Scientists have shown that the copper in the sediment also poisons beneficial microbes that perform a crucial job: clearing ammonia from the water. Research has shown that this process, called nitrification, is shut down by copper contamination.

As a result, the sediment is constantly recycling nitrogen as ammonia that only the cyanobacteria can use, because only they can dive down and get it.

And that opens up the opportunity for more money to be spent on futile treatments, when lake committees are talked into dosing with “beneficial microbes”.

If the environment is right, there will be all the beneficial microbes you need in the sediment.

But if you are poisoning the sediment with copper – all you will be doing by adding “beneficial microbes” will be sending them to their death in the toxic graveyard you have created at the bottom of the lake – and wasting your money.
So blocking microbial nitrification and boosting ammonia levels is yet another way that the legacy copper from past treatments ensures that the lake bottom is permanently set up to be a perfect five-star restaurant for cyanobacteria, forever fuelling more toxic blooms that trigger more misguided use of algaecides.

And even if you stop using algaecides tomorrow, the damage already done continues to feed the problem, locking your lake into a state of permanent sickness – and too often, a repeated cycle of perpetual algaecide treatments.

More algaecide, more copper in the sediment, more beneficial microbes wiped out, less nitrification, more ammonia, more toxic cyanobacteria HAB events, more algaecide – no wonder people say it becomes like a drug addiction.

You can’t breathe life back into your lake with biocidal chemicals that kill things.