Volunteers search for invasive plants

SURRY – Volunteers will visit 80 Hancock County lakes and ponds this week, looking for invasive plants.

The quiet invaders, which can upset a water body’s ecosystem, have not turned up in the area, but are a problem elsewhere in Maine.

The survey is a way to raise public awareness.

“You don’t have to be an expert on aquatic plants. You just have to know the enemy,” said staff member Scott Williams during training at Mount Desert Island’s Somes Meynell Wildlife Sanctuary on Sunday.

Altogether this week, 55 volunteers will visit lakes and ponds in Hancock County that have public access points.

At Sunday’s training at Lower Patten Pond, Roberta Hill of the nonprofit Maine Volunteer Lakes Monitoring Program worked with the volunteers.

“If they enjoy doing it, it will become a lifelong habit that they’ll just want to keep doing,” said Hill, who does lake survey work at a professional level. She volunteers her time to travel around the state and train people to look for aquatic invasive plants.

“The goal would be to do this every year with every lake that has a public boat access,” said Liz Petterson, district manager of the Hancock County Soil and Water Conservation District.

Petterson also organized the Hancock County Aquatic Invasive Plant Working Group, which has about 75 representatives and is made up of residents and members of local natural resource organizations.

“The lake survey week was really a brainchild of that group,” she said.

The group meets every few months to discuss expanding education efforts, developing rapid response procedures and spreading information about invasive plants.

“We’re very pleased that the state is paying attention to this problem,” said Sue Sokol, a volunteer who lives on Lower Patten Pond.

About $3,000 in grant money from the Maine Outdoor Heritage Fund, in addition to donations from the state Department of Environmental Protection’s invasive species program and local businesses, is paying for supplies and organizational needs for the survey week.

On top of that, Petterson calculated, volunteered time would have cost about $7,000 if the surveyors were paid.

Before Sunday’s training, volunteers had attended a 41/2-hour workshop to learn about the plants. On Sunday, they were shown how to make a map of their survey areas and how to use view scopes, similar to telescopes, to look underwater.

When Sunday’s group went out on the pond to practice, one pair brought back what Hill identified as a “mystery plant.”

“They found a plant that I don’t know. There’s no chlorophyll in it whatsoever,” Hill said. “That isn’t to say it’s rare or endangered, but it’s new to me.”

Hill thought the whitish specimen might be part of a root, but wasn’t sure. She did, however, rule out that it was one of the target plants the volunteers were looking for.

Volunteers will be making so-called “tier 1” surveys at lakes and ponds this week, which means they will examine an area 300 feet from each side of a public boat access and out to a depth of 13 feet. Such surveys take about four hours, according to volunteers.

Tier 3 surveys are the goal, according to Petterson, which she said are the most comprehensive surveys that look at an entire body of water.

Petterson said this week’s work would be the first of many survey efforts to come in Hancock County.

“It’s a proactive thing here,” she said. “Our goal is just to keep educating more people.”