The 'eerie beauty'
beneath the surface of Lake Erie

John Lavelle is a local amateur biologist and underwater diver who likes to get up close and personal with the vast world of living beneath the surface of Lake Erie. For years, Lavelle has donned a wet suit and tank and floated among the complex ecosystem found off the coast of Avon Point.

His Web site is a living document of the activity of Avon Point's reef, which was formed by the collapse of the shore's shale cliffs into the lake. There are details of the devastation wrought by the invasion of the Zebra Mussels and Goby, but also passages that remark on the 'eerie beauty' of the reef, ancient river beds, and interesting creatures—such as freshwater hydras and glowing, green sponges—living in the deep.

Links to the site:

• Introduction
• Zebra mussels
• Rounded Gobies
• Planarians (flatworms)
• Hydras and jellyfish
• Bryozoan
• Crustacean plankton
• Year 2000 update
• Data from 2001
• The reef in 2000
• Crustacean Copepods—monthly averages from 1993-2000
• The Cladocerans, Bosmina and Daphnia—a look at their changing numbers
• Rotifers at Avon Point
• Animal assemblage
• Peritechs

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Lake Erie is a wilderness, a big wilderness, and it is alive. To take a hand full of water is to take a handful of life—life that lives in a different physics than we are born to.
—John Lavelle

A green sponge is part of a complex ecosystem living
on the shale reef near Avon Point in Lake Erie