Research to help restore Caddo Lake

photo of moss-covered trees in Caddo LakeCaddo Lake, the largest natural freshwater lake in the South, is on the Texas-Louisiana border.

As the only natural lake in Texas, Caddo Lake, on the Louisiana border, is unique. With its bald cypress and tupelo trees, the lake is also only one of 19 wetlands designated as “of unique importance” in the United States.

Texas Agricultural Experiment Station scientists, along with the Caddo Lake Institute (a private operating foundation underwritten by musician Don Henley), The Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Northeast Texas Municipal Water District and other federal and state agencies, and local citizens are working together to help Caddo Lake remain a diverse and economically important wetland. 

Although other issues affect the lake, the integrity the lake and its ecosystem are being threatened because of a lack of freshwater flow.

After the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Lake O’ the Pines on Big Cypress Creek upstream of Caddo in 1959, the Caddo Lake area no longer flooded as much. The regulated water flows from the dam stabilized lake levels, reducing the regeneration of bald cypress forests.

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Professor discovers Mayan ruins, new marine life off the coast of Cancun

It may be the most interesting region in the world and surely one of the most important – it has archaeological treasures, more than 40 new species of life, bones of extinct animals, exotic marine life and possibly organisms that could provide a cure for cancer—and much of it is so far underground that darkness is blacker than black.

Tom Iliffe stands half-submerged, wearing diving gearTom Iliffe, a marine biologist at Texas A&M at Galveston, has most likely explored more caves in more locations than anyone in the world.

Cave diver Tom Iliffe, professor of marine biology at Texas A&M University at Galveston, has just returned from exploring dozens of “cenotes,” huge sinkholes off the Yucatan Peninsula that are like no other places on earth.

There are so many of the cenotes in the region, perhaps as many as 10,000, that exploring them could take decades, Iliffe said, and most of them have never been visited by humans.

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