A meeting put on by the Provincial Association of Resort Communities Saskatchewan (PARCS) last weekend down in Elbow stressed the need to educate the public and to continue protecting Lake Diefenbaker from aquatic invasive species, most notably zebra mussels.
On Saturday, April 21, officials with PARCS were on hand at the Elbow Civic Centre to give an afternoon presentation about this hot-button infestation issue, which has affected a large number of lakes and waterways in the United States and into Canada by way of Ontario.
Species such as zebra mussels, as well as quagga mussels can be impossible to eliminate if they become established in a waterbody, and they have the potential to severely impact aquatic habitats, fisheries, valuable recreational resources and water-related infrastructure.
“We’re the leading voice against this issue in Saskatchewan, and we’re glad to see support from everyone on this serious topic,” said Christina Taylor, Southwest Director of PARCS.
Those in attendance for the meeting included local mayors and councillors from surrounding communities, as well as business owners, cabin and lake property owners and the general public.
Leading the presentation was Lynne Saas, a coordinator for PARCS who went over the history of these invasive species and how they became introduced to western Canada.
Zebra mussels found their way into North America by 1986 before gradually making their way north into Canadian waters. They were discovered in Lake Winnipeg next door in Manitoba in 2013, and while the provincial government tried what they could to get rid of them – including the injection of liquid potash into the affected harbours in June 2014 – the mussels were still present in the lake just two months later.
Dr. Eva Pip of the University of Manitoba said in 2017 that Lake Winnipeg “is a lost cause” due to the infestation, stating that the only way to deal with mussels is to not let the problem start in the first place.
With the importance of Lake Diefenbaker to not just the surrounding communities, but to Saskatchewan as a whole, any possible risk of an infestation of mussels would be a major problem.
“If one zebra mussel is found in Lake Diefenbaker, there’d be no way to stop an infestation,” said Saas. “It would be a different lake ecologically, and it would be a tragedy for roughly half of Saskatchewan.”
Last year, the provincial government concluded its invasive mussel monitoring program for another year with no confirmed findings of invasive mussels in 90 waterbodies that were sampled throughout Saskatchewan.
Conservation officers completed 1,212 watercraft inspections and provided invasive species information to 872 watercraft owners who entered Saskatchewan from the United States. Of those 2,084 watercraft, 307 received a detailed inspection and 119 required decontamination.
The Elbow meeting concluded with Saas and the PARCS organization asking those in attendance to consider their options when it came to protecting Lake Diefenbaker; do nothing and watch the mussels take over like they have virtually everywhere else, or form a committee that would lobby for more funding for more boat and watercraft inspection sites and decontamination units, as well as the possible implementation of an idea called the ‘Lake Diefenbaker Insurance Fund’.
Feedback amongst those in attendance at the meeting seemed to indicate that no one who uses Lake Diefenbaker – as a water source, a recreation site or otherwise – is taking the issue of infestation lightly, and many were glad that they came out to the meeting as they left having learned a lot of new information surrounding the topic.
To date, there has been no reported sighting of zebra mussels in Saskatchewan, and the goal of PARCS is to keep it that way through continued education about prevention and making the lake-loving public aware of the issue.
