The boat skips along the waves, fast enough for the trio sitting in front to get some good air off their wooden bench. We’re trying to catch up to the MV Namao, a research ship that for weeks at a time serves as the floating homebase for members of Manitoba’s science community who study Lake Winnipeg.
Aboard the ship, they travel the lake’s expanse, taking water, fish and air samples, occasionally hopping into this smaller boat to do tests closer to shore.
UM undergrad student Grace Oliver races back to the ship after collecting water samples near Lake Winnipeg’s eastern shore.
Neighbouring communities and cottagers have long questioned the declining health of Manitoba’s largest body of freshwater as algal blooms surface and paint the shore green, or worse, its toxic hue of blue-green. They want to know: What is it that’s causing the most harm to our lake? And why aren’t we doing more before it’s too late?
The MV Namao launches from the harbour in Gimli, Man., home to a fishing industry and the largest Icelandic settlement outside of Iceland.
The global uniqueness of this lake, often described as a prairie sea, intrigues Iranian-born Masoud Goharrokhi [MSc/2013, PhD/2023], a postdoctoral fellow on the ship, from UM’s Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences.
Masoud Goharrokhi grew up in Iran—one of the world’s most water-scarce countries—and during his PhD work at UM collected dozens of sediment cores from the bottom of Lake Winnipeg to understand its history. He also studied erosion weak spots along the Red River.
The scientist recently embarked on a first-on-its-kind study of Lake Winnipeg involving airborne contaminants. Never before has anyone measured the phosphorus—the nutrient that most contributes to algal blooms—landing in the lake from the atmosphere. These particles can come from pollen, soil from farmers’ fields eroded by wind, or smoke (an especially timely measurement as Manitoba navigates its worst wildfire season in 30 years.) This research will reveal a clearer picture of these inputs.
Over the last five decades, phosphorus loads in Lake Winnipeg have doubled, says Goharrokhi. The Lake Winnipeg Foundation cites wastewater treatment, wetland drainage and agricultural practices as the main drivers of the excessive phosphorus. And then warmer water and an uptick in rain (with more run-off into the lake) due to climate change are making matters worse.
“To have efficient management practices, we should know the dominant source of the phosphorus,” says Goharrokhi. “Then we can let policymakers know to target that.”
Masoud Goharrokhi takes air samples from the Namao’s top deck.
The way it was
From the bridge of the ship, crewmember Walter Walaschuk reminisces about how, in the 1960s, they would fill up their drinking water tanks near the mouth of the Red River, which empties into Lake Winnipeg. Those days? Long gone.
“The lake is getting more polluted every year. At one time it was clear here,” the 74-year-old says of our current position. “You could see, maybe, 18 feet down. You can’t do that now.”
Walter Walaschuk says he and Captain Walter Lea know this massive lake so well they could probably navigate without radar (and, for years, had to rely on only a compass).
First-mate Curtis Grimolfson, a local commercial fisherman for 40 years, swears Lake Winnipeg’s algae is a deeper green than it was when he was a boy, swimming beneath its waves. He’s always felt the pull of this lake, the tenth largest body of fresh water on the planet.
“It’s my life. I tried living other places and always came back. I’m a Pisces, too. My sign is the fish” he says with a smile.
Captain Walter Lea feels at home on Lake Winnipeg, a remnant from the glacial Lake Agassiz. Today its watershed spans four provinces, four states and more than 100 Indigenous nations.
Our Captain, Walter Lea, has been on the water for more than 50 years. From Fisher River Cree Nation, Lea says he’s seen the greatest decline in water cleanliness in the south basin but believes it’s creeping north. Lake Winnipeg’s relative shallowness makes it worse at breaking down phosphorus build-up than deeper lakes. Manitobans know its shallow depths also make it prone to dangerous eruptions when the weather turns—especially in the north basin, where it widens to about 110 km.
Captain Lea insists the 20-foot waves he faced in last year’s north basin were the worse he’s seen in years. “You just ride it,” he says.
