Lake Tohopekaliga, Kissimmee: The 1987 Drawdown That Uncovered the Spawning Flats

In the mid-1980s, fisheries biologists proposed dropping Lake Tohopekaliga several feet, exposing the lake bottom to the sun, and physically scraping the accumulated muck off the shoreline. The technique had been tried on small residential water bodies — the Orlando Sentinel reported in 1986 that it had worked on 100-acre Lake Hunter. Toho covers 22,000 acres. The biologists proposed it anyway, to remove the organic sediment that had built up over the sandy bottom where bass spawn.

The drawdown happened in 1987. The Department of Environmental Regulation put $248,000 into the project, $100,000 of it collected through environmental fines levied elsewhere in Central Florida. Crews moved onto the dried lake bottom and hauled away the black, nutrient-loaded sediment covering the sandy substrate where bulrush and maidencane root. Photographs from the period show heavy equipment sitting on what is normally lake bottom.

Toho sits at a low point in a chain that drains a large piece of Central Florida. Shingle Creek runs 23 miles down from the Pine Hills area of Orlando before emptying in, and the Boggy Creek headwaters reach back to what is now Orlando International Airport. The load came down those creeks from fertilized lawns, wastewater plants and paved acreage. By the late 20th century secondary effluent from nearby cities was flowing in, cyanobacteria that had existed only at trace levels were blooming, and the muck on the bottom kept getting deeper. Wastewater diversions in the 1980s cut the phosphorus inputs sharply. The drawdown handled what had already settled.

Toho has since hosted multiple Bassmaster Classics. The spawning flats that produce its trophy largemouth are the sandy substrate the 1987 crews uncovered.

In March 2024, the Sentinel reported that hydrilla had taken hold on West Lake Toho in one of the worst infestations in Central Florida, and that there was no money available to eradicate it.

The drawdown-and-scrape model has been repeated across the Kissimmee Chain and on lakes throughout Florida. East Lake Toho got the same treatment. So did Lake Kissimmee downstream. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission still lists managed drawdowns and organic sediment removal as core tools for shallow-lake habitat enhancement.