“Alright. Who is ready to get messy?” Zach Lawson’s question is greeted with incredible enthusiasm. It is all-hands-on-deck in the wet lab and, today, everyone is sorting bugs. Ten undergraduate students crowd around two small tables, armed with small plastic sampling bottles and metal tweezers. They meticulously sift through plastic tubs of sand, muck and …
All summer long, Trout Lake Station outreach assistant, Ali Branscombe will be bringing you stories from the field. Join Ali as she follows researchers slogging through wetlands, boarding boats, and wrangling fish, bringing you – Limnology in Action. It is a cold morning with scattered showers and random peeks of sunshine between the dark clouds. …
It’s entirely possible that you’ve never heard of Canada’s Experimental Lakes Area. (ELA) But if you enjoy clean water, recreational fishing, and all the other benefits that lakes and rivers provide – your life has been directly affected by the ground-breaking research conducted over the past 40 years on a collection of 58 lakes in …
CFL grad student, Dan Oele, is trying to see if pike return to their “birthplace” to spawn or if any ol’ tributary will do. Thanks to funding from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, Oele is out in Green Bay working on an answer. Watch (or read) below: GREEN BAY — It’s the second day of …
Last Thursday, UW Chancellor David Ward hosted a reception for the winners of the 2012 Academic Staff Excellence Awards. Susan Knight, Trout Lake Station’s interim director and outreach specialist, was one of the eight award winners invited. Susan won the Robert and Carroll Heideman Award for Excellence in Public Service and Outreach and the CFL …
Center for Limnology grad student, Gretchen Hansen, took this video from a past summer’s field season up in Vilas County. While we’ll honor the tradition of fishermen not sharing their favorite spots, it’s safe to say smallmouth bass are doing quite well in this particular lake. Watch as one bass gets aggressive while Gretchen tries …
If you head down to the shore of Lake Mendota today, you’ll notice you can see right down to the bottom. In fact, the current Secchi reading is seven meters, meaning you can get a clear view of Lake Mendota’s depths more than 20 feet down. At first glance, it might seem that there’s just …
Check out this new trailer for a series of short films chronicling the research being done as part of the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research program (LTER). You may recognize some shots of Center for Limnology equipment, as we conduct the Northern Temperate Lakes LTER research right here in Wisconsin! The video was made …
Over the last three years a group of CFL students, professors and staff have worked on an experiment near Trout Lake Station that, they hope, will eradicate rainbow smelt and restore populations of native fish, like yellow perch, bluegill and largemouth to Crystal Lake. The experiment is finally ready to go. As the early melt …
The pier is in. The ice is off. Fish migrations are already underway. And that means that the “open water” field season at the Center for Limnology is about to begin. Before I start filling this blog up with engaging posts about our exciting research, though, I thought I’d take a moment to look back …