Lack of solid data
Lake Winnipeg remains mysterious. Its length spans 436 km and this vastness, along with its temperament, make it difficult to work on.
But the lake’s central importance to all life cycles in Manitoba compel scientists to seek more funding to find ways to better protect it for future generations. (A grant from the Canada Water Agency supports this latest research into airborne phosphorus.)
To date, the numbers floating around about airborne contaminants are mere estimates. That’s not good enough, says David Lobb, a UM professor in soil sciences who is Principal Investigator of the large-scale study.
In fact, the estimates relating to 23,000-square-kilometre Lake Winnipeg were calculated by scaling up findings from a much smaller 10-square-kilometre lake in Alberta, says Lobb. He doesn’t believe it’s a reliable comparison.
Lobb doesn’t expect soil eroded by wind to be as big of a direct contributor as once thought, and less so than natural sources like pollen from boreal forests lining much of the lake’s shores, along with dead insects (like those nuisance fish flies). Add to that: smoke from wildfires, on the rise with climate change. (This is the first study in Canada looking at smoke as a factor.) Although the majority of these direct atmospheric sources may be out of our control through land management, there are lots of indirect pathways from the land into ditches and rivers across the lake’s watershed.
Clockwise from left: UM alum Tylo Chadney, deckhand and commercial fisherman Kevin Palson, Namao science coordinator Riley Versluis, and UM student Grace Oliver
The data from this study will provide a key, missing piece in a decades-long challenge.
“The whole system is a little bit more complex than people would like to believe, particularly politicians and the public. They love things to be very simple—and it’s not. [But] how people manage the ditches, how they manage the fields, all of these things become part of the watershed picture, part of the lake’s story.”
The 33-metre Namao, built in 1975, requires nine crew members and sleeps 16.
Rhonda Thorsteinson, a long-time cook aboard the Namao, makes brisket for lunch. When waters get rough, she secures kitchen supplies in a laundry basket. The grandmother of five likes to hear about the scientists’ efforts to ensure the next generation can enjoy life on the lake.
UM environmental sciences student Grace Oliver studies microbial communities and collects water samples for UM Assistant Prof. Eric Collins, who compares its makeup with samples from sub-Arctic Churchill, Manitoba.
Tylo Chadney [BEnvSc(Maj)/2021], a water quality monitoring assistant with the Province of Manitoba, spends three weeks at a time aboard the Namao, a former Canadian Coast Guard ship before becoming the Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium’s floating lab 20 years ago.
The not-for-profit organization welcomes students and researchers from various universities and organizations.
Riley Versluis, whose work focuses on fish, climbs up from the bowels of the ship.
At each research “station” stop on the lake, logged by Captain Lea, Chadney lowers sampling tubes into the water. During each “cruise,” the ship zigzags through a circuit of 54 stations, across the south basin to the lake’s northernmost tip.
Tylo Chadney’s water-monitoring role with the government grew from a co-op she did as a UM student. She also gained field-work experience alongside locals while tracking fish stock in Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, and monitoring fish in the Experimental Lakes Areas in Ontario.
When asked how worried she is about Lake Winnipeg, Chadney, always that kid who’d ask her parents to turn off the tap while brushing their teeth, says she’s hopeful.
“I know there’s a lot of factors and a lot of things at play with a lake like this, but there’s also a lot of people that care.”
Crewmembers help lower a net to collect small fish—mostly walleye—for measuring. Later in the season they also monitor for zebra mussels and algal blooms.
Chadney cites zebra mussels as a top concern of hers, given there’s no way, as of yet, to rid the lake of the invasive species whose sharp edges have been known to slice the feet of a swimmer or two, including this writer on occasion. (But, did you know they also help remove phosphorus?)
“I’m optimistic. But, also, things change. And we don’t like to admit that very much in environmental science or in the environmental realm. Resource management is all about keeping resources as they were, how you found them, but it’s just not the nature of nature,” says Chadney.
“So, yeah, there’s invasive species in here and there’s too many nutrients, but I have great faith in the ecosystem itself to be able to recover or make do with the new situation as well.”
