Carol Warden, our aquatic invasive species specialist up at Trout Lake Station sent in this note about her work “up north” this summer. With summer well underway, aquatic invasive species (AIS) are once again a hot topic in the Northwoods. With things like rainbow smelt, Eurasian water milfoil and rusty crayfish moving in to Wisconsin’s …
by Aisha Liebenow Once I heard that I was going to be working for the CFL up north this summer, all I kept hearing about Trout Lake Station was what a great place it is to live and work. Now I can offer the same assessment – it has not only met, but far exceeded …
“NO WAY!” I yelled as I pulled up a rock from a creek bed, with a huge smile on my face. “Look! It’s a FRESHWATER SPONGE!” Chelsey Blanke, who was watching from the boat, just laughed. She volunteers for the Center for Limnology on Fridays, and has accompanied me for a couple of trips out …
by Emily Hilts When I worked at Trout Lake Station, I usually went running after a day in the field and then jumped in the lake – not only to cool off but to get clean. After all, Trout Lake is gorgeously clear, and the stink of the day washed right off. Showers were reserved for …
by Aisha Liebenow This last week was one heck of a week for Trout Lake Station. On Monday, we had our curtain removal at Little Rock Lake, reuniting the two halves of the lake and ending thirty-years’ worth of ground-breaking research. It was a huge undertaking, one that couldn’t have been done without all of …
We here at the Center for Limnology don’t like to keep people in the dark. That’s what, every year, we host public open houses at both our lab in Madison and our research station in northern Wisconsin. This year, nearly 500 people turned out to tour our labs, talk with our researchers and get a …
By Emily Hilts This week I had the privilege of returning to Trout Lake Station to help with the annual public open house. Sitting on the dock felt like coming home, and I let out a deep sigh of happiness at the sight of one of my favorite lakes. Why? I guess because Trout just …
By Aisha Liebenow The Restless Weasels made their way to Trout Lake Station on Tuesday, a great ol’ group of stand-up men. They are retired but, as they put it, “we are restless, and we get into everything.” The group came for a talk on research at Trout Lake Station, but, after they’d gone, I …
By Emily Hilts Lakes transform when the sun goes down. The once-familiar shoreline becomes unrecognizable and water takes on an inhospitable chill, making an after-hours trip a notch more exciting. So, when graduate student Jake Walsh (who studies zooplankton in the Vander Zanden lab) invited me to come along for a night of sampling, I …
by Emily Hilts “There is absolutely nothing graceful about this,: I thought as I swirled my hand through a bucket of mucky sediment. I was trying to filter organisms out of a hunk of sludge from the bottom of Lake Mendota. The sample was pulled up by an Ekman dredge, a contraption consisting of a metal …