Lake Doctor | A Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams Podcast

A Q&A Special: Diving Into Your Questions

• Lilly Center for Lakes & Streams

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What happens when the Lake Doctor opens the floor to your questions? Science meets stewardship in this fascinating exploration of freshwater ecosystems with Dr. Nate Bosch and Suzie Light.

Dive into the mystery of the tiny red worms appearing on boat lifts (they're blood worms!), learn why those pesky lily pads actually protect your shoreline, and discover how a single fish species might help control invasive zebra mussels. Dr. Bosch explains these phenomena with accessible science that connects directly to lakefront living and watershed management.

The conversation takes us on a journey through the complete phosphorus cycle – from soil particles to algae to fish and back again – revealing why this nutrient forms "the foundation of a lot of the work we do" at the Lilly Center. Understanding this cycle helps explain why eliminating phosphorus from lawn fertilizers makes such a difference to lake health, even miles away from the shoreline.

We also get a glimpse behind the scenes at the Lilly Center, from its humble beginnings in "a couple offices and a couple closets" to its current impact with 11 staff members and 46 student interns. Dr. Bosch shares how the Center leverages boat captain volunteers and community partnerships to monitor 16 lakes while making 12,000 student connections through environmental education programs annually.

Throughout the episode, one fundamental principle emerges: "Water carries nutrients downhill." This simple yet profound concept reminds us that every property owner, whether lakefront or miles away, influences downstream water quality. By preventing excess nutrients from leaving our properties, we collectively protect our precious freshwater resources for generations to come.

Want to make a difference for your local lakes and streams? Subscribe to the Lake Doctor podcast and visit lakes.grace.edu to discover tangible ways you can improve water quality in your community.

Learn more about the Lilly Center's work at https://lakes.grace.edu/.

Have a question we could answer on the podcast? Send an email to lakes@grace.edu or submit a comment below.

Help us improve the podcast by filling out this short survey: https://forms.gle/MzGSXHcnkEQC8T74A.


Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to the Lake Doctor podcast. I'm Suzy Light and my co-host, dr Nate Bosch, is a professional lake nerd.

Speaker 2:

That's true. I received my doctorate from the University of Michigan in limnology, which is the study of freshwater ecosystems. In today's episode, it's going to be you and me, and we're going to talk about questions that you all have brought up to us, as well as some comments from you about the Lake Doctor podcast so far.

Speaker 1:

We are really so excited about today's episode. The doctor is in Well. For this Lake Doctor podcast, we're changing things up a bit. We asked the community for questions and if you had any comments about the podcast that we're doing, and so, Nate, we've got community comments and questions that we're going to kind of kick around today.

Speaker 2:

This is going to be great. Thank you for those of you who expressed some of those comments and questions and others who haven't yet. Keep them coming. Keep them coming. So we'd love to hear.

Speaker 1:

And you know if you are listening to this or if you're watching on YouTube. Please like and subscribe, get the word out, because there are important messages for all of us in these Lake Doctor podcasts. Which brings me to a comment from Brad. Brad lives in Florida. He was a former Kosciuszko County resident and he commented that he loved the podcast where we were talking, where you actually were talking with the founders, which included me, dr Ron Manahan from Grace College and Frank Levinson. Did you enjoy that episode? Yes, I did.

Speaker 2:

That was actually been one of my favorites. So at this point we've recorded 21 episodes and that would be one of the highlights for me. I love looking back and recalling how we started and just how we've been blessed as an organization with what we've accomplished. That was in 2007. It was so much fun just having you three around the table me, being able to ask you all questions about you know. Hey, what were you thinking and why did you take a chance on this new endeavor and on hiring me as the director, and it's been just a really fun ride since then. But it was so much fun to look back at that moment where this need was brought to the community foundation. The community foundation engaged Grace College to say, hey, how can we serve this need? And the rest is history.

Speaker 1:

As they say the rest is history. But you know, what I loved most about that was like many things. One person asked a question and said what can we do about it? And he asked the right people who said what can we do about it? And Grace College stepped up and they found you and the Lilly Center is thriving thanks to one person who asked a question. So, the power of questions is really a superpower. Ask those questions.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and you like to call me a nerd. I love calling you a nerd, dr Frank Levinson. That individual is a nerd in his own right.

Speaker 1:

A scientist.

Speaker 2:

With the scientific background he has, and so he was just the right person to bring that question, that need, to the Community Foundation and then has been really appreciative of the scientific approach we've taken since then.

Speaker 1:

Right the scientific approach we've taken since then Right. So Doug gave us a kudos. Great job on the podcast about Lilly Center and the Wawasee Area Conservancy Foundation.

Speaker 2:

The three of you had nicely done mix of questions and explanations and that would have been the episode with Heather yeah, Heather Harwood, the executive director of the Wawasee Area Conservancy Foundation.

Speaker 1:

And Heather talked about lakeshore restorations.

Speaker 2:

That was a fun episode, yeah she also got to talk a little bit about her being a lake landscape architect and how that influences some of her work there at the conservancy.

