RH: You have been a certified Invasive Plant Patroller for only four years, but within that relatively short period of time, you have surveyed more lakes and covered more survey miles than probably any other volunteer monitor in the state. How did you get started down this path?
DR: I had grown up snorkeling in Mousam Lake with my father. In 2006 I decided it would be fun to broaden my horizons and snorkel around in other nearby lakes as well. I started with Arrowhead Lake. When I arrived I was met by the courtesy boat inspector, and saw big signs saying the lake is infested with milfoil. I assumed the problem at Arrowhead must be Eurasian water-milfoil, which was the "milfoil" I was familiar with, coming from New York. But I learned from the CBI that, no, the lake is actually infested with variable water-milfoil. So I started snorkeling around looking for this new milfoil, realizing that I really was not sure what I was looking for. And that led to the next thought, which was, well, if I am going to start snorkeling Maine lakes, I better know what all of the possible invasive plants look like, in case I come across something. I guess you could say that was the thought that got me started down this road.
RH: In the short time you have been doing this work, you have become quite an expert botanizer. How did you go about learning the native aquatic plants?
At each lake I visited that first summer, I would collect a sample of every different plant I saw. I would go to a new lake every day or so, and I was spending so much time in the water I did not have time to sit down and key the plants out so I froze them. At the end of the summer I had thirty or so frozen bags-each full of a dozen or more plants-so lots and lots of specimens. When fall came I decided it was time to figure out what I had collected. I took the frozen bags home to New York, got a bunch of books on-line, set up a work station in the basement, and started making my way through the bags, thawing them out one by one. I would spend about four or five hours down there at a time, just identifying plants. It was tough going in the beginning, but little by little, I would get one here and one there, and before I knew it I had learned dozens of species.
RH: It sounds like you worked your way through dichotomous keys. Some people find that keys can be pretty tricky; if you make the wrong choice at any juncture, you can get way off track and need to work your way back. Did you find that using the keys got easier after a while?
DR: Oh absolutely. You're learning the various characteristics and botanical terms and also just getting more familiar with the process. The repetition is great; it just gets easier and easier. Pretty soon you realize that there is only one pondweed that looks like this; only one floating leaved plant that looks like that; you don't need to run it through a key. After the twentieth or so bag, I'm going, "hey, I know that one... and that one," checking them off one by one, no problem. Some plants of course are trickier than others. The grasses are tough... the real thin pondweeds; those are hard. If a plant got too frustrating I just put it to the side. Maybe I would try it again later, maybe not. Some I just had to leave unidentified.
I learned a lot that first winter and it was great fun. The next spring I could not wait to get back in Mousam Lake. As soon as I got in the water I found myself saying, "Well that's so-and-so, and that's that." It was really great to be able to just pick them out like that. At that point, I probably had a few dozen natives that I could easily identify; I have just built on that. Every year I add a few new ones.
RH: How did you become a volunteer Invasive Plant Patroller?
DR: In 2007 I attended my first VLMP Invasive Plant Patrol workshop in Alfred. I remember leaving that workshop saying, "Wow. This is it; this is what I want to do." I was very excited. It was like I found my niche so to speak. Snorkeling was something I could do physically, and by now I was familiar with a bunch of plants. I had also found out that I was capable of learning and retaining the kind of information needed to do this work.
RH: Speaking of the snorkeling... the vast majority of our Plant Patrollers conduct their surveys from a shallow draft boat. Why did you decide to snorkel your surveys as opposed to surveying from a boat?
I used to do construction back in New York, and eventually that work destroyed my back. In 2002 I had major surgery. That set me way back for a few years. Having back issues, sitting is tough, and I am not able to spend much time in a boat. Snorkeling, on the other hand feels great.
RH: I imagine it is even therapeutic.
DR: Absolutely. Zero gravity... that's my world. I'm a good swimmer, but after fifteen minutes of swimming, my back starts to hurt. But I can snorkel all day. You're not using your back muscles when you snorkel; it's mostly in the legs. And as I said, my father was big into snorkeling when I was growing up, and we did a lot of it together on Mousam Lake. So I was really comfortable with it, and I had all the gear. It works really well for me.
RH: At this point, how many different Maine lakes do you calculate you have surveyed for aquatic invaders?
I'm going to say that so far I have done about 50 lakes, roughly.
RH: On most of these lakes you were obviously not conducting Level 3 surveys. (A Level 3 survey covers all areas in the waterbody where sunlight penetrates to the bottom and rooted aquatic plants grow.) What was your focus?
