. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. Coping with milfoil—what can and cannot be done. Eurasian milfoil, or Myriophyllum spicatum, is an exotic, rooted water plant native to Europe and Asia. It is an aggressive grower and can survive in a wide range of temperatures, depths and salini- ties. Generally the plant prefers water with less than one-third to one-half salinity. Milfoil needs light to live. Scientists speculate that milfoil came to the in the 1880s on a foreign ship. Fragments of mil- foil can root and begin new plants: the plant
. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. Coping with milfoil—what can and cannot be done. Eurasian milfoil, or Myriophyllum spicatum, is an exotic, rooted water plant native to Europe and Asia. It is an aggressive grower and can survive in a wide range of temperatures, depths and salini- ties. Generally the plant prefers water with less than one-third to one-half salinity. Milfoil needs light to live. Scientists speculate that milfoil came to the in the 1880s on a foreign ship. Fragments of mil- foil can root and begin new plants: the plant has the capacity to grow 64,000 branches from one branch in three months. Milfoil can also propagate through seeds and winter buds. So it is not surpris- ing that the weed quickly crept from New Jersey to the Chesapeake Bay where it was a problem in the 1950s and 1960s until it mysteriously died away. Milfoil is now a pest from North Carolina to Canada, Wisconsin, New York, Florida and in the Tennessee Valley Authority Lakes. A bone-crunching hurricane would probably do a lot to alleviate the milfoil infestation of Curri- tuck Sound, but other less capricious methods of control are available. All of the known controls, however, are either costly, slow, risky or still in the research stage. Chemical control with the herbicide 2,4-D has already been tried on a very small-scale in North Carolina. The state sprayed selected areas in 1968, 1971 and 1974. Nine hundred acres of Kitty Hawk Bay which were sprayed in 1974 are still relatively. Coinjock resident L. C. Barrow free of milfoil and other native plants. Martin Point and Point Harbor, however, which were dosed in 1971 and 1974, were buried in the weed by the summer of 1975. No short-term harmful effects have been found with 2,4-D according to Thayer Broili of the De- partment of Natural and Economic Resources (DNER). But there is always the danger of future unknown impacts, so the state is reluctant to make a full-scale chemi
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