It was a sunny July morning on Lake Cane, right around the corner from Universal Studios, when Jerome Madigan, best known by basically everyone as "Jay" jumped in, launching from the side of a pontoon boat.
Simply put, Madigan loves to swim. But he's also one of several diver volunteers helping to monitor conditions near the bottom of this ancient lake, which appears on Florida maps dating as far back as 1849. The lake falls within the heavily-urbanized, environmentally vulnerable Shingle Creek watershed, or drainage basin, where the Florida Everglades begin.
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At its deepest, Lake Cane descends to about 33 feet, where the muck that's been on Madigan's mind lately tends to collect. Muck is a dark, wet and sticky organic soil material formed from decayed plant matter, often emitting a rotten egg smell as the muck's bacteria decomposes.
Some amount and distribution of muck is natural and healthy for a lake, according to the University of Florida Institute for Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS). But if too much muck settles at the bottom of a lake, it begins to rot: spewing more nutrients into the water, and sucking up the dissolved oxygen that fish, plants and bottom critters need to survive.
That's exactly the kind of situation Madigan wants to avoid. He helps lead the Lake Cane Restoration Society, a nonprofit formed by Central Floridians like him who love Lake Cane and want to help keep it clean.
Fulfilling that mission requires a data-driven approach, Madigan said, including when it comes to learning more about the bottom of this lake.
"It goes arm's length into this stuff," Madigan said, holding up a fistful of gooey muck while treading water just above one of Lake Cain's deepest points. "And it's not solid at the bottom … There's no hard bottom," he added, smacking the side of the pontoon boat for effect.
Seeing the unseen
Watching Madigan from the pontoon boat that day were some of the engineers behind CCIWADR (Watershed Autonomous Data Recorder), a patent-pending lake monitoring technology using sonar and underwater drones to evaluate water quality and map lake depths. The Ohio-based company is part of the University of Central Florida's Business Incubation Program and has a local office in Kissimmee.
"One of the things I love is being able to see the unseen," said Stephen Curless, the company's lead research developer and inventor. An infrared camera Curless hooked up to another boat allows him to do just that.
As Curless steers his rigid inflatable boat all around the lake, the infrared camera scans the lake floor, gathering data for bathymetric maps that visualize Lake Cane's topography and underwater features, including its five deepest points.
Those five deep points are concerning for Madigan and others who love to swim Lake Cane, because muck has been collecting there — and, potentially, slowing the flow of fresh groundwater seeping up into the lake, Madigan said.
Whether or not that hypothesis is true remains to be seen. The data gathered by CCIWADR could help find the answer.
"We are taking this with data steps, so we're gonna know — first of all, what's in my hand?" Madigan said, gesturing with his fistful of muck. "We want healthy soil at the bottom of our lake, so we're testing it before we dig it up."
Before launching any muck removal project, it's critical to evaluate whether or not muck removal is likely to be an effective strategy, according to UF Associate Professor of Biogeochemistry Ashley Smyth.
"You might be doing worse by actually removing it all," Smyth said. "Sometimes it [muck] can act as a cap, and prevent anything that's worse underneath from being liberated," like contaminated soil, for instance, or some other source of pollution.
Facts over feelings
Along with measuring lake depths, the CCIWADR technology also collects water quality data, measuring variables like temperature, fecal coliform bacteria and nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. But instead of collecting samples from a few different, specific sites on Lake Cane, CCIWADR captures data from throughout the entire 80-acre waterbody.
"When we put the data together, it's a grid. It's like a digital twin of the water and what's in the water," said Joyce Johnson, owner of CCIWADR.
The software can be programmed to repeat tests in the same places, allowing for lake managers and monitors, like Madigan, to identify trends over time. "We need repetitive data to see what happens," Johnson said.
For instance, comparing scans of Lake Cane data collected at different points in time could reveal changes like more or less sediment accumulating at certain low points in the lake; or certain parts of the lake that are more acidic than others.
"You can make all the decisions you want about how you feel about the lake, but what's actually there is what you're trying to change," Johnson said.
The goal is not only to identify problems with a given lake, but to quantify those problems, too. To miss that quantification step is to risk wasting precious time and energy, Curless said.
"If you throw, let's say $100,000 in, and it gets rid of 5% of the problem, was that $100,000 worth it?" Curless said. "Don't know, because you don't know that it's 5% of the problem, right?
"If you can't measure it, then you have no idea," Curless said. "Might make [you] feel good, but when it comes down to it, you could potentially be hurting the problem by doing the wrong thing, or the wrong way, or the wrong amount."
It's all about the specifics, which is why CCIWADR also collected samples from other parts of the Shingle Creek watershed. For example, nutrient samples from different points in a watershed can help target whether pollution problems are beginning upstream or downstream from a given waterbody.
