Nutrient cycling in ponds can be interrupted by physically removing plants.

Evidence

A mat of algae is really nothing more than dissolved phosphorous and nitrogen made solid through the alchemy of photosynthesis. I couldn’t remove nutrients by shoveling, but once they are fixed into the bodies of plants they can be forked out of the water with the application of biceps and bent back and carted away by the wheelbarrowful. … The average phosphate molecule in a farm pond has a cycling time of less than two weeks from the time it is absorbed out of the water, made into living tissue, is eaten or dies, decomposes, and is recycled back to feed yet another algal strand. My plan was to interrupt this endless recycling by capturing nutrients in plants and hauling them away before they could once again be turned into algae. I could slowly, steadily deplete the stores of nutrients circulating in the pond. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 296

Categorization

• XREF: The phosphate two-week cycling and the idea of working with, not against, natural processes connects to the fruit-dispersal mutualism and gift-ecology threads in Chapters 5 and 7.
• ADDENDUM: A specific ecological mechanism of intervention that could enrich the Grafting & Growth essay’s landscape-as-infrastructure angle, though plants here are removed rather than grown.
• QUESTION: Does this removal strategy — drawing nutrients out by harvesting plants — have analogs in bioremediation or constructed wetlands worth chasing?