50 Years on Chautauqua Lake

My parents started vacationing with my brother and me on Chautauqua Lake when I was four years old. At age ten, I began piloting a small boat to fish.  We vacationed at Point Chautauqua each summer where we fished the rocky bottoms along Point Chautauqua to the Vikings Club for smallmouth bass and walleyes.  In my later teen years, we experienced getting stuck in topped out Eurasian watermilfoil in the Mayville flats while water skiing.  Each year, we caught muskellunge, bass, and walleye from Mayville to Prendergast Point and Maple Springs.

As part of these fishing experiences, I experienced the impacts of the construction of Chautauqua Lake Estates. The excavation buried the lake bottom there with soil. Our anchor pulled up this soil and I witnessed the abundance of Eurasian watermilfoil that thrived rooted in the soil that formerly had been on the hill above. Each year brought more shore excavation, more homes, and more erosion and sedimentation followed by more abundant milfoil beds.  Milfoil flourishes when rooted in fresh sediments. 

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the excavation for the Southern Tier Expressway and bridge construction provided a major onslaught of sediments into the lake.

In the 1990s, zebra mussels arrived, which made the water measurably clearer for a few years as they filtered out and ate a lot of algae (phytoplankton). They prefer to not to eat cyanobacteria (“blue-green algae”) and choose algae that are a main food for zooplankton such as Daphnia (water fleas). Daphnia are a primary food for young yellow perch and other species. These mussels re-direct the food chain and significantly contribute to the formation of harmful algal blooms (HABs). Zebra mussels also concentrate nutrients by depositing their feces onto the lake bottom between the rocks that host them. These droppings then provide a fertile environment for plants to grow, creating plant communities where they didn’t exist and changing the aquatic communities in these formerly more “clean bottom” rocky areas. 

Many positive actions have also occurred over this time. With the closure of the malted milk plant in Mayville in 1976 eliminating its discharges of high phosphorus effluent, the milfoil seems to be significantly less dense from Mayville to Hartfield and rarely tops out as it did in the 1970s. In 1980, the Chautauqua Lake South and Central Sewer Districts went into service diverting effluent from one-third of the lakeshore to the wastewater treatment plant in Celoron. In recent years, lake users and water consumers have been significantly benefiting from upgrading the Northern Chautauqua Lake Sewer District wastewater treatment plant and Chautauqua Utility District treatment plants to tertiary treatment removing over 90% of the phosphorus from their effluent. In addition, wastewater from Chautauqua Lake Estates is now treated at the NCLSD plant. These upgrades reduced external phosphorus loading to the north basin by about 25%.

Offsetting the benefits of sewer extensions and treatment plant upgrades are the impacts of more development and climate change, both of which cause more soil erosion, more nutrient pollution, and early lake stratification, increasing the duration of anoxic bottom conditions driving internal phosphorus loading from the lake sediments. According to NYS CSLAP data, average total phosphorus in our lake waters has increased over the past 36 years, while average water clarity has remained about the same.

So what about the fisheries? Yellow perch are very abundant. Muskellunge fry and fingerlings continue to be stocked by New York State, and abundance cycles up and down. They remain relatively abundant and challenging to catch.  Walleye populations cycle up and down as well. Largemouth bass are as abundant as ever. Smallmouth bass and crappies continue to provide productive fisheries. White perch, a non-native species, are much more abundant than in past decades. My brother and I, and our adult children, are still having fun catching fish on this lake.

So much has changed since I first started fishing on this lake. There are a lot fewer wooded natural shorelines and a lot more fertilized and pesticide treated lawns where those natural shorelines formerly existed. We have more rooftops, parking lots, and roads carrying more stormwater down streams and more urban pollution to our precious lake. There is so much more preventive and restorative conservation work needed in the lake’s 180-square mile drainage basin to reduce the pollution and sedimentation contributing to the lake’s excess plant and algae growth. There are no quick fixes to maintain a healthy lake for all to enjoy!

Article and photo by John Jablonski III

Special Projects Coordinator