Through the bathyscope

One of the most challenging parts of my job is that sometimes I have to leave the comfort of the office and spend time paddling around in lakes looking for plants - at risk of sun burn and getting wet. Here is Simon, staring through what looks like a traffic cone in the shallow end of Wast Water. The cone is something grandly called a bathyscope, and it cuts out the glare from the water, enabling a clearer view of the lake bed and the plants growing on it.

Wast Water has the cleanest water of any lake in England, fed by a mountainous catchment (in the distance we see Great Gable towering above) with only a small area at the head of the lake that is farmed.

The area we are pootling about in here was glorious, we could see the bottom when it was 9 metres deep. Lakes like this are said to be oligotrophic, that is poor in nutrients. They are not immensely rich in plant species, but they do have a specialised flora, and in this shallower water the beds of plants were growing profusely. We found one plant that I have never seen before and hadn't been recorded since 2000; we found another pondweed that was a new species for the lake. Along most of the lake edge, it shelves away rapidly, dropping to 90 metres; and very little grows.

Not all was perfection. We have pinpointed one problem area that will need to be sorted. But it's a tiny problem compared to the issues which some of the bigger Lake District lakes suffer from.

Maybe I should get out more often?

I uploaded this in haste, there's a more interesting one here.