On the other hand, in some lakes people have reacted negatively to what I would consider a very excellent habitat species, that I would feel happy to have off my shoreland. But people who are used to a plantless system perceive it as a large threat. I always remind people to be very careful in the treatment they select, even when we're talking about invasive nonnative species. If you remove all the plants, or if you create a disturbance in your efforts to get rid of the weeds, the first thing that is going to come back is the more aggressive weed. In other words, treatment efforts can backfire.
Many people forget that a lot of aquatic plants reproduce two ways.
They reproduce sexually, through pollen, but they also reproduce by fragmentation. People have called me up and said they were raking their beach every year and they couldn't understand why it seemed to be getting worse and worse. Well, it was getting worse every year because they were fragmenting the plants. This Florida lake is choked with excessive growth of several types of plants. There needs to be an understanding that development in any watershed is going to increase weed growth, and unless the plants are intrusive nonnative species they might not be a bad thing because they are buffering or absorbing some of the new nutrients coming into the system, so you don't get greener waters or algal blooms.