In the fall of 2009, a tiny aquatic creature known as the spiny water flea showed up in a lake where it had never before been seen. At first, students in the UW–Madison undergraduate limnology class didn’t know what they were pulling up from Lake Mendota in their plankton nets. But professor Jake Vander Zanden …
Yesterday morning I brought breakfast to my daughters at our dining room table, glanced out the window and did a double take. The waters of Lake Monona were a churning mass of brownish bluish green. What had only the night before been a flat sheet of late-winter ice had disappeared, broken up by the unusually …
NOTE: This post originally ran on January 17, 2012. In the four of the five years since this post, Lake Mendota has frozen over well after its “median” freeze date, and in three of the five years it has thawed much earlier. A few days before Christmas, I was headed down John Nolen Drive on …
Back in December, some unique circumstances caused an odd stratification of temperatures above the still-open waters on Lake Mendota. With the water keeping air near its surface right around 32 Fahrenheit, but an Arctic blast bringing quite cold temperatures into town, conditions were ripe for a rare winter mirage. Luckily, a local lake-lover snapped some …
We’re taking a look back at some of the CFL’s most popular blog posts from 2016. Here’s one originally published on back in 2015 about what life is like under the ice – considering Lake Mendota still hasn’t frozen, maybe this one will be better in 2017? Happy New Year! [Originally posted Jan. 30, 2015] …
As the year winds to a close, we’re taking a look back at some of the the CFL’s most popular blog posts from 2016. Here’s one originally published on March 21st about our researchers calculating the cost of a tiny invasive species and finding a very big impact. MADISON – A new study shows we’ve …
This is what an invasion looks like. Last fall, students in a UW–Madison undergraduate limnology lab found invasive zebra mussels living in Lake Mendota for the first time. Later that year, when we pulled the Hasler Lab pier out of the water for the winter, we only found two, maybe three, mussels per leg of …
We recently stumbled across this old video of Art Hasler (in an amazing coat/hat ensemble, we might add) discussing the “congregation” of professors and students at the UW–Madison who work on Lake Mendota “trying to unfathom the unknowns of the aquatic community.” We hope you enjoy it as much as we did! The video was …
How did we miss this excellent feature on Lake Mendota and the CFL? We have no idea, but better late than never – enjoy! By: Masarah Van Eyck From the window of his second-story office overlooking Lake Mendota, Steve Carpenter can see the UW rowing team running drills. On a warmer day, he might glimpse yellow-hulled …
On a hot, windy morning in late June, Ankur Desai and other members of his lab took their first steps to bridging a big gap in data between the aquatic and atmospheric sciences, as they set out in a cherry picker for a leisurely ride down the Lakeshore Path. Jonathan Thom and David Reed, two …