakesiders favor importing sterile carp, a fish that eats hydrilla and has cleared other Texas lakes of it. But the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department opposes using the carp, which eat other vegetation that provides homes for fish that sportsmen want. Instead, the department has suggested the city use a type of herbicide that won't pollute the drinking water Austin takes from the lake, said Mary Gilroy, an environmental scientist with the city's Watershed Protection Department. Coleman worries that some lakeside residents won't wait for the city to act on the suggestion. ``There are people now, I promise you, using Roundup (a toxic garden herbicide) on this stuff,'' she said. "People are desperate." Coleman and Barnes aren't expecting much sympathy from folks who lack a lakeside home and its recreational opportunities. But they fear the hydrilla eventually will affect everyone in Austin, from altering the taste and smell of the city's drinking water to diminishing the lake's general beauty. ``It'll get worse and worse,'' Coleman predicted...."

-- tex (tex@tex.com), January 14, 2001