This article was written by LLLA's Stewardship Coordinator, Elizabeth Haber. Elizabeth's background is in botany, and her wealth of knowledge of the plant world has brought incredible insights into our care and appreciation of our aquatic ecosystem. We hope you enjoy learning about life underwater from Elizabeth's planty perspective!
As terrestrial beings, many humans don’t spend much time exploring the underwater world. When folks spend a day on the lake, they typically spend much of their time at its surface: boating, paddling, fishing, and doing other water sports. However, there is an enchanted forest below the surface, full of beauty, drama, wonder, and delight. The architects of this underwater forest are our diverse and precious native aquatic plants. With one of Michigan’s largest inland lakes in our back yard, we are extremely lucky to be so near to such a splendid underwater environment. In this article, I’ll take you on a brief tour of some of the fascinating plants that call Lake Leelanau home, with the hope that the next time you’re out on the lake, you’ll recognize some of these plants and greet them as friends, knowing they’re working hard to keep our lake environment healthy and beautiful.
Aquatic Plants
An aquatic plant is a plant that can and must live its entire life submersed in water. As with any “rule” in nature, there are always exceptions, and aquatic plants can have floating leaves at the water’s surface and flowers that emerge above the surface of the water; but for the most part, aquatic plants’ stems and leaves live entirely in the water. There are over two dozen species of native aquatic plants in Lake Leelanau, and each one plays an important role in our lake’s healthy ecosystem. Aquatic plants provide habitat, food, and shelter for countless animals. They help maintain our water clarity and quality. And, crucially, aquatic plants produce oxygen for our fishes and other aquatic animals to breathe. Aquatic plants are much more than just “weeds” underwater.
Bladderworts
The first plant group highlighted here are the bladderworts. Relatives of the butterworts, a group of fascinating terrestrial carnivorous plants, bladderworts are underwater predators. They eat small aquatic animals like Daphnia (otherwise known as common water fleas) and even mosquito larvae! How does an aquatic plant even eat an animal? Well, it’s a fascinating story. Each underwater leaf of a bladderwort develops groups of small pouches called bladders. These bladders have a set of small hairs along the edge of the lids of the pouches. When the trap is set, the lids of the pouches are open and the hairs are sticking out. An unsuspecting mosquito larva swims near the bladderwort and brushes a few of the hairs along the lid - a fatal mistake! Quicker than the blink of an eye, the lid of the bladder snaps shut, sucking the doomed mosquito larva into the pouch and trapping it inside. Then the bladderwort slowly releases digestive enzymes into the bladder, dissolving its prey and absorbing the nutrients.
This video explains how a bladderwort catches its prey. The process is very quick, so the researchers who made the video slowed it down and magnified a single bladder so we can see this amazing process clearly.
Water Celery
The next plant I’d like to highlight sometimes gets a bad reputation for being “weedy”, but in reality, it’s an extremely important part of our lake’s healthy aquatic ecosystem. Furthermore, its pollination story is one of the most romantic stories I know of in the plant kingdom. The plant I’m referring to is water celery, or eelgrass. This is one of the most common plants in Lake Leelanau, and toward the end of the summer, boaters can often look into shallow water and see the long, ribbon-like leaves waving in the gentle current. Water celery is an extremely important source of food for waterfowl and muskrats and provides excellent habitat for fish. Water celery is such an important part of canvasback ducks’ life cycle that part of their scientific name refers to water celery. Water celery is especially important for our Lake Association’s work in Lake Leelanau because it’s often one of the first plants to poke up through the burlap barriers that we lay to control the invasive Eurasian watermilfoil (EWM) in South Lake Leelanau.
Underwater video taken of a recently-installed burlap barrier in South Lake Leelanau with lots of water celery re-establishing on the barrier.
What made me fall in love with this plant, though, is learning about how its flowers are pollinated. Male and female flowers are produced on separate plants. The female flowers appear at the ends of long, spiralling stalks and reach the surface of the water. At the surface, the female flowers open up and create a small dip on the surface of the water. Meanwhile, the male flowers are aggregated in a packet, which is released from the base of the plant and floats up to the surface. Once at the surface, the packet with the male flowers becomes a sail, and the male flowers then set sail off into the sunset in search of their true love. As the male flowers sail across the surface of the water, they encounter the small dip in the surface that the female flowers create and sail down into the dip, where they unite with their true love and pollinate the female flower to produce the next generation of water celery plants. And they live happily ever after! Check out this website for some gorgeous photos of water celery flowers and a description of its pollination process.
Fun Facts
I wish there were space to share all the fascinating stories about the aquatic plants that call Lake Leelanau home, but this article can only be so long. Therefore, the final paragraph will be a rapid-fire list of fun facts about more of our lake’s aquatic plants.
- Muskgrasses, which are actually a large form of algae, are one of the few water plants that can be identified by smell alone. Anglers who pull up an anchor from a bed of muskgrass will know this smell well - a pungent and unmistakable skunky odor.
- At the northern mouth of the narrows, as it empties into North Lake Leelanau, is the largest and densest bed of Mare’s tail I have ever seen. Mare’s tail is an aquatic plant that only grows in high-quality, healthy aquatic habitats, making this bed of Mare’s tail in North Lake Leelanau a very special place.
- When we think of watermilfoil, it’s often the invasive Eurasian watermilfoil that we’ve been controlling in South Lake Leelanau. However, there are six native species of watermilfoil in Michigan, of which I’ve seen three in Lake Leelanau. Check out this article for more information about the watermilfoils in Michigan.
There's More to Learn
Just under the waves of Lake Leelanau is a diverse and beautiful environment full of aquatic plant life. But don’t just take my word for it! Grab a mask and a snorkel and see for yourself. As long as you have open eyes and space for curiosity and a sense of wonder, you will be rewarded ten-fold by a magical world just underneath the surface of the water.
If you are interested in learning more about aquatic plants, I recommend the following books:
Aquatic Plants of the Upper Midwest, 4th edition. By Paul Skawinski
Aquatic Invasive Plants: A Field Guide for Michigan Lakes, Streams, and Ponds. By Erick Elgin, Jo Latimore, Paige Filice, Tom Alwin, Kevin Walters, Kelsey Bockelman, and Lois Wolfson
Through the Looking Glass: A Field Guide to Aquatic Plants. By Susan Borman, Robert Korth, and Jo Temte