The Southampton Town Trustees say they have ruled out using poison to kill off carp in Mill Pond and will use other methods to try to rid the troubled Water Mill pond of the destructive fish.
Despite pressure from pondfront residents and one of the Trustees’ most trusted advisors to use a chemical called rotenone to kill off the pond’s carp—as well as any other fish living in the pond—the Trustees said the proposal had become too controversial and had been dropped from the list of considerations for fixing the pond’s chronic problems.
“We’ll just find other ways to get the carp out and take care of the pond,” Trustee Fred Havemeyer said this week. “The residents were in favor of it, and it’s been done in numerous other situations, but the tenor of the discussion was just going in the wrong direction.”
Instead, Mr. Havemeyer said, the Trustees will put the emphasis back on their original plans to capture carp in nets and remove them from the pond. He said the Trustees plan to enlist the skills of several local commercial fishermen to employ a variety of netting tactics to capture as many carp as possible. The carp’s spawning habits in the spring usually bring them to the edge of the pond and could make corralling large numbers of them easier. Re-introducing predator species, most of which died in a massive fish kill in 2008, will aim to further reduce the carp populations.
The use of rotenone to kill the carp had been introduced by marine biologist Jim Walker of Inter-Science Research Associates in Southampton, who works as a consultant for the Trustees. He has argued that ridding the pond of carp is crucial to restoring native aquatic vegetation that will help balance the ecology of the pond, which has been plagued with thick algae blooms—like the one that sparked the fish kill—for years. The Friends of Lake Nowedonah, a citizens group made up of residents who live along the pond, had recently endorsed Mr. Walker’s plan to poison the carp and pledged to lend financial and manpower support to the effort.
Mr. Havemeyer said that in addition to netting the carp, the Trustees are still investigating other chemical treatments, primarily the use of a compound known as alum that would bond with nitrogen in the pond and starve the algae blooms of their primary fuel source.
A study of the pond’s waters by marine biologists from Stony Brook University in the wake of the fish kill revealed that the pond suffers from heavy influxes of nitrogen from groundwater polluted by decades of chemical fertilizers being spread on nearby farmlands.
The Trustees have hired Lee Lyman, Ph.D., a pond ecology expert from Massachusetts, to develop a plan for restoring the water quality to Mill Pond.
on Feb 2, 2011