This is my "ool." Notice there is no "P" in it.
It sounds like a bad comedy routine. Someone out swimming in the water pauses to go to the bathroom, and then dead fish start popping up out of the water, killed by the potency of the swimmer’s waste. Well, it’s not funny to fishermen in Hamburg, Germany. Eichbaum Lake, a destination near Hamburg, is the latest place to be victim to a massive fish kill. While it’s not in the millions, it’s a pretty small lake, so 500 dead fish is a big deal to local anglers. Some local fishermen believe that swimmers peeing in the water is killing the fish.
“Swimmers who urinate in the lake are introducing a lot of phosphate,” said Manfred Siedler, a spokesman for a local fisherman’s group. “We’re calculating half a liter of urine per swimmer per day.”
The pee isn’t the only problem Eichbaum Lake is having; ice skaters in winter are also causing a lot of trouble for the local fishermen. Apparently, anything you do in a lake can kill fish, if by anything you mean relieving your bladder and then skating on the yellow ice.
“The ice-skaters make a noise that wakes the fish out of hibernation,” says Kerstin Graupner, a spokeswoman for the local environmental authority. “Then they can’t breathe and freeze. That’s a very common phenomenon.”
Swimmers have been banned from Eichbaum due to the high concentration of algae there, which causes swimmer’s itch. Apparently the algae blooms feed off of the urine in the water, then they consume all the oxygen as they grow, live, and die, which causes the fish to suffocate. So far, all attempts by the local government to clear the lake of algae have failed.
Tags: Eichbaum lake, Hamburg, Germany, lake closed after swimmer pee kills fish, swimmer urine kills fish, swimmer pee kills fish, unusual environmental hazards, swimmers peeing in lakes can kill fish, algae blooms, urine, urine kills fish, unusual news, weird news, weird nature news, the environment, Manfred Siedler, Kerstin Graupner