The Namao crew catches about 110,000 fish a year for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to analyze and gauge how strong the fishery is and how the lake’s health is affecting its inhabitants. The local industry experienced big spawning years in 1997 and 2022, which they’re expected to benefit from for years to come—but algal blooms can also damage fish populations.
Run-off from Manitoba’s 1997 flood spurred a significant uptick in phosphorus loads. The Lake Winnipeg Foundation continues to advocate for accelerated compliance for phosphorus output at Winnipeg’s north-end sewage treatment plant.
A lake at stake
If you want to raise David Lobb’s blood pressure, ask him if Lake Winnipeg will one day become a dead lake.
“Who told you it’s going to die?”
Concerns circulate whenever headlines surface about raw sewage from Winnipeg spilling into the adjoining Red River, or about the unstoppable zebra mussels. (In 2009, Macleans called Lake Winnipeg “Canada’s sickest lake.”)
“What if I told you there’s no clear evidence in any scientific literature that would ever happen—just speculation,” he says. “Certainly the quality of the water can be degraded for some functions, impairing the current health of the lake—but a complete loss of life?”
Lobb explains that if you assess the lake based on its biological activity, it’s healthy. If you have a cottage and you want your beach clean from organic matter, green algae and sharp shells, it’s unhealthy.
Lakes need nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus—along with algae—to fuel living organisms but, in Lake Winnipeg, it’s too much of a good thing. This overabundance grows massive algal blooms that can use up oxygen in the water when they die and decompose, and choke out other living things, as it did to Ontario’s Lake Erie (which has since bounced back.)
Conversations swirl around how you achieve an acceptable level of nutrients while balancing different demands, from growing local crops to ensuring sewage doesn’t back up into people’s basements, to providing electricity via Manitoba Hydro.
Lobb insists the conversation among policymakers must go beyond “What are the health indicators of the lake?” to pinpointing the greatest phosphorus offenders. That’s what contributes most to the more frequent, larger algal blooms of the toxic blue-green variety, and that’s what he pushed for at a workshop this spring on the topic held by the federal and provincial government.
While farmers, particularly of hog operations, have historically gotten a big chunk of the blame for contaminated run-off, a major culprit—based on sheer population—would be cities and municipalities dumping human waste into the rivers and lake, says Lobb.
“But you don’t expose this by saying, ‘That’s wrong,’” he says. “You have to expose it by actually figuring our what’s right, what the scientific evidence tells us.”
Kevin Palson, a crane operator on the Namao, emerges from the lower level of the ship. “I’ve spent my entire life on this lake. It’s in our backyard and [this research] is actually doing something for us,” says the 47-year-old Gimli father.
Shelley Mishtak, the Namao’s first female deckhand, says sailing Lake Winnipeg comes with its risks, including the potential for medical emergencies when they’re touring the isolated north basin and far from help.
The way forward
Before the 12-hour day ends, we’ve travelled from Gimli on the lake’s western shore to Victoria Beach on the east, to Traverse Bay and the Winnipeg River: a roundtrip of about 65 nautical miles. The steps at each station repeat. The scientists and crew don’t seem pained by monotony as they put individual tasks into action.
Riley Versluis documents details at each of the five stations we visit. One way that Manitobans can help protect Lake Winnipeg, he says, is by reducing microplastics in waterways—a growing research field—and this includes avoiding the use of laundry pods.
Goharrokhi points out how none of this work can happen in silos. Not if they want to make any real headway. He has a mantra he likes to think about in this context.
“If 1,000 people go one step ahead, it’s much better than one person going 1,000 steps ahead,” says Goharrokhi. “If we can, all together, go one step further it’s more effective—more beneficial for everyone.”
As Manitoba’s largest research-intensive university, UM is home to scientists, students and scholars who respond to emerging issues and lead innovation in our province and around the world. We ignite a curiosity to identify and solve important, complex problems and value work across academic disciplines. Creating knowledge that matters is among the priorities you’ll find in MomentUM: Leading Change Together, the University of Manitoba’s 2024-2029 Strategic Plan.