DR: Mostly Level 1 areas: public boat launches and nearby coves; areas that would likely be hot spots, so to speak. Some lakes that I surveyed actually didn't have boat launches. I would just walk through the woods and get in where I could. But you never know. The Eurasian milfoil infestation in the quarry pond in Scarborough and hydrilla infestation in a remote cove on Damariscotta Lake have taught us that these plants could be just about anywhere.
RH: How have you picked which lakes to survey?
DR: So far it has pretty much been by proximity to Mousam Lake. I have been trying to hit everything within an hour radius of my place on Mousam. That seemed to be the likely first area to tackle. Eventually I'd like to survey all the lakes in York County. That's definitely a goal.
Taking a break from the bracing fall water temps on Damariscotta Lake. Dennis is also a member of the IPP 1st Responders
One challenge to accomplishing this is access. For a lot of these lakes, there is no public access. One of the ways I find a possible access point is through Google Earth. I zoom in on the lake and site along the shoreline looking for spots where the public road comes very close to the lake; places where I can just park and jump in. I have done this several times and it actually has worked out very well. I have met people out on the lake as I am going along, and I have made some great contacts this way.
RH: Mousam Lake was your first Level 3 survey and Maine's first Level 3 survey on a lake of this size by a single surveyor snorkeling the entire way. If you knew at the beginning of the summer what you know now, would you have tackled this project?
DR: (long pause... sigh) Ahh... yes, and no. I feel good that I did it. It was something important that had to be done. I wanted to make sure that there were no invasive plants lurking out there in Mousam Lake, hidden where nobody could see, slowly spreading like a cancer. On the down side was the time required. It became a real job in a way, and once I told the Mousam Lake Association Board that I was going to do it; then it became an obligation.
RH: Let's talk about the immensity of the project. How much territory did you cover?
DR: I haven't really done the math with any precision, but I imagine I covered about one square mile in all. In terms of linear distance, snorkeling tight transects to cover some of these areas, back and forth, back and forth; I would say I must have snorkeled at least a hundred miles. I know that I snorkeled at least seventy five miles in Lower Mousam alone. (At this point Dennis unrolls his map of Mousam Lake.) OK, here we go. This shows all the areas I covered.
Dennis in his element.
The bright red shirt is
his standard safety attire.
RH: How did you approach an area like this? (pointing to Lower Mousam, which is almost entirely littoral)
DR: After doing the entire shoreline, I would start here, snorkel directly across to here, move up the shore 15 feet, snorkel back, roughly parallel to my first transect, but heading for a point 15 feet up from my original starting point, all the time using landmarks on the shore to keep me on course, moving up transect by transect until I had completely covered an area.
RH: Why fifteen feet?
DR: Swinging my head back and forth, I could visually cover a swath about twenty feet wide. If I kept my transects fifteen feet apart, that provided some overlap, so I could be sure I was not missing anything. I didn't cut any corners. I really did complete coverage throughout the entire survey. This area here (again pointing to Lower Mousam) took weeks, and weeks, and weeks. This area (Dennis points to a spot in the middle of the lake) was a surprise. I came out of a cove and noticed some plants continued out further. The area was like a submersed island fifteen to eighteen feet deep. So I covered that shoal the same way, transects back and forth, back and forth. I wasn't really expecting to see anything invasive way out there, but it was part of the littoral zone, so I wanted to cover it. It was mostly Potamogeton amplifolious and Elodea canadensis; you see those two species quite often in deep water.
RH: Do you think you would have noticed this area if you had been in a boat?
DR: Maybe, but you never could have surveyed that area completely from a boat. It was just too deep.
RH: The best you could have done from a boat would have been to point sample with a weed weasel.
DR: That's right. There were actually lots of areas on the lake like that-deep-very hard to see the plants from a boat.
RH: Did you approach the project in a linear way, starting at one point and working your way around the entire lake?
DR: No. Mousam Lake gets busy on the weekends, so you avoid the busier areas on those days, primarily for safety reasons, but also turbidity. You also consider light conditions, just as you would if you were surveying from a boat. On the other hand, surface disturbance, glare and certain kinds of weather are not really issues when you are snorkeling as they can be when you are surveying from a boat. I could be out in whitecaps or in pouring rain. It is calm as can be below the surface. When weather conditions were less than perfect, I would just look for a shallower area where the light was sufficient, and I was good to go. So you are always looking for the best viewing conditions, which means you bounce around a bit. You just need to keep track of where you have been on the map.
RH: So what about your gear. You had a map. You had your snorkeling gear. What else?
DH: I had a boat; a fourteen and one-half foot aluminum work boat with a 15 horsepower motor on it. I would take that out to the area I was going to survey and jump out of the boat and pull the boat behind me. At that point, the boat was for protection more than anything; something big that other boaters could see from the surface.
