Untitled Document

12 September 2003

Patchogue Lake, Long Island, NY. One Year after Drought of 2002

by James Farr

I returned to Patchogue Lake to take snapshots of what I had earlier observed along its shoreline in 2002. At that time I had written an article on the Drought on Long Island as well as a note on a rare cranefly I had collected before the drought. In 2002 I reported that that rare Dolichopeza or River-Woodland cranefly was no longer found there. Instead the lake had adapted to the drought by diversifying its plant life. I reported in our local newspaper two variants of Queen's Anne Lace. I also reported some strange new insect visitors including a rare dragonfly giant (normally found in more southern regions) but since termed an actual species variant in Northeastern Rivers.

Nature sure has learned to adapt. Today as I returned to the lake in 2003, I took snapshots of where the Queen's Anne Lace was and found that the purple colored variant or variation had disappeared.

So the drought did have an overall effect of reducing species diversity. I kept walking by the shore, and to my surprise, I saw a Monarch butterfly. This is a rare siting; in Mexico, they had reported this butterfly as being almost extinct. I had read in National Geographic Magazine, that instead of its extinction, the butterfly had actually rebounded.

The freeze in Mexico during the early 2000's had almost dropped that butterfly's numbers to zero. The Monarch breeds in only one forest in Mexico, and then is known to migrate north during the summer. It has the longest migration of any known butterfly.

In fact, I hadn't recorded seeing a butterfly at all in my last three or four years of walking in the field.

The instant I saw the Monarch Butterfly,I wanted to see if somehow, something changed to favor its feeding behavior by the lake shore. I took notes (more copiously) of the plant life still remaining after the drought of 2002. I found many more herbaceous plants. There were more succulent plants or plants associated with open fields. There were a larger number and variety of Goldenrod.

I began to think that the overall increase in plant biomass or increased weight of plant material by the lake shore led to very significant increases in the ability of different insects to breed or reproduce there.

Possibly my rare cranefly will return. I also became more aware of nature's huge power to use the sun, diverting its energy in bringing more efficient, diverse fauna to life during harsh droughts, and then taking full advantage of the end of the drought to utilize its productive strength as a field or lake shore to eventually repair itself and possibly return to its normal state.

My interest in this type of recovery stems from my early interest in limnology or the study of lakes. Limnology taught me that lakes have two or three stages to their overall growth, aging and then death.

A young lake is always termed oligotrophic or bare of nutrients. As it grows older, the lake gains more species of plant life and then enters a stage of diversity called mesotrophic. As the lake gets older, there are fewer species, but more species of larger size, i.e., large Maple trees by the shore and larger fish in the lake. Finally, the lake enters the eutrophic phase, where it is rich in organic nutrients able to support abundant plant and animal life. Eventually lakes die by becoming a bog.

What I saw at Patchogue Lake was a small microcosm of this cycling of production, diversity and overproduction. It was the first time I saw a lake actually repair itself through one instance of drought by going through three complete stages of, oligotrophic, mesotrophic and then eutrophic. Except Patchogue Lake did not eventually become a bog, it actually remained in the end oligotrophic, at least in the biological sense. The Monarch butterfly siting led me to believe what one of my Professors had termed to be impossible. The lake had completely repaired itself.

There were three famous Swedish limnologists during the early l970's who actually diagrammed the various stages of lake, eutrophication and stabilization actually thinking of lakes as living organs much like the lining of a stomach. I had read their works early on in my school career and found them preposterous. How can someone take an inanimate thing such as a lake and term it living organism? Now that I saw what I saw at Patchogue Lake on Long Island, NY, I had decided that that type of lake or even forest categorization might be true.