Your voice is needed NOW to help stop this nuisance and save the Upper Guadalupe River, as well as protecting the local residents and those of us who paddle the river for recreational purposes. Texas River Protection Association has an excellent description of this problem and what can be done about it on their website at Guadaulpe River Environmental Action Team.

This issue is much too important to overlook. While some other issues we face are merely inconveniences, this one threatens the very survival of one of Texas' most precious waterways - the Guadalupe River. TAKE A STAND TODAY! Please do not wait. Read the articcle at the link above, then follow its instructions to contact Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and urge them to stop Wheatcraft Materials from further damaging this scenic and nearly pristine waterway and its surrounding community.

CADDO LAKE, Texas - Every day, a handful of locals climb into small paddleboats on this scenic lake and scour its shallow, swampy sloughs and bayous for signs of a monster.

RICHARD MICHAEL PRUITT/DMN
Mike Turner sprays herbicide at giant salvinia, a Brazilian fern that multiplies fast and chokes the life out of waterways. Their prey: a floating, leafy water fern called giant salvinia that acts more like an alien from another planet than a plant.

The tropical import from Brazil can double in size in less than a week - clogging waterways, choking out natural vegetation and killing off bass.

Retirees and fishermen fear the weed could soon turn Texas' only natural lake into a massive green parking lot.

"You can't stop it," said Billy Carter, a 57-year-old Caddo Lake bass fisherman and tour guide. "How do you stop something that has no beating heart and that can reproduce in a few days?"

"It's such a sinister plant," said Dr. Randy Westbrooks, an invasive species specialist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Whiteville, N.C. "If you let it go, it multiplies much faster than any other aquatic weed until it's a permanent maintenance issue. It never goes away."

The plant - discovered in a pond in South Carolina in 1995 and at a schoolyard lake near Houston three years later - has wreaked havoc on lakes and creeks from California, Colorado and Hawaii to Florida, Texas and Louisiana.

Aquarium collectors who wanted to spiff up water gardens first brought the weed to the U.S. in the early 1990s, biologists say. But they mistakenly transported it along with other plants bound for public lakes and ponds.

Jack Canson, the self-proclaimed "weed warden" for Caddo Lake, which straddles Texas and Louisiana, said residents responded quickly.

"It came very natural to us when we found out we had a problem," said Mr. Canson, a resident of nearby Marshall. "We said, 'Hell, let's organize and let's fight it.' "

The $35,000 fence is the latest attempt by worried lakeside residents to combat the weed.

It's 'so sneaky'

But they may be fighting a losing battle.

A magnified view of the prolific salvinia and a warning to boaters who might unwittingly bring it into unscathed areas of Caddo Lake are among efforts to educate sportsmen and sightseers. In Swinney Marsh, Texas, at the lower end of the Trinity River in Liberty County, residents had to abandon spots once fished for bass, crappie and sunfish because the dense mats of salvinia prevent fishing lines from breaking through the water.

At Toledo Bend in Jasper, Texas Parks and Wildlife officials found thousands of acres of the floating weed.

After years of costly herbicide treatments, the mass has been reduced to about 1,200 acres, according to the agency's most recent geological survey. But biologists and researchers say the free-floating water fern will never be fully eradicated because of its ability to quickly clone itself and move.

A tiny piece of the weed from a boat trailer or propeller, fishing rod or even a shoe can find new life in freshwater because the plant grows when segments of it break off and quickly start new strands.

"It's so adaptive and so sneaky," said Howard Elder, an aquatic habitat biologist with Texas Parks and Wildlife. "It's not big and flowery. It will come up on you until, all of a sudden, there's just too much to deal with."

Prevailing winds can also easily relocate patches of salvinia from one waterway to another. Caddo Lake boaters say they followed a patch of the weed that traveled three-quarters of a mile within 24 hours in February.

"We went out one week and didn't find anything on the Texas side but, a week later, it had spread everywhere," said Ken Shaw, president of the local Cypress Valley Navigation District and a 62-year-old retired paper company executive who lives on the lake. "And it was all coming to Texas."

Lake a uniting force

A massive logjam of debris on the Red River that once blocked the mouth of the Big Cypress Bayou created Caddo Lake in 1799. Steamboats transported cotton to ports from Galveston to New Orleans before they abandoned the lake at the turn of the century.

Caddo Lake has become home to an odd mix of wealthy retirees who moved to escape fast-paced city life and locals who have historically profited from a number of illegal commercial fishing and bootlegging operations.

"The people here are naturally independent, and these aren't tree-huggers," said Mr. Canson, the "weed warden." "The only thing these people will hug is their boats."

In 1993, the lake was designated "a wetland of international importance" under the Ramsar Convention, the result of efforts by environmentalists, including rocker Don Henley, who spent summers at Caddo Lake as a boy. The designation helped sink a project by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to channel through the lake for a barge canal from Daingerfield, Texas, to Shreveport, La.

Fighting the weed is a difficult proposition for all involved.

"It's brought the city, the lake folk and everyone else together," Mr. Canson said. "We still have a few court cases pending against each other, but we're working together on this."

Hope in weevils

On the Louisiana side, it's easier to treat the weed with sprays than the Texas side, where it's sometimes impossible to navigate through the thick cypress trees.

"We can see the weed but we can't reach it," Mr. Shaw said. "Talk about frustrating."

It's also pricey. Caddo Lake groups in Texas expect to spend about $120,000 from the state each year to fight salvinia. And a homeowners' association has already collected $70,000 in donations for upkeep and maintenance.

More than 100 people have also taken a one-hour certification course offered by the state to learn how to remove salvinia from Caddo Lake. Transporting the weed is illegal under state law.

