Once these eggs reach the water, tiny larvae called miracidia hatch and immediately go on the hunt for the freshwater snails of the Flathead Lake ecosystem. Less than a millimeter in length, blood flukes begin their life cycle as eggs that are released with the feces of infected waterfowl or mammals, which in Flathead Lake are often mergansers. Still with me? Well hold on, because we haven’t even scratched the surface yet. Here’s the unflinching truth: swimmer’s itch, officially known as cercarial dematitis, is caused by an immune system response to the penetration of human skin by parasites known as blood flukes. It wasn’t until I joined the University of Montana’s Flathead Lake Biological Station (FLBS) that I learned the horrific reality festering inside those little red bumps. For the longest time that’s actually what I assumed swimmer’s itch was - a simple reaction to some kind of irritant like algae or an underwater plant. It’s an allergic reaction, in other words, not unlike the body’s response to poison ivy. They typically manifest as mosquito bite-like bumps that emerge wherever lake water has air-dried on the skin. In reality, swimmer’s itch symptoms aren’t quite so dramatic. “They got swimmer’s itch after cannonballing off of their family cabin dock.”Īt the time I had no personal swimmer’s itch experiences to fall back on, so these tales often left me no choice but to imagine poor so-and-so in a hospital bed, pockmarked and malformed by their terrifying encounter with the infamous itch of the swimmer. “Did you hear about so-and-so,” a fellow fifth-grader might say, in a tone reserved only for the scariest of ghost stories. Prepare yourselves, Leader readers, because this column is bound to get under your skin.Īs someone who grew up in Montana, my childhood summers were peppered with mysterious swimmer’s itch tales. From peeling sunburns to mosquito bites, many of the inflamed epidermal threats we experience are widely known and well understood by local residents and out-of-state visitors alike.īut there’s another cutaneous offender that exists more in the realm of local folklore than the rest - one that resides in the shoreline waters of Flathead Lake and other freshwater bodies, and starts to emerge when summer temperatures approach their peak. Funding for his work comes from the state and private donors, but right now there's only enough for another year.ĭevlin says prevention is key in protecting an environment like the Flathead, because once it changes, its much harder to change back.Here in Montana, itchy skin has always been an unavoidable consequence when enjoying the great outdoors. He wants to study the lake for the rest his career, but money may be an issue. And that’s what he hopes to do as a lake ecologist at the station.ĭevlin joined the Flathead Lake research team in 2014 as a post-doctoral student. If we see a change in phytoplankton that is drastic we can say what is going on nearly immediately."ĭevlin says to understand a climate or a complex ecosystem, scientists need to gather data over a long period of time. "The biggest reason that we want to keep Flathead lake monitoring going is because, if there is an issue, we can determine it quickly. He hopes his data will guide future discussions on stewardship of the Flathead Lake, because we can’t talk about what we don’t know, and his data tell us a lot. What happens if the lake receives more nutrients and turns green, removing the glassy clarity from the lake water?ĭevlin also wants to know what would happen if an invasive species, like zebra mussels, were introduced into lake? What will it mean if the surface temperatures rise and the fish move to lower, cooler, water? Along with his super sophisticated computer model, and 35 years of data collected by researchers at the biological station, he is working to understand what climate change means for the entire lake ecosystem. So that is quite a rise over the course of the century." The bullet point is Flathead Lake is an extremely complex body of water and it’s changing."Climate change has a pretty big impact on temperatures in this area and over the next 100 years, air temperatures are set to increase anywhere between 4 and 6 degrees. Corin Cates-Carney reports from a research presentation at the station Thursday night. Researchers at the Flathead Lake Biological Station are studying how climate change may affect the lake’s chemistry and temperature.
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