Speaker 1:

One of the things that I really enjoy about these podcasts is bringing partners in, and the Wawasee Area Conservancy is one of those partners, as is the Watershed Foundation. What other partners have you enjoyed working with?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so Soil and Water Conservation District would be another one. Department of Natural Resources we haven't had anybody on the podcast from Indiana Department of Environmental Management, but that's another partner that we work with, same thing with the United States Environmental Protection Agency. A lot of different universities we've worked with over time. So, yeah, one of our pillars at the Lilly Center is collaboration, and so we really enjoy doing that and find that we can accomplish a lot more. We can be more efficient we talk about and more effective when we're working with other groups, and so this podcast you're right is a great forum for bringing those partners together, talking about what we're working on together, letting them shine a little bit with their areas of expertise that they have.

Speaker 1:

So I'm encouraging our audience if you haven't listened to all of the podcasts, we've recorded 21. They haven't all yet been released and we've got a couple more in the pipeline. That should be pretty exciting.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1:

So subscribe, wayne. Wayne just finished watching the latest podcast and it was great info on giving. That was that's so dear to my heart. Thank you, wayne, for that comment, because, um, much like asking a question, giving is part of stewardship and helping support the good work of the Lilly Center was one of my favorite.

Speaker 2:

He's probably referring to Stephanie Overby, the director of the Kosciuszko County Community Foundation. She took over for you when you retired, and what a wonderful organization. As we just mentioned, that's why the Lilly Center exists is because of the community foundation, and so, yeah, we did talk a lot about giving and nonprofits and how those investments from donors really can make a big difference.

Speaker 1:

Wayne went on to say it was a nice job across the board and he enjoyed the science aspect of actually learning the instrument for measurement Was he talking about the monitoring system that is at streams?

Speaker 2:

It could be. Yeah, stream sensors that we have. We have six. We have 14 of those right now deployed all around the county and those are real-time data. Anybody can go on our website and see those real-time. I know Wayne personally. He helps in a lot of areas at the Lilly Center.

Speaker 2:

He's a boat captain, right yeah he's a boat captain and he's actually done show and tell. So college students maybe you didn't know this enjoy show and tell just like kindergartners and preschoolers. So he brought in a bryozoan, which we should probably have one of those on the podcast someday.

Speaker 1:

What is a bryozoan?

Speaker 2:

It almost looks like a brain. So it's kind of squishy and slimy and they grow underwater in our lakes and he's had them around his pier in the Chapman Lake system and so he brought them in and passed them around and the students were touching them and stuff like that and it was really fun.

Speaker 1:

You know, that's something I really, really enjoy about the Lilly Center at Grace College the students, the college students that you have, that you are teaching about environmental stewardship, that you're teaching about data collection, and these boat captains help on the different lakes with your students in doing some of those measurements.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, we have volunteer boat captains for each of the lakes. Every summer, we sample 16 different lakes here in northern Indiana, within Kosciuszko County, and sometimes we'll do other lakes even more broadly than that. We have over a hundred lakes here in our county and so we have volunteer boat captains that take us out on their own boat, with their own time and allow us to bring our scientific instruments and take measurements. That allows our student interns to show up to the lake and immediately get out there and get some sampling done without having to worry about getting a boat in the lake. And is our boat being maintained properly or is it running well, or any of those sort of things.

Speaker 1:

Or have we cleaned it off between lakes?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's actually part of Center and we've declined those offers because we don't ever want to be the reason for moving a new exotic species from one lake to another because we sample so many different lakes. If we're moving a boat from lake to lake to lake just constantly all through the summertime, one day after another, there'd be a lot of opportunity for moving some of those exotic species around and we don't want to be the cause of that.

Speaker 1:

So this brings me to a question that I received as an email. My friend Sally wanted to know how does the Lilly Center use volunteers?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so in a number of ways we were just talking about boat captains, right, also in our education programs, and so our education programs we want to raise000 student interactions, student connections throughout the county and we have three educators that work 12,000?. Yes.

Speaker 1:

That's one, two comma, zero, zero, zero, yes, wow.

Speaker 2:

Yes, that's a lot of youngsters and a lot of potential for impact. As they grow up they're going to be business owners, they're going to be directors of nonprofits themselves, they're going to be local elected officials and property owners, and so they'll have a lot of influence. So that's an opportunity. We have three educators that are regular staff members. Usually we will have another, maybe five student interns that work in education, but that's only eight people for 12,000 student connections. So we rely on a lot of volunteers as well. Maybe they used to be a school teacher or just have a passion for the next generation and they come and help.

Speaker 2:

It could be as simple as timekeeping as students are moving from one station to another and kind of helping corral. It could be presenting one of our lesson plans that we've put together and they get to do that. They could be a helper with, maybe, a sand table or a virtual aquarium or one of the activities that we're doing. It could be out at a local lake shore, like when we do our lake adventure day and we have fishing out there as one of the activities. Fishing for fourth graders needs a lot of extra hands around to keep hooks out of ears and noses and keep them in the water and worms on those hooks and or, yeah, somebody's shoe falls in the water, or something like that, and so there's always different interesting things.

