Chapter Two

A brief history of limnology up to 1950

 The early American limnologist C Juday on Trout Lake, 1916

It took the science of limnology nearly a century  before it focussed with any urgency on the threat posed by eutrophication to freshwater resources globally.  So when and where exactly did this turning point arise?

Wikipedia has: “Eutrophication was recognized as a water pollution problem in European and North American lakes and reservoirs in the mid-20th century” referring to an oft-quoted source, Rodhe W 1969.

‘Nature education project’ - an online scientific journal – has this: “during the 1960s and 1970s, scientists linked algal blooms to nutrient enrichment resulting from anthropogenic activities such as agriculture, industry, and sewage disposal (Schindler 1974)."

Or this from Sciencedaily - another popular online scientific resource:   "Eutrophication was recognized as a pollution problem in European and North American lakes and reservoirs in the mid-20th century."

A global research organisation,  the World Resources Institute, has even established a website dedicated to the issue of eutrophication,  because it "has found that one of the primary impediments to effectively addressing eutrophication is lack of public awareness of what eutrophication is, what its impacts are, the causes and drivers of eutrophication, and the extent to which freshwater and coastal ecosystems experience eutrophication."  (How much more difficult it must have been therefore 70 years earlier for Dr Servettaz to launch his information campaign!)  But the WTI is as unspecific as the others about when and where the issue was first identified. “Within the past 50 years, eutrophication---the over-enrichment of water by nutrients such as nitrogen phosphorus---has emerged as one of the leading causes of water quality impairment."

WT Edmonson is a little more specific. “One Sunday in June 1955, for recreation, [Dr. George C. Anderson] went sailing on Lake Washington and noticed that it looked strange. He brought a sample back to the laboratory in a beer bottle, saying, “That is not the lake I knew.” We sent the sample to an expert on algae who identified the abundant organism as Oscillatoria rubescens.” (Edmonson p 13).  And from that decisive date flowed the whole remarkable account of the saving of Lake Washington which is dealt with in the Section 'Lake Washington Story".

But there is one even earlier date that is all but lost from record.  It was one Sunday in May 1946.

Dr Servettaz relates the following in his account of the saving of Lake Annecy.  He loved lake Annecy and so “it was by a deliberate choice and by no means chance that I returned home to Annecy to take up work as a doctor in May 1946." And he loved diving and so "my sporting inclinations found their chief expression on the shores of the lake, above and eventually below the surface. The quality of its water was not a matter of indifference for me…” (DRS 1991, 137 – 138.)

By 1948, after he had clarified his ideas  by doing specific research at Lake Annecy,  he had begun his campaign to raise the alert with his fellow citizens. (Dr S 1991 p 146) "Once i was elected municipal councillor for Annecy in 1948 with a very specific desire to defend our beautiful waters, my colleagues rapidly discovered what some of them called with a grin "my obsession with the lake", and without taking me in any way seriously they were amazed at the importance which i attached to this 'idée fixe'- for them far too original, truly futile and superfluous!" (DRS 1991, 146 – 147.)

But it was not by chance that Dr Servettaz noticed that “this is not the lake that I knew”.  He had taught himself the science of limnology by devouring every text he could find in his local libraries.

He was enthralled to read “Le Leman” the masterpiece of François-Alphonse Forel (1841-1912), (DRS 1991 p 139) where the word ‘limnology’ was coined for the first time from the greek for lake (limne) and knowledge (logos).   This pioneering Swiss scientist was, like Dr Servettaz, a medical man with an intellectually curious mind that ranged widely beyond his day job as professor of medicine at the University of Lausanne. Forel investigated the biology and chemistry of the lake as well as the processes of water circulation and sedimentation, but above all he was interested in the interactions between all these. In conceiving this multidisciplinary approach to studying lakes he is considered the founder of the new discipline of limnology, as explained more fully in this paper.  As it happens, Lake Leman is the next lake upriver along the Rhone from lake Annecy, and Forel was born in Morges a village on the shore of lake Leman less than 100 kilometres from Annecy.

Dr Servettaz read the monumental work, Atlas des lacs français 1892 – 1896, by A Delebecque  in which he extended Forel’s study of one lake to encompass all the lakes of France.  Delebecque studied the way lakes filled with water and where they drained, the level of their water, their temperature, their colour, the transparency of their water, chemicals dissolved in their water, and above all their depth which he measured for the first time using instruments he made for the purpose.  And where there were no boats navigating the lake he used his own portable dinghy. Meanwhile, international interest in limnology had grown to the point where in 1922 August Thienemann a German zoologist and Einar Naumann a Swedish botanist founded the International Society of Limnology.  

