That was one answer to my question, but now I had to look further to find out why Silver Lake is eutrophic. As I kayak around my lake, I see that it is triangular in shape. On one side of the triangle is a golf course, and on the other two sides are either houses or the Orange Blossom Trail, a highway. Most of the homeowners on my lake clear out all the emergent plants so that they can see the lake better from their house, or so they can make a beach. Some people say that they clear out their waterfront because they don't want water moccasins to nest by their house. But I noticed that one house actually had beautiful emergent flowering plants and flowering lily pads in front of it. I paddled closer and took some pictures. When I got home, I researched the plants and found that the beautiful yellow flowers were golden canna and the purple small flowers were pickerelweed. They had white swamp lilies that looked like huge stars as well as banana lilies floating out toward the middle of the lake (Aquatic, Wetland and Invasive Plant Particulars and Photographs, 2005). All of the plants were native Florida plants. With that in mind, I started wondering why only weed-like grasses grew up along the shoreline around the rest of the lake. I walked over and talked to the neighbors with the water garden, and they said that they had planted these natives because they had been told that these plants acted as a filter for the runoff from yard fertilizers. I realized that if these native plants were the only filters our lake had, it was probably full of pollutants from all the other areas where runoff ran straight into the lake. One problem with fertilizer runoff from yards and golf courses is that it can decrease the amount of oxygen in the water, thus stimulating algae growth and perhaps causing a fish kill.