Speaker 1:

Those sound like fun stories. You're talking about a former educator or a possible future elected official, and that reminds me of one of my favorite episodes, diane Quantz, who is a Warsaw City Council person former educator she was a longtime guidance counselor at Warsaw High School. And she's one of your volunteers at the Lilly Center.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, in two different ways, both as a boat captain doing our lake sampling, but also with some of those K-12 programs that we were just talking about. So, yeah, she's really a superstar as a volunteer in our community.

Speaker 1:

So Diane Quantz in that episode spoke about filter strips. She also talked about landscaping the area of a shoreline.

Speaker 2:

That was a fun episode, yeah and she's a great example of a lifelong learner. I just got an email from her just last week in fact with a crack across the lake there, pike Lake, where she lives and in the ice and kind of wondering A crack in the ice, not the water.

Speaker 2:

No, no no, the lake wasn't sort of seeping away through a crack in the earth's crust or anything and just wanting to learn about you know how could that happen, and so we talked about wind and kind of jostling around the ice in weak spots and then you can get some water coming up and so the ice can be kind of slushy in those areas.

Speaker 2:

So, yeah, one episode that I think of that was a favorite for me is whenever I can give opportunity to showcase the wonderful talent of some of our former students at the Lilly Center that came through the environmental science program at Grace, interned with the Lilly Center and now are out there in their career. So I think of Aaron Voril such a proud moment just to see how far he's come and the skills he brought into the Lilly Center. How far he's come and the skills he brought into the Lilly Center we talked about with fishing and boating, with his upbringing, and now to see him just excelling with a DNR hatchery. And yeah, I just love that multiplication that happens with these students as they come through our program, become wonderful environmental professionals and then go off in their careers and then just keep doing their thing.

Speaker 1:

And just have a bigger and bigger impact. It's neat to see that spark in your eye when you talk about it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

That's cool. We've got a really good question and this was something that, when Frank talked to the Community Foundation about, I want to impact water quality and I want it to be replicable so that what we're doing here might be something Chesapeake Bay is interested in. So Seth is asking the question how can people passionate about lake science but living far from the Lilly Center get involved in their own communities?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's a good, great question from Seth, and Seth was actually one of our interns at the Lilly Center. He was an environmental science student at the Lilly Center.

Speaker 1:

Did you plant that question?

Speaker 2:

No, I did not, I promise I did not. That came in totally on his own volition. Seth Bingham in Michigan now but was with us at the Lilly Center. He actually, as a student, he was also pursuing his MBA, while pursuing his environmental science bachelor's degree, and so he was really well-suited and led our economic impact study, that research that we did, where we found over $300 million comes into Kosciuszko County every year due to our lakes, and so he's a very inquisitive man and so I love this question here and so, him being in Michigan, maybe some of our viewers or listeners you're coming to us from Minnesota or Wisconsin, michigan, pennsylvania, ohio, yeah, even maybe further away, and you're wondering, hey, how can we do some of these same sorts of things in our community? I would say the first thing is let's not reinvent the wheel. Let's look around and see what other organizations might already be in your location. Maybe you're in a lake area where there's lake associations and you can get involved with that lake association. Maybe there's river keepers or watershed group that happens to be in your area and you can volunteer with them, get involved with them, start to learn about what they're doing and how you can get involved. Maybe there's a local university that is doing some environmental research and you can somehow get involved with that environmental research there at that university. If you look around and there's really nothing going on, well then start something.

Speaker 2:

One of our founders, dr Frank Levinson, saying he wanted this to be replicable, as you just said. We would love nothing more than to help you start something like what we're doing here at the Lilly Center, and we've actually helped a number of groups do just that get started, or maybe they want to retool some things and change some of their approach, and so we would really appreciate that honor to be able to help, you think. But I think one of the things that makes the Lilly Center uniquely able to do what we do is that close connection to the community that we have. We're externally facing, even though we're part of a university. We're externally facing to the community. We want to serve the community, community, we want to serve the community. But having that partnership with the university allows that pipeline of those wonderful students, that talent and those students then that can go out and continue on as professionals, just brings life to the organization and helps. You know, with 46 college interns right now currently we have this school year. It helps us get way more done as an organization than we would be able to with our regular staff members. We have 11 regular staff members, but then you add on those 46 student intern they're all paid staff members as well then we can just get so much more accomplished.

Speaker 2:

And so, but we didn't start that big. Some of you might be listening or viewing this podcast episode and saying, well, how am I going to suddenly get 11 staff members and 46 student interns? If you're thinking about starting something like this, we didn't start that way. We started in. We had a couple offices and a couple closets there at Grace College. They were closets, they were. They were small little closets. We took some donated aquariums. Some of them were leaking. I remember people would bring us like, oh, we want to donate this aquarium and then we put water in it. It just leaks all onto the floor.

