Most people spend a chunk of their gap year acquainting
themselves with weed. Most of them tend to smoke it. We chose to scoop it.
I have mentioned in previous blogs that part of what we’ve
been doing here is clearing weed from the very beautiful Tungog Lake, but I
haven’t told you much about it.
In a nutshell, this is a devastatingly invasive weed called Salvinia molesta which has sidled into
many of Malaysia’s water ways and is steadily wreaking havoc on any ecosystems
it encounters. Initially from Brazil, it’s now officially made the IUCN’s Top
100 Invasive Species list and is causing problems in huge parts of Australia,
SE Asia, and the USA, so this stuff is nasty. The problem is that it can double
in mass approximately every 3 days and creeps across the surface of a lake
until it is covered.
**Warning Science Part**
This prevents light from entering the lake and therefore
reducing the photosynthesising capacity of plants, and causing them to start to
die, therefore reducing the oxygen content of the water, and increasing the
presence of respiring decomposers, which in turn increases the acidity of the
lake. This as you can imagine is devastating for all of the wildlife that lives
in, or is dependent upon the lake.
**Science Part Over** (that’s for you Higgins…though you all
know I love to bang on). Basically this weed sucks.
Bro with requisit sun-shade
In a feeble attempt to keep this short, Tungog Lake is
rapidly drowning in this weed, and there is no funding available to stop it.
Currently the only method of removing it is manually via a moveable pontoon,
using only hand-held scoops. This is extremely slow, back-breaking work, and
involves hours of hard work, with no shade and extremely high humidity. It’s
not fun so no-one wants to do it. The lake is 50acres in size, and this method
is so slow that even with volunteers like me and Bro working on it, we are
merely slowing down its spread (perhaps worth mentioning that volunteers here
are also fairly infrequent).
So…seeing that our manual efforts were getting us nowhere,
Bro and I thought outside the box and decided we would try crowd-funding to
raise money for specialist equipment to help remove the weed at a significantly
higher rate, and enough to employ local people to remove it.
Our beautiful Lake Tungog (the tiny bit without the weed!)
Our manual efforts...not very fun!
Queue lots of discussions with the community,
footage-gaining escapades (including a number of 6am starts, river trips and
jungle stake-outs), trips out on the lake, setting up a mini studio on the
decking with DIY studio equipment (thanks to matresses, string, sticks and
gaffa tape), borrowing a drone, almost crashing the drone, then successfully
using the drone, hours of editing on Bro’s part, hours of computer time in our
make-shift ‘pop-up’ office (perched with our laptops on the end of a jetty
using temperamental 3G internet) to set up the website. And finally….Meet….OUR
CROWD-FUNDING PAGE!! http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/borneo-lake-restoration-programme
Please do have a look at the site and Brodie’s fab video
which I am absurdly proud of him for. If you would like to contribute and are
in a position to do so, we would be SO grateful, and please do spread the word
and share the link.
Thank you in advance for letting me rattle on. Let’s see how
we get on! J
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