When I first started doing the survey, people would come by and ask if I needed help because they figured I had broken down. But after I spoke at the Mousam Lake Regional Association (MRLA) annual meeting about what I was doing, people started approaching me and asking, "Hey, have you found anything?" They knew right away what I was up to. So that was great; the project had begun to raise awareness and generate interest on the lake. I also got several volunteers at the meeting. I begged-I pretty much begged for help, and several folks stepped up to the plate, which is great.
RH: How have the volunteers helped?
DR: Mostly, they assisted by running the boat, following me while I surveyed so I didn't have to pull the boat behind me. They also bagged plants and checked species off on the data sheet, that kind of thing. Eventually I'd like to take GPS readings around the whole littoral zone of the lake, and mark all the places where we have native milfoil. Having someone in the boat who can actually take the readings while I'm in the water marking the spot will be a big help.
RH: This brings up the important issue of safety. You conducted much of your survey solo, not really a method we would recommend to other Plant Patrollers. For safety reasons, a snorkeler should always have a tender or spotter.
DR: Absolutely. Snorkeling by yourself-things can happen. You never know, no matter how careful you are; it's just not a good thing to do. But at the beginning there was really was nobody around to help me. But now I have these four people who are helping me, and my hope is that they will learn more about the whole process and want to take on their own sectors next season. We just need to get them trained, and get some more people involved as well. If we had a couple dozen trained Plant Patrollers on the lake-that would be great. We have established a connection with two other local lakes and are hoping to co-host an Introductory IPP workshop in our area next summer.
RH: Going back briefly to the boat, I've got to ask. How heavy was the boat when you were pulling it yourself? How much extra effort was involved in snorkeling this way?
DR: I guess I did about three-quarters of the survey by myself, pulling the boat along behind, and I gotta say, I did not realize how much work it was until I started getting help from the spotters. When I was pulling the boat, I was attached to it by about twenty feet of rope. To survey the deeper areas I had to haul the boat up close to me so I would have enough line to dive down, then I would move forward a little bit and have to pull the boat close again, and so on. It was a lot of work. When I started getting help, I couldn't believe it. I could just zip along. It made a world of difference.
When I was doing the Level 1 surveys on other lakes-areas that I could easily cover without getting into a boat-I would pull a small bright orange inflatable along instead. Pulling a boat like that is no trouble at all.
RH: What about your schedule, your daily routine?
DR: Well, fortunately my schedule is pretty much wide open. Because of my back, I am no longer able to work, so I don't really have to stick to a strict schedule. I could get up in the morning and say, "well this looks like a good day." I guess I was in the water an average of two hours, four or five days a week, all summer long.
RH: What did you learn about Mousam Lake from this experience?
DR: First and foremost I learned that there are no invasive plants in Mousam Lake. That is huge. But rhere was lots more. For example, snorkeling the lake, I began to piece together bits and pieces of Mousam's past. Mousam Lake is a flooded river valley. I found places where the old course of the river and the riverbanks are very clear, the remains of what must have been bridge foundations, submersed tree trunks and wooden structures, that kind of thing. I really like finding stuff like that.
When asked, "What's next?"
Dennis says he is always looking
for new lakes to explore
RH: What did you learn about yourself?
DR: I learned that I could accomplish something that turned out to be a pretty daunting task. I also learned that I will never do again; not without help at least. I have actually framed my original survey map and hung it on the wall to remind me of just how crazy it was to do it alone.
And actually, one important thing I learned is that in order to get help, I have to get out of the water and talk to people. So I am doing that. I am on the Board of the Mousam Lake Regional Association (MRLA) and the Acton/Shapleigh Youth Conservation Corps now. This summer I was asked to speak at the MRLA annual meeting and was really nervous about it; I have never done any public speaking. But I got up there, and once I started talking about invasive plants, what they could do to the lake, and what needed to be done to protect the lake, I wasn't nervous anymore. I actually think I did a good job. People seemed interested and asked lots of questions. So I learned I could do this too.
RH: What's next?
DR: As I said earlier, one of my goals is to survey all the lakes in York County. But I also want to branch out further. I'm pretty much willing to go anywhere in the southern half of the state. Ideally I'd like to team up with people on other lakes and help them get started on their own surveys. If, for example, someone was able to put me up for a day or two and ride me around in their boat, I could spend a couple of days screening areas for invasives and photo documenting the dominant native plants in these areas free of charge.
I also am really excited about getting a Mousam Lake Invasive Plant Patrol Team up and running. We should be screening the lake for invaders every year. The more people we can get to participate in this effort the better. Believe me... I know.
Check out our collection of underwater photographs and video taken by Dennis this summer.
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