Speaker 1:

I remember seeing the waiters hanging up in the hallway.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we took over the coat racks of our building and turned them into waiter racks, and we had myself and one other staff person to get us started with that original seed grant from the Community Foundation, and so that's another thing to think about. If you want to do something like this, there needs to be a funding source. So if there's like-minded people around you that have that wealth capacity, or maybe a community foundation or another foundation in the area that wants to get behind what you're doing, you need to think about that sustainability. And how is it going to get funded? Because it's going to cost some money.

Speaker 1:

So you know you talk about that and my background is as a fundraiser because of working at the Community Foundation and I'm thinking you know there are a lot of people in our community that would like to support the work that's happening at the Lilly Center. So this would be my question for you how can somebody financially support the Lilly Center?

Speaker 2:

So people can give in whatever way is most convenient for them. Some people are going to find a gift of cash through a check is going to be a really helpful way for them to be able to invest. Some people will want to give through a donor advised fund that they might have. That's one of the ways that you've supported us. Some might want to support us with an IRA and make us a beneficiary of that or a life insurance policy. We've had gifts of real estate before. We've had gifts of stock transfer. Those appreciated assets sometimes could be helpful for taxes for people, and people can support over multiple years or or monthly or annually, people can designate gifts towards certain things.

Speaker 2:

Some people are really passionate towards our collaborative efforts. Some people are really passionate about research or a particular project that we're working on. We have people who underwrite aquariums or people who underwrite our endowment. We've been building an endowment fund and that's one of the things that you encouraged me to do early on when we first got really rolling as a center, and so lots of options for people for how they do it, when they do it and what it's going to go towards. But regardless of what they want to do, they can be rest assured that that money is going to go towards our mission, which is making our lakes and streams cleaner, healthier, safer and more beautiful. There's no sort of administrative fee that gets pulled off the top to the college or anyone else. All of that money is going right into our account to accomplish the very purpose that that donor is excited about, and so I love that. Efficiency efficiency and we've really been able to accomplish a lot with the investments from our donors.

Speaker 1:

So you're the professor in the room, but let me tell you I'm going to give you an A plus on that answer.

Speaker 2:

Well, you would know, you spent many years in fundraising, which is for those of you who don't know this, those of you who are listening in or viewing in. I call Susie, my number one coach and cheerleader over my career here at the Lilly Center at Grace College. She's always there to encourage and she's there to redirect if needed at times. She's always truthful with her answers and it's been just really fun to learn from you and so getting an A-plus from you on a fundraising question. I will take that.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, thanks for those kind words, but God's hand is in all this and it's just so rewarding to see you can give somebody the football, but how they run down the field, and maybe we shouldn't use football as an analogy for this, because Grace doesn't have a football team right. But you've hit a home run.

Speaker 2:

How's that Okay? Good, thank you.

Speaker 1:

So Jack has got a good question. He was helping a neighbor take out his boat lift and on the bottom of the legs were tiny red looking worms that he had never seen before. What could those be?

Speaker 2:

Yes, so those would most likely be blood worms.

Speaker 1:

That doesn't sound good.

Speaker 2:

Actually it's a good thing in the lake. Okay, so this would be a midge fly larva. So if you don't know what a midge fly is, it's kind of looks like a mosquito, but it doesn't bite like a mosquito, and so the larval stage of that fly actually lives down in the bottom sediment, so the bottom mud of our local lakes and streams. And the reason that they are bright red in color and I would encourage viewers or listeners to go online and look up a picture of these bloodworms they're really quite interesting they are bright red in color because they have a lot of hemoglobin in them. Hemoglobin is the thing that gives our blood its red color as well, and it's got iron in it, which contributes to that. And they need that hemoglobin at such high content in their body because they live in low oxygen environments, and so we've talked a lot on the podcast about low oxygen levels, often in the bottom of our lakes due to over productivity from too many nutrients, and so they're an indicator then of low oxygen levels.

Speaker 2:

And so we can go out to one of our lakes Wawasee, winona, dewar all of them happen to be about 80 feet deep.

Speaker 2:

There's no oxygen down at the bottom, or very little oxygen down at the bottom and we can send down a sampler.

Speaker 2:

It's called an Ekman dredge. It's kind of like a almost like a claw, like on the end of a crane, kind of a bucket that comes together. I'm trying to do some hand motions for those of you who are just listening in. Maybe you want to watch this instead but it closes together and then pulls up that sample of mud and we bring that up to the surface of the lake Ekman Dredge and we put it through a filter and all of the sediment and the water washes through it and what's left is any organisms that were living down there, and we often find bloodworms very bottom of the lake, very little oxygen, but they can survive down there and the fact that there's a lot of them down there is an indicator that it's low oxygen conditions, which is where they really do well. So the fact that they were seeing these up around their pier indicates that there was low oxygen conditions there, maybe just below the surface of the sediment, where they were kind of stirring things up as they were working.