"There's a whole piece to this that's going to change accountability," Johnson said. "And we're going to be able to understand why things are coming into the lake."
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Downstream consequences
Right now, Lake Cane is considered eutrophic, according to the latest data available from Florida LAKEWATCH, a citizen volunteer lake monitoring program coordinated by UF/IFAS. Basically, that classification means Lake Cane is hovering right in the middle of a process called eutrophication.
"Eutrophication is nutrient pollution. It means that there are too many nutrients in a water body," Smyth said.
Although eutrophication in itself is a natural process, people are making it worse. For example, fertilizer applications, which end up in the lake, and sewage discharges have dramatically increased the rate and extent of nutrients entering freshwater and marine ecosystems. Climate change is also exacerbating the problem, including with heavier rains that send more nutrient runoff into lakes and other bodies of water, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Excessive nutrients in a waterbody will trigger algal biomass production, Smyth said. "Algae just start to go to town on it, and then create those algal blooms.
"That algal bloom, that turning of the water that green color — that's just a clear indication that we have too many nutrients," Smyth said.
Algal blooms happen all over the world, including in Florida, where high temperatures and abundant sunlight make for especially ripe bloom breeding ground during the summer and early fall. Another contributing factor for algal blooms is reduced water flow, according to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
Right now, Lake Cane appears clear of algal blooms. But Orange County testing recently confirmed the presence of an algal bloom at nearby Lake O'Dell, one of two small lakes that flow into Cane.
Both O'Dell and the other contributing lake, Floy, are hypereutrophic, according to the latest LAKEWATCH data. In other words, both lakes have way too many nutrients.
Algal blooms can be toxic to human health, but aren't always. It's not possible to tell whether or not a bloom is toxic simply by looking at it, according to FDEP.
One of the most common toxins released by algae is microcystin, a potent liver toxin and possible human carcinogen, according to the EPA. Nationally, 2% of lakes — 5,360 lakes in all — contain excessive levels of microcystin, according to the EPA's most recent comprehensive lake assessment.
In the case of O'Dell, the recent algal bloom wasn't toxic, according to state testing But for Madigan and others, the concern remains: unhealthy waters are ultimately flowing into their beloved lake.
Smyth compares Florida's porous soils to "Swiss cheese." Because of it, "we have a lot more groundwater inflow as a source of nutrients to our lakes, our rivers, our coasts," she said.
"Because of our Swiss cheese soils and all the groundwater movement, Florida is just very well-connected," Smyth said. "What you're doing does have consequences for downstream … What you're doing on land connects to water somehow."
Lake Cane has no public access point, meaning it's technically private to the 50+ property owners living right on it. But Madigan isn't one of those property owners; he lives elsewhere in the Shingle Creek watershed, where the Florida Everglades begin.
Instead, Madigan is one of thousands who came to love Lake Cane by swimming it over the last 36 years, in a tradition that's come to be known as "Lucky's Lake Swim." Six mornings a week, people start their day by swimming across the lake, launching off from Lucky Meisenheimer's backyard. It's an event designated historic by the Historical Society of Central Florida.
It was through the swim that Madigan, and many others, fell in love with Lake Cane — with some also finding purpose in the nonprofit formed by citizens to help keep the natural resource in good health.
"We do all this testing as a way of protecting the swim. And that is our obsession and passion and so on," Madigan said.
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But keeping lakes clean isn't just about enjoying them for fishing, swimming or diving.
Most people in Florida get their drinking water from a vast aquifer system. But as Florida grows, so does its water demand, putting more pressure on the state's fresh groundwater resources. That means increasingly, means the state will need to draw on alternative sources of drinking water, including surface water systems like lakes, according to Clay Coarsey, the St. Johns River Water Management District's director of water supply, planning and assessment.
"We really need to switch over, with this growth that's happening, to — when we have these periods of abundant rainfall — using more water from our surface water systems, to take advantage of that [rainfall]," Coarsey said.
But building out the systems required to make those surface water sources safe will be expensive, Coarsey said: "The more we can do to conserve water, the farther off we can put having to do these very large and expensive surface water development projects."
Meanwhile, engineers with CCIWADR are analyzing the new data from Lake Cane, to see what might have changed since the first comprehensive set of data it collected here in 2022. They're also demonstrating the technology on other Central Florida lakes, in hopes of finding more partnerships. Recently, the system captured data on Lake Hiawassee, also located partly within the Shingle Creek watershed; and Lake Howard, in Winter Haven.
On Lake Cane, Madigan and his fellow volunteer divers will continue doing what they can to monitor the lake's health, and identify restoration solutions that are likely to be effective. Madigan said he's hoping other citizens will follow the example.
The goal is simple: "Our mission is to keep this lake swimmable, fishable and lovable," Madigan said.
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