Nature’s Magic + Bears

Years of restoration work are allowing the lake to heal itself.

Nature has shown off its surprising healing powers at Lake Tahoe this year. Scientists at University of California Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) announced this spring that, due to the population collapse of a tiny, invasive shrimp, Lake Tahoe is clearer than it’s been in 40 years: 71.7 feet of clarity!

TERC is a world-class scientific research facility headquartered in Incline Village. Its interactive museum is open to the public, with a 3-D movie theatre and a replica of the Le Conte, the research boat used to take measurements on the lake year around. UC Davis scientists have been monitoring Tahoe’s water clarity and other data since 1958. Their research has been essential to a decades-long effort to save a body of water that was losing on average a foot of water clarity annually.

Researchers suspect that the invasive Mysis Shrimp are victims of a fungal infection. Their demise has, however, triggered an explosion in the population of Daphnia, a tiny zooplankton that the shrimp preyed on. Daphnia are a Tahoe water filter, extremely efficient at gobbling up fine particles and algae.

Nature has had a helping hand at Tahoe, however, an unprecedented local, state, regional and national effort to restore its watershed, giving the lake’s healing powers a chance to work.

Tahoe has healed itself in the past, recovering from the clear-cutting of 2/3rds of its forests in the 1860s and 1870s, timber used to build the Comstock silver mines of Virginia City. The enormity of the lake (larger in volume than all of America’s man-made reservoirs combined) and its granite-based soil helped Tahoe recover from the erosion of that period. A century later in the 1950s, Tahoe’s water clarity measured 105 feet!

But at that time, raw sewage was still being dumped directly into the lake. In 1957, a group of Tahoe-lovers became concerned about the effects of the sewage and unchecked development around the lake and formed the “League to Save Lake Tahoe,” raising awareness with soon-to-be ubiquitous “Keep Tahoe Blue” bumper stickers. In 1969, the concern for Tahoe’s future made it all the way to the U.S. Congress, who created the bi-state Tahoe Regional Planning Agency to manage growth within the Tahoe Basin.

For the next decades, Tahoe’s clarity continued to drop a foot a year. In 1997, Tahoe’s biggest landlord, the Federal Government, stepped in. President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore visited Tahoe that summer and, with the bi-partisan support of Congress, signed a bill that funded major restoration projects in the watershed. In the decade that followed, the decline in Tahoe’s water clarity slowed, stabilized, and then had a 4-year stretch where clarity improved by 13 feet!

This past, huge winter would be expected to cloud measurements this summer, with increased snow run-off carrying more sediment and pollutants into the lake. But with the return of Mysis Shrimp not expected for a few years, the Daphnia will continue to work their magic. When the shrimp do return, UC Davis staff and students have been dreaming up ways to harvest and process them into dog treats!

In the future, climate change is predicted to have the greatest impact on Lake Tahoe and the surrounding Sierra Nevada. TERC has created an augmented reality app, “Find Tahoe Tessie,” that includes climate change themes in interactive games, videos and quizzes. Tessie is the nickname of Tahoe’s “sea monster,” with reported sightings through the years, but none captured on film. Now using the app, young and old can snap a photo with an adorable version of our inland sea creature.

Scan this QR for Finding Tahoe Tessie app.

Bear Country

Getting along with our wild neighbors.

A Tahoe bear nick-named Hank the Tank gained national notoriety last year, accused of breaking into numerous houses in South Lake Tahoe, looking for food. All Tahoe communities share their forests with Black Bears—the Lake Tahoe Basin has the second highest population density of Black Bears in North America!

American Black Bears are omnivores and can range from black to cinnamon in color. Most adults weight between 200 and 350 pounds, but some males are over 600 pounds! Bears normally try to avoid humans, but they have one of the most powerful senses of smell in the animal kingdom and are aggressive foragers. Bears look at unprotected food as an open invitation, whether that’s an open door to a vacation cabin, garbage left out in unsecured cans or bags, or dog food and snacks left in a parked car over-night. When they smell food in a parked car at night, bears can open unlocked doors or break windows and crawl inside, sometimes causing serious damage to the interior.

If you spot a bear, keep your distance and don’t disturb it. If the bear is up a tree, give it space to climb down and run into the woods. Hopefully, you’ll be treated to the sight of one of these majestic animals enjoying a Tahoe summer day, just like you and me.