NORTHPORT -- A tugboat pushed through the chop just outside Northport's marina, then slowed and dropped its anchor.
The Bay Monitor research vessel wasn't stopping, though. Its anchor is a tool to help researchers study algae and aquatic plant growth in Grand Traverse Bay.
"It's right along the drop-off. Wow, it's like a jungle," said John Nelson, baykeeper with the Watershed Center Grand Traverse Bay.
Nelson and the nonprofit's program director, Sarah U'Ren, busied themselves in recent weeks mapping beds of algae and aquatic plants throughout the bay's western arm. It's an effort to monitor plant and algae bed sites, information that's to be compared to similar studies done in 1991 and 1998.
"We want to see if it's increasing, decreasing or staying the same," Nelson said.
"What you can learn is where there might be increasing sources of nutrients in the bay," U'Ren said. "We've found there are a lot of beds on the bottom of West Bay."
The study will continue for a few more weeks, finish in northern stretches of West Grand Traverse Bay, then move to East Bay.
Nelson pulled the first anchor full of plants into the boat, a big salad of water milfoil and pondweed.
U'Ren used a glass-bottomed bucket to peer beneath the bay's surface. The device allows her to observe the types of algae and aquatic plants underwater.
"This is a big bed here. It will be hard to map," U'Ren said.
U'Ren checked aerial photographs of the area taken this month to get a sense of the bed's dimensions. Several samples later, and with the help of a Global Positioning System device, the bed measured 300 feet wide and 1,000 feet long.
A second part of the study will begin when the algae and aquatic plant beds are inventoried, a process that involves returning to 10 percent of the locations to sample sediments within and outside the plant beds.
The idea is to see whether invasive zebra mussels are filtering the water to an extent that nutrients are concentrated on the lake floor. That's been the case at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Shoreline in Leelanau and Benzie counties, where cladophora algae growth and eventual decay led to several consecutive years of botulism outbreaks that killed fish and birds.
"We want to find out if that same process could happen in Grand Traverse Bay," U'Ren said. "It's good to know what's happening in the bay."
Last year marked the first avian botulism deaths in the bay, along the eastern shore of East Bay in Antrim County.
A final report on the study's findings is expected to be completed this winter.
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