“You don’t clean up water in hopes of resurrecting the food web – you resurrect the food web in order to clean up water”.  Bruce Kania

What does this mean?

“Resurrecting the food web” means to restore bio-complexity to the aquatic environment, starting from the very base of life – microbes.   Microbes gather together to form biofilm, which becomes a substrate for other forms of life, providing habitat and nourishment.  The plant component of biofilm is periphyton, the green stuff (it can also be brown).  As the periphyton-eaters derive sustenance from the biofilm itself, the next level of life up the food chain eats them; and so on and so forth throughout the aquatic food chain (now called the food web).

Each level of life consumes phosphorus in order to grow; and each level is successively consumed– or harvested – by the one above it.  Thus phosphorus moves through the food web.  Where the final predator in the chain is humans (it could be bears), we have a responsibility to complete the harvest if we want to remove nutrients.

When water becomes impaired, through depletion of dissolved oxygen, it loses its ability to sustain bio-complexity, and only species such as mosquito or midge larvae can survive.  To turn this around, we can add two elements to the water to help Nature restore bio-complexity – surface area (structure) and circulation.

Biofilm-forming microbes are “limited” by surface area; so, the more surface area they have, the more they proliferate.  With a healthy substrate of biofilm, the food web can kick in on a “build it and they will come” basis.  Suitable types of surface area include brush, cobble, roots, gravel and, of course, BioHaven matrix.

Circulation is important for enabling the nutrients to flow into the surface area, where they will be used, and for distributing oxygen throughout the environment.  Natural circulation (inflow / outflow) might be sufficient, or it may need to be enhanced with a pump or fountain of some sort.

Surface area and circulation are the basic components of “the wetland effect”, a sustainable strategy for enabling natural processes to be kick-started – in other words, for resurrecting the food web.

For information on how Floating Islands can help resurrect the food web, please visit www.FloatingIslandSolutions.com