A lake of two halves …

I have started this post in the same way that I started the previous two posts: with one of a series of pictures that I took from Kirkland whilst driving away after fieldwork in Ennerdale Water and the River Ehen earlier in March and noticing the rather spectacular view up the valley. This post, like those, will focus on the microscopic life of the lake but it pays to pause for a moment – as I did on my drive away from Ennerdale – to look at the landscape, and contemplate how the features that are apparent in this panorama shape the properties of a lake that are less obvious to the casual observer.

The picture shows a view across Ennerdale Water towards some of the highest peaks of the Lake District, with Great Gable prominent in the background. What we can also see is a transition: the foreground consists of softer features and more gentle slopes; the background is rugged, steep scree-covered fells. Somewhere, approximately at the point where the hills in the centre left of the picture fall into the lake, the rock type changes. In the foreground, the underlying rock is Ordovician mudstones and sandstones; beyond this, the rocks are formed from a granite intrusion resulting from volcanic activity. This activity also took place in the Ordovician period, but the rock is much harder than the sandstones and mudstones that underlie the foreground.

Most of the features that I have written about in Ennerdale Water are from the zone underlain by the granite but I also visited the north-western end of the lake, where the mudstones and sandstones predominate and the algae that I found attached to the rocks here were conspicuously different. Many of the submerged stones were covered with green filaments which, in turn, were overgrown by diatoms – mostly Tabellaria flocculosa and species of Fragilaria. The green filaments, in turn, had trapped a lot of fine sediments, presumably deriving originally from the sandstones in the catchment. Under the microscope, the green filaments resolved into a mass of Spirogyra filaments, with their distinctive helical chloroplasts, along with Bulbochaete and a few strands of other genera. The algae in this corner of the lake reminded me, in fact, of the algae that I am used to seeing in the River Ehen, just downstream from the lake outfall.

A submerged cobble in the littoral zone of Ennerdale’s north-western corner (left) with (right) two filaments of Spirogyra at high magnification, each with two ribbon-shaped chloroplasts arranged in helices. Scale bar: 20 micrometres (= 1/50th of a millimetre).

Those of us who study freshwaters know that geology has a big influence on the types of plants and animals that grow in a water body – it is probably the strongest natural factor excluding situations where there is a saline influence. The interesting point about Ennerdale is that geology not only has an effect on the lake as a whole (most of the water deriving from the granitic fells that make up the catchment), but it also has subtle effects around the margin, particularly on those algae that are growing directly on rock surfaces.

But it is not quite as simple as that. Look at the photograph at the top of this post. The foreground – the land underlain by Ordovician mudstones and sandstones – is improved pasture. The topography is such that a farmer can get a tractor onto the fields and spread some manure or fertiliser a couple of times a year which, in turn, means the land can carry more livestock. A little of those nutrients may find their way into the small streams that drain into the lake and this, too, may be having an effect on the algae. On the fells beyond, only rough grazing is possible. In other words, however hard we try to separate the effect of man from natural factors, we also have to remember that the landscape, itself, shapes the way that man uses the land. And that, in turn, influences the ecology of the lake.

I should emphasise that the algae in the north-west corner of Ennerdale Water do not suggest any malign effects from those parts of the catchment that drain into the lake here. My point is just that they are different and that the change in geology along the lake may be one factor driving this difference. It is quite subtle, the water that flows into the lake is soft and it is only very slightly less soft near the outfall. But it is enough to have an influence on the ecology of the organisms that live around the edge of the lake. The story of the lakes of the Lake District has told in terms of the rocks that form each of their catchments. What is interesting in Ennerdale Water is that we can see some of those effects of geology within a single water body.