Speaker 1:

Jack also wants to know if people live on a lake that have lily pads, can they take out those lily pads?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So we get this question a lot, and even some of my friends who live around the lakes like to give me a hard time about this. Oh, those darn lily pads, why can't we just pull them all out? Okay, no, we do not want to pull them all out, so let's first talk about it legally and then we'll talk about it ecologically.

Speaker 2:

So, legally, in our state, in Indiana, the DNR allows people to remove aquatic vegetation if they have a permit. There's also some ability to pull out aquatic vegetation without a permit if they follow certain rules. That would be outside of the permit, and those rules would be that you can remove up to. You can remove the aquatic vegetation in front of your property for up to 625 square feet. So, to give you an idea, that'd be like 25 feet by 25 feet. So that's meant to be.

Speaker 2:

Let's say, you have a small swimming area that you want your kids or grandkids or your dog to be able to play in, and you don't want them always wrapped up in weeds or more technically called aquatic macrophytes, and so we have that ability then to clear out that area, and it could be lily pads, it could be submerged vegetation that someone might want to rake out. It could also be maybe in an area right along their pier where they're putting their kayak in or where they're pulling their boat in and out and they don't always want to get all those weeds caught up in the propeller of their boat. Or maybe they've got a sailboat and they don't always want it to get it caught up on the sailboat when they're coming in or out. So there is a provision for that. 625 square feet it's about 25 by 25.

Speaker 2:

You don't have to do 25 by 25. 25 is the maximum width of your shoreline that you can clear it. But you could instead, if you wanted to go just along your pier, you could do five feet by. However far you could go to get 625 square feet right along a really long pier. You could do it that way as well. But um, that's legally. What's what's possible now ecologically? The reason that you'd want to pull out as little as possible of those plants is those plants provide great services to the lake. Those plants are.

Speaker 1:

Lily pads specifically.

Speaker 2:

Lily pads, but it's other other pond weed or northern water milfoil would be some submerged plants. Eel grass would be another good example. In addition to lily pads that emerge up out of the water, we could also have arrowroot or pickerel. Those would be some other things that would have some plants that would come up. Those things are going to provide habitat for critters that live in the water, so it's frogs and turtles and fish, aquatic insects, even some types of algae that we call them periphyton because they connect onto other surfaces like those plants. So it's great habitat. It could be some food, it could be hiding from predators that those things can stay in there.

Speaker 2:

The other thing that those plants will do is they they hold on to the soil, much like on a hillside that has no trees. The dirt would quickly erode from that hillside mudslides and such, versus a hillside that has lots of trees that are kind of holding in the hillside. So to the shoreline area of our lakes, with waves that come, boating activity. If you have those plants there, they sort of hold down the sediment, keep erosion at a minimum. As waves come in towards the shoreline, they can dissipate and break up some of that energy. So the waves, don't you know, crash against the shore and start causing erosion at the shoreline or even damage to people's property. So those plants can do a number of services which are really helpful. So I understand we want to recreate and we want to be able to enjoy the lake, but let's try to minimize taking out those aquatic plants, because they really do help the lake.

Speaker 1:

Which leads me to a question that Jim asked. He wants to know if the water temperature affects the growth of Eurasian water milfoil, and I'm guessing because it has the name Eurasian that is an invasive species, not native.

Speaker 2:

Yes, no, that's exactly right. So we have northern water milfoil, which is a native milfoil species, and we also have the Eurasian watermilfoil, which is an exotic species that happens to be invasive. So it grows, it loves really warm temperatures and it can overtop a lot of our other native plants. And I've been in, I've waded through ponds and wetlands and been in boats and lakes where the Eurasian water milfoil has made such a dense mat that you can't even push your way through it walking in shallow water, or push your boat through it with your propeller, or even if you're trying to use oars with a little john boat or something. It can just really clog things up.

Speaker 2:

Now, as we've talked about, when you have an overabundance of plant material, as that plant material dies back in the wintertime, or even as it naturally sort of cycles throughout the growing season, that plant material is going to start to build up on the bottom of a lake and that then uses up the oxygen, and so then we have areas where we don't have oxygen, where the fish can't survive in those areas of the lake. And so Eurasian water milfoil is one of those that can move in and sort of take over a lake. It can grow well at really high temperatures when other plants might start to slow down. But it also can grow at low temperatures as well. So sometimes it wakes up earlier in the spring before some of the native plants and starts to grow and overtop and shade out and crowd out some of those other native plants. And the Eurasian watermilfoil doesn't have as much nutrition for some of the organisms in our lakes that will eat some of the plants, and so it doesn't really help from that standpoint either.

Speaker 1:

One of my friends is Jacob Mackey. Jacob owns the Chapman Lake Native Nursery and Jacob is asking a question about zebra mussels. He has noticed more zebra mussels on his boys when he pulled them out of Chapman Lake this week compared to previous years. What are the conditions that make zebra mussels more or less prevalent?

