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April 25, 2006
By JOHN CHARLES ROBBINS
Staff writer
State authorities have ruled the recent mass death of thousands of fish in Lake Macatawa is a natural event and nothing
to be alarmed about.
Many lakefront property owners, dealing with new piles of rotting fish with each new day, remain skeptical.
"This is not typical at all ... there is something going on here," said Larry Wiersema, a south side resident,
who's already buried more fish than he cares to think about.
North side resident Pat Danley agrees: Something is amiss.
"This is strange. It happened too quickly," Danley said. "It wasn't just a few at a time -- it was like,
bam! You could watch them, out in the lake, thrashing and dying, flipping around, floating, working their way toward shore,"
Danley said.
Michigan Department of Natural Resources staff in the field have determined the fish are dying because of a naturally-occurring
event, tied directly to a quick rise in water temperature.
"At this point they are ruling it spring kill, mostly because there is no other evidence that would point to something
else," said Mary Dettloff, the DNR's public information officer.
Amy Harrington, a DNR fisheries biologist, told the Sentinel on Monday she has been in contact with the Department of
Environmental Quality, which reported no point sources of pollution that could have triggered a fish kill.
Conservation officers will make periodic checks of the lake, and will stay in touch with property owners along the shore,
Dettloff said.
The DNR's definition of a spring kill says the event "occurs in lakes and rivers when fish survive the winter but
die as the water warms rapidly in May and June. It rarely claims many fish and is usually over in a couple of weeks. Spring
kill is almost always due to natural causes beyond our influence."
A sharp rise in the lake's temperature was identified as the probable culprit over the weekend by Graham Peaslee, a Hope
College chemistry professor who has studied Lake Macatawa.
"The DNR thinks the large temperature rise is mostly to blame ... It's fascinating to me that it's happening on the
other side of Michigan, too," Peaslee said Monday.
He referred to reports of a similar large fish kill in the Lake St. Clair area.
"My guess is that there must be a lot of fish food around after a warm winter, so that small fish populations are
up in these little lakes, and the big fish are chasing them in," said Peaslee.
After the big fish got into the smaller lakes the water temperatures shot up dramatically, and a spike in temperature
can rob the water of oxygen.
Records kept for the Macatawa Watershed Project show the water was 44.8 degrees on April 10 with a steady rise to 62.8
degrees on Saturday evening.
Lakefront property owners are additionally worried because the seagulls and other birds are staying away from the dead
fish, for the most part.
"The birds won't even eat them," said a worried Danley, 70, who along with her 75-year-old husband, Dick, filled
three 40-gallon trash bags with dead fish last Thursday found on their beach.
Peaslee said the birds are probably just full, since they've had an unlimited supply of chow for two weeks.
"They're probably not eating more than the eyeballs out of the fish because they are full. If you ate 3,000 eyeballs
you'd have a hard time flying away let alone trying to eat the rest of the fish," said Peaslee.
The DNR says disposal of the fish is a property owner's responsibility.
"Our recommended method of disposal is essentially to scoop them up off the shore and from the shallow water and
bury them on your property -- hopefully as far away from your house as possible," said Dettloff.
Persons wishing to contact the DNR about Lake Macatawa should call the regional office in Plainwell at (269) 685-6851.
Contact John Charles Robbins at (616) 546-4269 or john.robbins@hollandsentinel.com.
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