What’s in that sip of lake water?
By Dr. Norman Yan.
Over the decades on wilderness canoe trips, I commonly scooped a drink of lake water, as long as the water “looked” clear and clean. In fact, I did this several times a day with a cup I kept tied to my thwart. Paddling is work after all.
I must have drunk from hundreds of lakes over the years. I remember thinking there was no threat from drinking clean lake water. I was in the wilderness. There was no obvious sign of pollution, and First Nations peoples have been drinking for millennia from lakes they deemed clean.
But what might be in that refreshing invigorating mouthful of water that’s not in filtered chlorinated water from my kitchen faucet?
This question got me thinking about a related but more philosophical question. Could, or perhaps should, we treat natural water as alive? My western scientific training argues we shouldn’t, because habitats and the living things they support are clearly different and separable.
But that is not the First Nations’ viewpoint. To paraphrase Dr. Susan Chiblow (a Crane Clan, water knowledge expert raised in the Garden River First Nation), her people treat water as alive. She argues that water has been given its own job to do by the creator. It is much more than an inert resource for humans to manage.
So, let me back up and start with a question. When I took that sip of water from the lake, what was I drinking? Well, much of it, likely about 98 per cent by volume, was certainly plain old H2O. But, what about the other few per cent? I’ve communicated with a few experts and done some googling to estimate how many living things might have been in each sip. The number can vary a lot, but it is always shockingly large. Assuming a typical refreshing sip of lake water is about 15 mL, I was likely imbibing an average of over 1.6 billion living things with each mouthful — 1.6 billion!
And I was consuming critters from many walks of life. About 1.5 billion viruses, 150 million bacteria, 15 million algal cells, filaments and colonies, and perhaps 1,000 protozoa. And then there would have been animals too — on average roughly 15 rotifers and at least one member of the crustacean plankton.
And given that most living creatures sport several different types of parasites, both internal and external, I was eating them too. Even without the parasites, it totals about 1.6 billion. This will vary by a factor of 10, but it’s never a small number. This does put a new spin on that refreshing sip of water. It isn’t just water, with its benefits. There may be a bit of nutritional value that isn’t found in urban tap water, and it’s likely also refreshing my gut microbiome and engaging with my immune system, keeping it cognizant of what’s in my local environment.
So, might this mean we should treat water as alive? Tap water certainly isn’t — we killed its biota with chlorine. The good news is that this means we won’t get the water-borne plagues of the past such a typhoid fever, but we still must be careful of contaminants such as lead. Just ask the folks in Flint, Michigan.
I confess I now have an open mind about whether to treat natural lake water as alive. It doesn’t just support life, as a habitat. It’s thriving, roiling and engaged with life of all types, and we’d be much poorer if that wasn’t the case. So, do consider that when next you reach for the cup tied to your thwart and take that refreshing sip of clean-looking lake water. You are being refreshed, but you are also engaging with a sea of life under your hull.
This is #15 in the current series of articles from Muskoka Watershed Council. Its author is Norman Yan, Director and founding Chair of Friends of the Muskoka Watershed, a retired environmental scientist who knows intimately the tiny creatures that help keep our lakes clean and clear, and a canoeist who drinks while he paddles. The series is edited by Peter Sale, Director, MWC. This article was published on MuskokaRegion.com on March 8, 2025.