Speaker 2:

That's a great question, jacob. Zebra mussels are an exotic species that moved in again from that Eurasia area, black and Caspian Seas and came over in the ballast water, and some large ships that were carrying cargo over into the Great Lakes and then from the Great Lakes started to get into our smaller inland lakes as people moved boats from one lake to another, and so we ended up with zebra mussels on Chapman Lake, like you're from, jacob, as well as many of our other lakes around northern Indiana. Curiously, some of the lakes in the southern part of our county don't yet have zebra mussels, and so we actually have research ongoing where we're keeping track of those lakes and seeing when they might be introduced. We hope that they won't be, because they really have a lot of impacts on the ecosystem, but it's probably speaking, the lakes that don't have them are those lakes that do have public access.

Speaker 1:

They still do have public access.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but just being really realistic, they probably eventually will get zebra mussels, like our other lakes have them. But your question is about Chapman Lake and noticing more than in other years. So when the zebra mussels came in they came into many of our lakes. They came into the Great Lakes in the 80s, they came into some of our inland lakes here in northern Indiana in the 90s, and so when they first would come in they would boom their population lots of food, perfect conditions, not a lot of competition and then usually would eat themselves out of their food source and then they would bust, kind of like anything. That would be cyclical.

Speaker 1:

Feast and famine.

Speaker 2:

Feast and famine yeah, would be another good way to say that. And so zebra mussels would be on that boom-bust system. Now they would come in, initially in a boom system and people can recall cutting their feet on them. I remember you've even said that you remember your kids having to wear those aqua socks or something because else you cut your feet on those zebra mussels. And so typically we don't see those same high populations that we did years ago when zebra mussels first entered in. Zebra mussels populations each individual year are going to be controlled by things like water temperature. So zebra mussels have what's called a veliger stage, when they're a sort of nomadic and are just kind of being moved around, and then eventually they their larval stage.

Speaker 2:

They'll find a spot where they can connect on to a good substrate, usually a pretty hard substrate like a pier post or a buoy or maybe a rock or something like that, sometimes on each other or on one of our native mussels, sometimes those large clam mussels. You'll see lots of zebra mussels on them, and that's actually part of the reason why their numbers have declined when zebra mussel numbers have gone up. So water temperature will influence their ability to reproduce and how those veligers move around the lake. Also, their food source can impact their population numbers, and so they are filter feeders. Zebra mussels are, and so they are filtering phytoplankton or algae out of the water.

Speaker 1:

But they don't eat blue-green algae. You got it you need to teach them how to do that.

Speaker 2:

So I don't know if they really respond well to training.

Speaker 2:

I'm not quite sure. I don't know that anybody's tried that before, but if you're listening out there and you've got an idea for how to train a muscle, we've got a lot of opportunity for you. So the good types of algae, like green algae, those they can filter out better, the bad types, as you said, like blue-green algae, also called cyanobacteria, the ones with toxins, those they'll spit back out, and so if they've got plenty of food, their populations are going to be higher. The other thing we need to look at is what eats them. Right, because they're part of a food chain, so they're both eating something, but something else is eating them, and we have some fish that can actually eat zebra mussels.

Speaker 2:

So red ear sunfish is one of those. They're called in some geographies shell crackers because they have a propensity for wanting to eat mussels like zebra mussels, and so there's been. So DNR fisheries will look often at the gut content of some different fish and see what they're eating in our different lakes, and they've seen a lot of zebra mussels in some of the gut content of fish. So these red-eared sunfish, these red-ears, are eating zebra mussels, and so, if they probably can't eat the biggest ones, but those smaller ones, they can help keep the population lower because of that. So yeah, so, jacob, your question then water temperature predators eating the zebra mussels, as well as the algae that the zebra mussels are eating, all would influence kind of that boom and bust cycle from year to year that we see.

Speaker 1:

And do our lakes, specifically Chapman Lake, have red ear fish in them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yes, that's a common fish in a lot of our lakes. Some lakes seem to have more red ear sunfish than others, and that's something that we might even want to look into, maybe with our partners at the DNR, to understand that. One of's something that we might even want to look into, maybe with our partners at the DNR, to understand that one of the ideas that I've thought of to try to control zebra muscle populations and thus potentially help the algae toxin issue that we have in some of our lakes is by potentially having more of those red ears in our lakes to eat more of the zebra mussels and so maybe having slightly different fishing regulations you know what you can keep with the red ears or maybe even we should have asked Aaron about that on the podcast yesterday when we recorded that about stocking red ear sunfish. That would be another idea.

Speaker 1:

That would be an idea, and so are there things that people can do, or are there things people should not do, to help control the zebra mussel population?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so the best thing that people can do for zebra mussels is really in moving boats around from lake to lake, and so, as we said, we've got lakes in our own county here that don't yet have zebra mussels, and so we really don't want to see those move from one lake to another, and so I think that that's a helpful thing that people can keep in mind, and if they are moving their boat from one lake to another, letting it dry out is a really helpful thing before you move it from one to another. Sometimes there's some water intake water that's helping cool the engine, getting that flushed out, maybe spraying off the trailer, just making sure that there's no what we call hitchhikers that are coming from your boat or trailer from one lake to the next.

