ANSELMO – The lake within Anselmo’s Victoria Springs State Recreation Area is certainly a mysterious one. It is primarily spring-fed and almost too healthy for its own good, despite how it may look. The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission has spent the past ten years trying to get to the bottom of that mystery, pun half-intended.
Since 2012, Game and Parks Aquatic Habitat Program Manager Jeff Jackson and a team of biologists, engineers, and a slew of other experts have been trying to solve the riddle of the Victoria Springs Lake’s alarming, near-constant plant growth.
“What we found,” Jackson says, “is that we’ve got a ton of nutrients coming from those springs that are feeding the lake, which is what’s really driving those plants that are present in the lake.”
Those nutrients are phosphorous and nitrogen, two crucial food groups for watermilfoil and duckweed, the plants that, in the warmer months, give the Victoria Springs Lake its almost putting green-like surface. The lake is by no means the largest in the state, and nutrients entering lakes statewide is certainly not uncommon, but Jackson says the concentration of those two chemicals blew expected ratios out of the water.
“We have nutrients coming from within the lake, which is pretty common. You’ve got nutrients that are coming up out of the sediment. That’s always expected in these systems. What we didn’t expect was to see so many nutrients coming from those springs. They were four to eight times higher than what we’d ever want or expect; that’s what’s driving the whole thing.”
Through the decade-long investigation, the Game and Parks Aquatic Habitat team discovered that phosphorous and nitrogen in the lake could have come from the watershed, the springs which feed the lake, the richness of the surrounding soil, or a combination of any or all three, which may help explain why Victoria Springs is so bizarrely full of plant life.
In Jackson’s experience, nutrient release, and thus plant growth, in most lakes can be stemmed through the introduction of alum into the water, though Jackson says that Victoria Springs Lake is not most lakes.
“Alum helps strip the nutrients out of the water. It’s kind of a one-time application, that helps to reset the nutrients. The problem is: those nutrients kept coming in from those springs like crazy.”
Jackson says that the problem is not so much that the nutrients, or even the plants for that matter, are present in the lake, but it is that they exist in such concentrated and excessive quantities. Duckweed and watermilfoil are not invasive species, but they are short-living and quick-breeding, which creates all manner of problems for other organisms within the lake.
“If we have a cloudy stretch, those plants will start to die back, and what happens is when they die they take a lot of the oxygen out of the water, so we’ve been seeing a lot of fish killed in the lake.”
Simply put: without fish, the lake at Victoria Springs becomes no good for Custer County’s anglers and no good for the ecosystem of the lake itself.
Outright “treatment” for the lake might not be in the cards; regulating Victoria Springs would be a costly endeavor both financially and ecologically, but one solution to help mitigate the excess biomass proposed by Jackson and his team is to get underneath it, literally.
“One of the things could be installing a well so we have a constant, flowing source of water that wouldn’t have as high a level of nutrients. We’d target that well to a certain depth, which would help us maintain the water level of the lake as well as provide fresh water that would circulate some of that plant life.”
As the research was just concluded at the end of 2022, no specific plans have been officially presented by Jackson’s team or approved by Game and Parks, though a decision regarding the lake is expected sometime this year.