Dr Servettaz looked particularly for studies of lake Annecy, for instance  Boltshauser “Lake Annecy” an article in the Revue Savoisienne 1860, and L Duparc “Le lac d’Annecy” 1894.  He was particularly impressed by the work of Marc le Roux who produced 20 or so papers on the limnology of Lake Annecy. He regarded him as a remarkable savant quite isolated in his time in pursuing his original scientific work. (DRS 1991 p. 139). Among this work were prescient papers “Sur un organisme flottant capture en filet fin dans les eaux du lac d’Annecy” 1893, "Une algue aerienne" 1897, “Colonies d’ophydium dans le lac D’annecy”1912 and not least his “Etudes biologiques sur les lacs savoyards: lac Annecy et lac du Bourget” published in 1928.

At the same time, across the Atlantic the study of lakes was proceeding a pace in parallel to these developments in Europe. In 1982 the University of Wisconsin established a reseach facility called The Centre for Limnology. It “grew out of almost 100 years of limnology at the university, initiated by E. A. Birge and Chancey Juday… and developed by the work of Arthur Hasler who led the way in experimental limnology and facilitated four decades of aquatic studies at Wisconsin.”

“The University, being only about 25 years old and 500 students, had no research program to speak of and no facilities to do it in. Besides teaching courses in several areas including zoology, botany, human anatomy and bacteriology, Birge played a major role in creating a research program for zoology and physiology. He was also one of the first to use research and individual laboratory work as a method of teaching. Chancey Juday (1871-1944) joined Birge as a half-time lecturer in the Department of Zoology in 1908 after working for the newly created Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey for several years.

In 1909, he began teaching the first courses on limnology and plankton organisms. He also produced the first graduate students in limnology at the University.They were both field researchers, skeptical of laboratory experiments, hated “desk produced” papers and collected huge amounts of data, believing that if they collected enough data, it would speak for itself. They also knew that collaboration was the key to studying lakes. It was not unheard of to have up to 50 researchers from many different backgrounds, such as chemists, biologists, geologists and meteorologists involved in one publication.

But arguably the greatest of the American limnologists was an Englishman. “George Evelyn Hutchinson was a man of charm and learning. He had been educated at Cambridge, travelled to South Africa then Ladakh, to study their lakes, and eventually settled at Yale in the USA to become the doyen of limnologists. In 1957 he published the first volume of his “Treatise on Limnology” which was to become the reference book on limnology for several decades..” BMoss p28. GEH (1903 – 1991) contributed for more than sixty years to the fields of limnology, systems ecology, radiation ecology, entomology, genetics and biogeochemistry, a mathematical theory of population growth, art history, philosophy, religion, and anthropology. He worked on the passage of phosphorus through lakes, the chemistry and biology of lakes, the theory of interspecific competition and on insect taxonomy and genetics, zoo-geography and African water bugs.[3] He is sometimes described as the father of modern ecology.

But our story takes place in the years leading up to 1955, before  G E Hutchinson's masterpiece had been written. More significantly, despite nearly 100 years of limnological research, the issue of eutrophication had been barely touched upon.  Why was this? Were the limnologists of those early years blind to such an obvious threat beneath their noses?  No.  This was no oversight by the great limnologists cited above.  The threat was not the natural process of eutrophication which they had seen,  but human induced eutrophication which came after their time.  It was only when large communities built up around lakes and the great labour began of polluting them with as much effluent as could be mustered, that the modern threat of eutrophication was created.  It would be fair to say that some limnologists such as Forel and Hutchinson were born great, some such as Birge and Juday, and Dussard achieved greatness through their long years' of professional work, but that those such as Dr Servettaz and Dr Anderson had limnological greatness thrust upon them by being in the right place at the right time.

The first limnologist to describe human induced eutrophication as the real threat that it has since turned out to be to so many lakes around the world, was a Frenchman, E. Hubault, in a paper written in 1943  “Les grands lacs subalpins de Savoie sont-ils alcalitrophes?” Arch. hydrob 40, 240-249. 

This was the work which had the greatest impression on Dr Servettaz.

"Waste waters are discharged directly into the lake, without any purification and are beginning to give the lake an undeniably eutrophic character, recent, emerging, and directly caused by human activity!!”

For Dr Servettaz  this was a solemn warning to anyone who knew what eutrophication but,

“it passed however unnoticed by all who should have paid attention: the bodies responsible for the lake: the departments of Hygiene, Bridges & Roads, Water & Forests: I had the impression I was the only one who had heard! And so, with all those interested parties completely unaware, a sword of Damocles was already suspended above the life and the destiny of a lake loved by some but above all used to every conceivable extent and thoroughly exploited by others”. (Dr.S p 143)

So when Dr Servettaz embarked on his mission to save lake Annecy in the years immediately after the war, he was entering new territory, hardly touched even by those few specialists in the field of limnology.

It is in this context that his efforts are all the more remarkable.

He was a pioneer in the new field of the management of human induced lake eutrophication – and it is his name which is missing from all those books, journals, scientific publications, and websites that describe, rather vaguely, the origins of the issue of human induced eutrophication of freshwater lakes.

Continue Reading   Chapter Three