Speaker 1:

Good deal. This is a great question that Jacob asked. What is the most surprising thing that you have learned about? The lakes?

Speaker 2:

I would say it's probably from our study that we did back during the 2012 drought and we found the springs in our lakes can actually reverse and become drains, which was fascinating to me because we know here in Kosciuszko County, northern Indiana, we have many spring-fed lakes.

Speaker 1:

Seacrest Lake is spring-fed lakes, and that's Seacrest Lake is one of those lakes.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and that would be the case for many lakes across the Midwestern United States would have spring-fed lakes, especially with some of the limestone geology that we have in these areas, and so the springs would bubble water in when water tables and groundwater was plentiful enough that the pressure pushes water into the lake through the spring. But when we have drought conditions, like in 2012, when water tables and water pressure outside of the surrounding area of the lake go down, now actually there's more water pressure in the lake and so those same springs that were allowing water to come in now are going to reverse and water is going to leave the lake and go into the groundwater in the area around the lake. And I found that so fascinating to think about that, and we tracked it from month to month across the across that year and then we compared some other wetter years right around 2012. I believe we did 2011 as well as 2013. If anybody wants to check out that study, it's on our website, lakesgraceedu.

Speaker 2:

The full study is there as well as a fact sheet that gives kind of the summary of the project, but that was just such a fascinating thing to realize there. We also found that evaporation was just an amazing amount of water that was leaving the lake. I'm going to forget the exact statistic, but I calculated. It was like a school bus filled with water leaving the lake every few seconds or few minutes or something like that. That's how much evaporation was happening from that lake during the height of that drought. And so just a really interesting study and really countered what a lot of folks were thinking about the drought and what was causing it at the time. A lot of people thought it was agriculture and irrigation around agriculture and yeah. So that was a really fun research study and very surprising.

Speaker 1:

Patrick loves the podcast and he would like to hear a discussion about phosphorus and the life cycle phosphorus has in the soil. But then I'm going to add and say and what is the life cycle phosphorus has when it is in the sediment of a lake?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so that's a great question, patrick. So phosphorus really is the foundation of a lot of the work that we do. When we look at our lakes in Kosciuszko County, throughout northern Indiana, throughout all of Indiana and all of the Midwestern United States probably globally, with these sorts of lakes that we have, the number one challenge is too much phosphorus. What that leads to is it leads to an over productivity of weeds, also known as aquatic macrophytes, and algae, also known as phytoplankton more technically, and that then leads to, as we've been talking about, all of this buildup on the bottom of the lake which leads to low oxygen levels, which leads to fish habitat being squeezed into the surface of the water. It leads to toxic algae which can be harmful to people and their pets. It leads to difficulty in recreation where weeds are choking out the ability to recreate in certain areas.

Speaker 2:

All of these things can be traced back to phosphorus, so phosphorus is an element. It's on the periodic table of elements. It's actually a good thing. We need phosphorus in the soil to make plants grow, whether it's crops or trees or our yard. We need some phosphorus in our lakes to make plants grow, the algae and those weeds. They help make up the food chain in our lakes, and so it's good. But it's too much of a good thing, is the problem with it, and so let's kind of carry that through like Patrick is talking about. So let's take phosphorus in the soil on land. Maybe it's at a construction site along a stream bank, maybe it's on an agricultural field and that soil particle with phosphorus adsorbed to it. So phosphorus, I might get a little technical here, Okay, all right.

Speaker 2:

So we have phosphorus is often in the form of orthophosphate, which is PO4, and it has a negative charge on it. Soil particles often have a positive charge, so the negative and the positive go together right. So wherever that soil particle goes, that's where the phosphorus is going to go as well. So we've got a soil particle in one of those areas that's going to be eroded. Maybe we have snow melt, maybe we have a big thunderstorm, and that soil particle with the phosphorus washes into a stream. Maybe it's an agricultural ditch if it's an agricultural area, maybe it's a more natural stream if it's in a forested area.

Speaker 2:

Now, as that little sediment particle and we can see sediment particles with our eyes when we go by a stream after a big rainstorm and we can see that chocolate, milk, brown wad that's got all sediment particles, all with phosphorus, most of them probably with phosphorus adsorbed, and hitchhiking along with it. And as that sediment particle then moves down with the phosphorus, it's eventually going to move into one of our lakes. In the lake, the sediment particle is going to drop to the bottom. That's why we often have sandbars near a lot of our streams that flow into our lakes, because the water velocity slows, so the water no longer can hold on to that sediment and instead the sediment drops to the bottom. Now it's in that lake environment and there is algae and weeds that would love to use that phosphate. Phosphate I think of as kind of like the, the twinkies of the aquatic.

Speaker 1:

Oh, we understand that, the junk food.

