For one day, a dozen years ago Lake Tahoe had the national administration's undivided attention.

President Clinton and Vice President Gore spent Thursday at and on the lake, seeing and first hand research that was monitoring its slow decline in clarity and hearing the issues confronting those trying to protect it.

That visit ended with a new federal commitment to those efforts and a promise of improved coordination between all the entities with an interest in the lake.

Federal money followed, work has been done, but a lot remains.
Still, at the end of today's forum, there was optimism.

"Scientifically I"m very optimsitic," says Dr. Stephen Wells of the Desert Research Institute. "We have the team in place and we've learned to expect the unexpected."

Others say Tahoe's biggest problem is not being adequately addressed.
"We knew twenty years ago, the problem was urbanization," says Carl Young of the League to Save Lake Tahoe, "and the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency still wants to urbanize."

The latest figures on the lake's clarity shows a decline to 69 vertical feet, fathoms less than was seen decades ago. Nutrients from runoff continues to fuel algae growth and climate change is having its effect on the lake and the surrounding forest.

And those unexpected threats Wells referred to? The latest challenge is the Asian clam. A tiny bivalve about the size of your thumbnail, it looms large in the concerns of scientists watching the lake. It showed up here about 10 years ago.

Just off the Zephyr Cove beach that hosted this year's forum they are found in the thousands. Where they go algae blooms follow and there's fear they may clear the way for other invasive species like Zebra or Quagga mussels which are showing up in western lakes causing millions of dollars in danages.

"Creatures that size usually have the ability to reproduce rapidly." says Dr. Sudeep Chandra who has been studying the tiny clam. "And when you get millions or trillions of them they can take in nutrients and spit them back out in a different form that promotes algae growth."

So far those clams have only shown up in numbers at a couple of locations on the east side. Scientists studying them are asking for the public's help in watching for any sign of them elsewhere in the lake.

The hope is some sort of management strategy can be developed before the problem spreads.