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Long-term trends in the water quality of Killarney Lake.

Article Excerpt
In July 1882, John Rigby wrote from his home in the new prairie town of Killarney. About the lake that lay beside the town, he enthused:



[Killarney] Lake is a beautiful sheet of water, clear as crystal and abounding with fish and fowl. I think we would travel the world over before we would hit another spot to equal Manitoba and this locality in particular. (1)

Today, Killarney residents perceive that their lake is no longer the way that Rigby described. They believe that lake water quality has deteriorated markedly. For at least fifty years, they have worked vigorously to improve the situation, by adding chemicals to kill the massive growth of algae (called "blooms") that appear in its waters most summers. Besides the obvious impacts of algae blooms on lake aesthetics and the willingness of people to swim at the public beach, the blooms make it harder to treat lake water as a potable source for the town, they can produce toxins that jeopardize the health of humans and animals consuming lake water, and the inevitable collapse of the blooms consumes oxygen, causing fish to die. It is claimed that algae blooms are the cause of declining numbers of fish caught by sport fishers at Killarney Lake.

Many people think that algae blooms are recent phenomena resulting from human pollution of the environment. In fact, the mere presence of blooms is not evidence of lake deterioration, as they have occurred for millennia and may have played a role in human affairs numerous times through history. It is speculated, for instance, that blooms of red-colored algae were responsible for biblical stories of seas turning to blood. Algae blooms have been reported in Canadian waters for well over a century. Captain George Huyshe travelled with the Wolseley Expedition to the Red River Settlement during the summer of 1870. While canoeing through Lake of the Woods, he observed that:

The most noticeable feature... is the peculiar green colour of the water, arising from a profuse vegetable growth ... they abound all over the lake, in some place so thickly that the water has the consistence and colour of pea soup. Some of the deep bays receding from the lake, such as Clearwater Bay, are free from this growth, but it extends even a few miles down the Winnipeg River below Rat Portage [now Kenora]. It was impossible to drink the water, or use it for making tea or cooking, until it had been carefully strained. (2)

Huyshe also saw algae blooms in Lake Winnipeg, long before the lake began to receive agricultural fertilizers and domestic sewage from its large prairie watershed.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to evaluate whether Killarney Lake has truly changed as much as locals claim, because no one analyzed lake water back in 1879, when intensive agricultural land use began in its vicinity. Even if someone had thought to collect water samples, improvements in analytical methods in the past century (and especially in the past couple of decades) would make comparison with modern measurements nearly impossible. So we must turn to information on historical water quality that exists elsewhere to determine the nature and extent of changes which...

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