Speaker 2:

The junk food, yes, so rapidly able to be utilized by those plants, whether it's a single-celled plant like an algae or a multi-celled macrophyte like a weed. And it's pulled in then to that plant. And if it's pulled into an algae, well what's eating the algae? We've talked about the zooplankton, which are those tiniest animals in the lake eat the algae. So now that phosphorus goes from the sediment particle to the water, into the algae cell, and now it gets eaten by a zooplankton, and sometimes that algae can can hold, hold onto a whole bunch extra of phosphorus. It's called luxury uptake the algae. They don't really think like this, but it's as if they're thinking hey, I don't want you to get some of the phosphorus, so I'm going to take extra myself to sort of hold it myself so I can grow faster.

Speaker 1:

Hoarding algae. Hoarding algae, yes, the algae that are hoarding yes yes, okay.

Speaker 2:

so luxury uptake, so they take on extra phosphorus, which makes them more nutritious than on up the food chain, right? So now you've got these zooplankton that are eating them and maybe a big fish eats them, and then maybe that fish then gets pulled out by one of our birds of prey, like an osprey or an eagle, and pulls that fish out and starts munching on that fish up in a tree near an agricultural field or along a stream bank and that fish gets partially eaten and then the rest of the fish gets dropped down to the ground. Now we've just completed our cycle, right? So now again we have that phosphorus. It's decomposing out of the fish. That little phosphate molecule connects to a soil particle and the whole thing starts over again, and so that would be an example of a phosphorus cycle. Now, it can go in a lot of different directions and different examples, but that would be one.

Speaker 1:

So I understand that source of phosphate. We know that fertilizer some fertilizers have phosphate in them, yeah, so we want to make sure that people, especially people who live around the lakes or people in watersheds and remember we all live on a watershed don't use phosphate in their fertilizer.

Speaker 2:

Right, yeah, plants typically need some phosphorus when they're first getting started, when they're first germinating from a seed to that little tiny plant that's just start growing.

Speaker 2:

Plants often need some phosphorus for flowering as well and sometimes for seed production, and the fact of the matter is, here in this part of Indiana we have enough phosphorus in the soil to allow those things to happen. Naturally the grass plants in our yards and trees that are growing in the forest, and so we don't have to add extra phosphorus, so we can have just as healthy and as green of a lawn without phosphorus in our fertilizer as we could have with it. Now there's going to be some minor exceptions to that, and agriculture will often encourage their producers to do soil testing and see if maybe certain areas of the field are deficient in phosphorus, and so maybe they add a little bit to that part of the field where it's needed.

Speaker 1:

They've got the technology now to determine in their whole big field what specific area needs the phosphorus, because phosphorus costs the farmer money right. And they're not going to spread it over the whole field, because that's a waste of money, right? So just target an area.

Speaker 2:

And nitrogen typically, as another nutrient is typically needed more by that soil for that crop plant, or more in the soil for our lawn plants, for our turf grass and even in our forests, for our trees, is usually nitrogen's needed more than what phosphorus is. And so if we use that zero phosphorus fertilizer for our lake front property or even for our lawn in the watershed of one of our lakes, even if it's miles away, that's always going to be a helpful step for a homeowner to take to limit that phosphorus. Because, as I said before, a little is good, but currently we have way too much in all of our lakes and streams, and so we could back that way way off and still have healthy lakes actually have much healthier lakes.

Speaker 1:

So, nate, we've been asked a lot of questions. What question hasn't been asked? What would you want our listeners and our viewers to really think about when it comes to being good stewards of the environment that we're living in?

Speaker 2:

stewards of the environment that we're living in? That's a good question, susie. One of the ways I like to end presentations that I give in the community and with my students is to remind people that water carries nutrients downhill. We all have influence over certain pieces of property, whether it's where we work, where we play, where we have our home, and that land is accumulating nutrients, whether it's nitrogen or phosphorus. And as water runs across that land it's moving those nutrients downhill and it's always where all those pieces of property are within a watershed and so they're all going to be moving down eventually to a stream and then to a lake, and we want to eliminate that excess nutrient from coming into our lakes. And so if we can all be mindful of our own properties that we have influence over and trying to stop any of those nutrients from getting off of our property, then we'll stop any downstream problems from the excess nutrients from the excess nutrients.

Speaker 1:

And not only does what we do on our lake affect those that are living downstream. There are people upstream from us.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And what they do affects us.

Speaker 2:

Right.

Speaker 1:

So it is important to pay attention to this stuff.

Speaker 2:

Unless maybe you live on the top of Mount Everest, then there'd be nobody upstream of you.

Speaker 1:

Not a lot of people there. Thank you all so much for tuning into this episode of the Lake Doctor podcast and keep your questions coming. Make sure you like and share. Subscribe, because we need to get this word out. Thanks, nate.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thank you, this was a lot of fun, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Like Doctor podcast. Please like, subscribe and share, and make sure to join us next time. It's bound to be fun.

Speaker 2:

Listening to this podcast is just the first step to making your lake cleaner and healthier. Visit lakesgraceedu for more information about our applied research and discover some tangible ways that you can make a difference on your lake.

Speaker 1:

If you have a comment or a question that we can discuss in future episodes, leave a comment or send an email to lakes at graceedu. We'll see you next time. The doctor is in.