Some experts traveling to Caddo Lake say there's hope in weevils - tiny, black beetles from South America that feed on salvinia. But Dr. Westbrooks said weevils work only in small areas and under the right climates.

In India and Australia, entire lake systems have been overrun by salvinia, and in Southeast Asia, infestations have cut villages off from the waterways and fisheries they depend on for food and water.

South American weevils may solve the problem in their native territory, but there's no guarantee they are the solution for Texas.

"It's not special in Brazil but, in these other areas, there's no other species to help control its numbers," Dr. Westbrooks said. "It's like sending someone out to the mall with an unlimited credit card. The results can be bad."

GIANT SALVINIA
What is it?

A floating, rootless aquatic fern originating in Brazil that first appeared in Texas in 1998.

• Also known as Kariba weed, aquarium watermoss and koi candy, giant salvinia is one of 10 similar water ferns from South America.

• The upper surfaces of the weed's green leaves are covered with rows of white, bristly hairs. The stalks of each leaf divide into four thin branches that soon rejoin at the tips to form a cage, resembling tiny eggbeaters.

• As plants grow, they mat.

• Giant salvinia will overtake all other aquatic vegetation in its path, destroying a habitat by blocking sunlight and depleting oxygen.

• In 2003, giant salvinia covered 124 acres on the Toledo Bend Reservoir in Jasper. By 2004, it had spread to more than 3,070 acres despite herbicide treatments.

Where does it grow?

Quiet water of lakes and ponds, oxbows, ditches; slow-moving streams and rivers, backwater swamps, marshes and rice fields.

Texas Parks and Wildlife says more than 50 private lakes, ponds and streams have reported infestations of giant salvinia. It's been spotted in at least 10 public waters, including Lake Conroe in Conroe; Lake Texana in Edna; Center City Lake and Pinkston Lake in Center; Sheldon Lake in Houston; and B.A. Steinhagen Lake near Jasper.

What does it do?

Rapidly expanding populations can overgrow and replace native plants. The dense surface cover prevents light and atmospheric oxygen from entering the water. And decomposing material that drops to the bottom consumes dissolved oxygen needed by fish and other aquatic life.

• At Swinney Marsh, Texas, fishermen have found it impossible to cast into water covered with dense mats of giant salvinia and are abandoning spots once fished for bass, crappie and sunfish.

• Giant salvinia also clogs water intakes to interfere with agricultural irrigation and electrical generation. Many infested farm ponds in Texas lie on creeks that drain tributaries heavily depended on for agricultural irrigation. The 26,800-acre Caddo Lake is split almost evenly between Texas, with its narrow waterways lined by giant cypress trees draped with Spanish moss, and Louisiana, where more open bodies of water form larger lakes.

As you may be aware, much of the funding for Texas state parks is supposed to come from a tax on sporting goods, which produces more than $100 millions in state revenues per year. Consumers of sporting goods believe their taxes are going for state parks, but in 1995 the Legislature capped the amount of sporting goods taxes that could go to TPWD at $32 millions. In recent years, the Legislature has not appropriated even the $32 million.

State Rep. Harvey Hilderbran, R-Kerrville, is expected to introduce legislation to lift the cap on the sporting goods tax. "The current conditions of Texas state parks are in dire shape -- close to disaster," Hilderbran has said. "Some of the state's 114 parks are embarassing. Declining budgets have resulted in staff cuts, reduced operating hours, deferred maintenance..." In fact, TPWD has closed some park facilities and is trying to sell off some of our precious Texas park land.

Contact your state senator and representative soon and urge them to strongly support long-overdue funding for our Texas state park system. Specifically, ask them to support lifting the "cap" on the sporting goods tax and to release previously-appropriated funds for use by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. To learn who your state rep and state senator are, go to http://www.fyi.legis.state.tx.us/ and enter your address.

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There is a lot going on with Texas rivers conservation issues this year. We are about to enter a very important era with respect to Texas river issues as the next couple of legislative sessions draw nearer. The Texas Instream Flow Program (TIFP) will be conducting studies over the next several years that may impact subsisence flows on some streams to get them back to "Sound Ecological Environment" status. State agencies and the Legislature will use the study results to divvy up the water pie as we move into an era of water as commodity and surface water futures are traded. Get more info from the TIFP links at www.txrivers.org/.

Meanwhile, right in DFW's backyard (or is that front yard?), a new river advocacy group, "Friends of the Brazos River" (FBR) is picking up steam and will work with (or fight) Brazos River Authority (BRA) to improve and sustain minimum instream flows, especially in the stretch from Possum Kingdom Lake to Lake Whitney. Get more info and join/donate on-line at http://www.friendsofthebrazos.org. This part of the Brazos has a special place in my heart, and I encourage anybody who has an interest in returning this stream to its former glory to join up now. Interestingly, BRA has intermittently increased weekend flows at its three dams in North Texas over the past year. Maybe they are listening to FBR, which has many Brazos riverside landowners in its ranks.

Down in the Hill Country, our beloved Guadalupe has its own current and serious problems as well. Down on the Upper Guadalupe River between Center Point and Kerrville, a huge rock quarry operation is wreaking havoc and destruction right up to the banks of this beautiful stretch of river. Not only that, the quarry operators are seeking a permit to add more of those huge, monstrous, insanely noisy rock crushers near the river. More noise, more sediment in the once pristinely clear water, more air pollution. The operator is already using river water and polluting it illegally. The place already looks like a moonscape right up to the riverside. Get the latest info at Newsletter of the Guadalupe River Environmental Action Team.

SYOTR,

Richard Grayson
E-mail: webmaster@txrivers.org