Schwartz: After wildfires, a concern is sedimentation. What are the specific fears about why the Bootleg Fire could lead to even worse algal blooms? Miller: So let’s look forward now to the heart of your most recent reporting. Then they end up succumbing to parasites or get predated by birds. So the oxygen gets pretty much sucked up by the decomposing algae cells and that really stresses the fish out. The problem is that the blooms dominate the entire system and then all die at once and that causes massive, dramatic swings in water quality. The blooms themselves are toxic to humans and pets, but the studies have been done and they don’t really show to be directly toxic to the fish. Every time there’s more erosion or increased erosion, more nutrients entering the river, that’s bad news for these blooms and then ultimately the fish.
Also fertilizer runoff from agricultural production above the lake. Cattle that have trampled the soils into the river and caused more erosion. It was never a beautifully clear Tahoe kind of situation, but it has gotten worse than normal since colonization and that’s largely due to the channelization of rivers upstream of the lake. The lake has always been nutrient rich naturally. The soils are naturally highly rich in phosphorus, and that nutrient is harnessed by two species of algae that have sort of come to dominate the community in Upper Klamath Lake.
Schwartz: The blooms are partially a function of how much phosphorus enters the system. What are the existing reasons for these blooms? But they’ve been happening for years now. We’ll talk about how the Bootleg Fire has increased the fear and the risk of even worse blooms. Miller: One of the reasons in more recent years for population problems with these fish is the big cyanobacterial algae blooms. So they have a huge cultural significance and they’re just an important food source that the Tribes have not been able to harvest for coming up on 50 years now. That was a really major food source, probably the first fresh food that most tribal members would eat traditionally at the start of their year. Every March, pretty much after the end of a really long cold winter, millions of these fish would run up the rivers in the upper Klamath basin to spawn. They have been a huge food source for the Klamath Tribes for thousands of years. Schwartz: The C’waam and Koptu are a type of lake sucker, pretty common in the remnants of these huge inland seas that used to dot the western U.S. Can you remind us how significant the C’waam and Koptu species are for the Klamath Tribes? Miller: So it’s hard and irresponsible to talk about the cyanobacterial algae blooms without talking about the endangered fish that are being threatened by them. Welcome back to Think Out Loud.Īlex Schwartz: Hey, thanks for having me. Alex Schwartz wrote about this recently for the Herald and News in Klamath Falls and he joins us now to talk about it. One of those effects is the possibility of sedimentation, increased runoff into the streams and rivers that feed Upper Klamath Lake.That could mean more devastating algal blooms. But while the dangers from the fire itself have passed, the effects of that fire will linger in the region for a very long time. In the end, it burned more than 400,000 acres in southern Oregon.
The Bootleg Fire, which at one point was the largest wildfire in the U.S., is now fully contained. This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.ĭave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. Alex Schwartz, environmental reporter for the Klamath Falls Herald and News and Report For America, wrote about all this in a recent article. The Klamath Tribes are concerned that the rainy season will bring large amounts of sediment and nutrients from the burn area into the Upper Klamath Lake, which is already having problems with toxic algae blooms. Forest Service have analyzed the soil in the area burned by the Bootleg Fire for danger of erosion.
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