Category: Uncategorized

Fish Fry Day: UW-Madison Students Visit Nevin Fish Hatchery

by Chelsey Blanke Last week, students in UW–Madison’s Ecology of Fishes lab course had the privilege of visiting WDNR’s Nevin Fish Hatchery, just a 15-minute drive from campus. Field trips are a major component of the course’s content and this was the first time it’s included a hatchery tour. Fish hatchery and stocking operations are …

Field Samples: Adding Inland Fisheries to the Total Global Catch

Field Samples is a Q&A with aquatic researchers. Today graduate student, Etienne Fluet-Chouinard, talks about attempts to get better measurements of inland fishery catches. . Etienne will give a public lecture on his work today at noon in the Water Science & Engineering Lab as part of our weekly Wednesday seminar. Who are you, where …

Science on Ice at the Frozen Assets Festival

We here at the Center for Limnology are dedicated to outreach. The more everyone knows about our lakes, the better off we’ll all be. That’s why we love events like the Clean Lakes Alliance’s Frozen Assets Festival – when Lake Mendota becomes an outdoor classroom for people across the city. Over the weekend of February …

Fish Fry Day Redux: Video of Smallmouth Bass Begging for Samples

While you’d be right in accusing us of “mailing it in” in this week’s version of the “Fishes of Wisconsin” challenge, we’ll make it up to you by presenting not one, but two cool underwater videos of smallmouth bass doing their thing! First up, some smallies in an undisclosed lake in northern Wisconsin keep trying …

Field Samples: How Fish Find Their Niche

Field Samples is a Q&A with aquatic researchers. Today the incomparable John Magnuson talks about research on how fish find their niche. John will give a public lecture today at noon in the Water Science & Engineering Lab as part of the Center for Limnology’s weekly Wednesday seminar.  Who are you, where are you from, and …

Art Hasler, Bluntnose Minnows and How Salmon Get Back Home

Happy Fish Fry Day! It’s the day that, like restaurants across Wisconsin, we put fish on our menu. Today’s main course – bluntnose minnows. As we tackle the “Fishes of Wisconsin” challenge, striving to write a post for each of the 183 species of fish found in Wisconsin, one might expect to stumble across a …

Celebrating World Wetlands Day 3 Ways

Tomorrow is World Wetlands Day, a celebration of the importance (and warning of the fragility) of some of Earth’s most beautiful ecosystems. Wetlands, the transitional ecosystem from an aquatic environment to terra firma, provide an incredible array of services to their surrounding landscapes – they filter sediment and pollutants out of the water, they absorb overflow and …

Fishes of Wisconsin: Louis Agassiz & the Mississippi Silvery Minnow

Last year we launched an overly ambitious project here on the blog – post each week about one of the 183 species on the epic “FIshes of Wisconsin” poster. That proved easier said than done, but we’re back and ready to tackle more of the 13-foot-long behemoth. This week, a few interesting tidbits about the …

Video: Limnology 101 – Lake Stratification

CFL graduate student, Colin Smith, produced and narrated this first video in our new “Limnology 101” series. Here he explains why lakes separate into warm, upper layers and cold, bottom layers.  Check it out! Stay tuned for more “Limnology 101,” as we explain some of the basic physical and biological principles of the study of our inland …

The Bold Prediction on Lake Michigan’s Sport Fishery That, Unfortunately, Was Proven Right

by Steve Carpenter Every moment, our brains make predictions of what we will next encounter in our lives based on our lifetime of experiences. As our experiences are updated, our brain adjusts and accounts for the new information in its next predictions. The discovery that brains engage in co-evolving cycles of predictions and actions is …