Author: freshwater

“Neonics.” It’s a cute-sounding nickname for chemicals that are anything but adorable. Neonicotinoids have been used in commercial agriculture for more than two decades as potent insecticides. As their use has spread, so have some unintended consequences.

“The pesticides are supposed to target insects, and cause their muscles not to work properly,” says Tisha King-Heiden, a reproductive physiologist and toxicologist at UW-La Crosse. “Our bees, which are non-target organisms, are being impacted.”

While media attention has often focused on the harm neonics can do to honeybees and other pollinators, the problem doesn’t end there.

“Everyone kind of focused on bees, but these pesticides are pretty water-soluble,” King-Heiden says. “They get sprayed on seeds, and end up in runoff, and they’ve been found in drinking water, and in our streams.”

With support from the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin, King-Heiden, her students, and colleagues at UW-Whitewater and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are investigating whether two widely used neonics may be causing subtle behavioral changes in fish.

Such altered behavior can have significant impact. For example, an affected fish may move more slowly, and be unable to evade a predator. Over time, these changes can destabilize entire food webs.

The project is new territory for King-Heiden, who usually looks at how environmental contaminants influence the development of an organism’s reproductive system. However, in the same spirit of silo-busting that created the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin, King-Heiden and environmental toxicologist Elisabeth Harrahy of UW-Whitewater decided to pursue the neonics project together.

Says King-Heiden: “We’ve never collaborated before. We started talking about it and I said, ‘let’s go for it.’”

The research also provides a valuable hands-on learning opportunity for both graduate and undergraduate students.

While the project is still in the early stages, there are already echoes of an earlier, now infamous pesticide.

“This work is kind of mirroring the story of DDT,” says King-Heiden. “We developed the pesticides, they’re widely used, and now we’re finding unintended consequences.”

She adds: “Those non-target effects have a big impact on the environment, including the decimation of entire small ecosystems. Humans sometimes forget we’re part of the environment. And the ecosystem is part of our economy, too.”

“It’s pretty much a Brita filter,” says University of Wisconsin-Green Bay assistant professor Michael Holly. Make that a very big Brita filter: “We’re trying to clean up the water in northeastern Wisconsin.”

The material Holly hopes to identify one day, like the familiar consumer product he likens it to, could improve water quality for entire ecosystems and the communities around them. Assisted by colleagues at UW-Madison, Holly and his team of undergraduate students are looking for a filter to remove excess phosphorus in agricultural runoff before it fouls local waterways.

And not just any filter will do. His ultimate goal is to find material that’s economical, locally available, reusable and also easy for a farmer to install and maintain as an edge-of-field treatment.

It’s a tall order, and Holly says his team is just getting started.

“In trying to reach the ‘lightbulb’ stage, we’re still looking for the filaments,” he quips. “What material works, what won’t? Will the material leach? How do we regenerate the material (to use again?)”

With a trio of undergraduates, Holly has conducted early tests on materials such as zeolite — mineral compounds sometimes found in air purifiers — and charcoal made from community garden plant waste.

He credits the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin’s support for getting the project rolling, with preliminary results expected in 2021.

“The Freshwater Collaborative provides support for projects that might not get funded by larger sources,” says Holly. “It also provides opportunities for students.”

He hopes the current exploratory project will lead to larger proposals and opportunities for more than a dozen students to learn high-quality R&D testing methods, preparing them for a wide range of work in industry, academia and other fields.

On the banks of the Fox River, just a short stroll from Lake Winnebago, a nondescript building houses one of the state’s most important research and training hubs for environmental health and safety.

Since opening in 2008, the Environmental Research and Innovation Center (ERIC) has partnered with county health departments, local communities and individual members of the public on a range of projects, including monitoring the safety of well water and recreational beaches. Graduate and undergraduate students training at the facility learn the same rigorous, standardized testing procedures used at high-profile national labs.

“In most water fields, you really have to be comfortable with both lab and field work,” says ERIC Director Greg Kleinheinz, a UW-Oshkosh environmental engineer and microbiologist. “One of the unique things our students get is that combination of hands-on work.”

Now, thanks to support from the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin, ERIC will roll out a new training opportunity for undergraduate students across the state. Beginning with four students in early 2021, the program will offer both online and hands-on lab training, followed by a summerlong experience at a field station in Door County’s Sturgeon Bay. The project allows for customized areas of focus and scheduling so each student can build a program that best suits their interests and needs.

Kleinheinz says the project has value well beyond preparing individual students for a career in water.

“I see this as a catalyst to increase collaboration,” says Kleinheinz.

The FCW-funded project, like the FCW itself, is about combining the unique resources at 13 campuses into a single freshwater sciences powerhouse.

“In a time of limited fiscal resources, there’s no sense in duplicating efforts,” Kleinheinz says. “Taxpayers have invested in our facility. Let’s make it available to students across campuses. It’s a much more efficient use of resources.”

Mussels sometimes get a bad rap, thanks to destructive invasive species. While these unwelcome outsiders stir up trouble, dozens of native mussel species are quietly going about their business, cleaning our water and serving as sentinels for the health of entire ecosystems.

“Mussels filter feed a huge amount of water. It’s insane how much they filter,” says Becky Doyle-Morin, UW-Platteville freshwater invertebrate ecologist. “They’re helping to clean waterways, like little vacuums or pool filters.”

As these hardworking bivalves suck in water, food particles and sediment, they’re also taking in any pollutants in the environment. As Doyle-Morin puts it, “What’s in the water determines whether they thrive.”

Studying the size and health of native mussel populations provides researchers with crucial data about water quality and the stability of entire food webs, including fish that might end up on your plate.

But to monitor and protect native mussel populations, first you have to find them.

“Wisconsin waterways have some of the most diverse mussel communities in the world,” says evolutionary ecologist Gretchen Gerrish, director of the Trout Lake Station in Vilas County. And while mussels around the Mississippi River and some of its tributaries have been well-documented, many other populations remain unstudied.

Gerrish and Doyle-Morin plan to fill in some of the gaps while also providing the next generation of researchers with invaluable skills. With support from the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin, their team of undergraduates has begun surveying locations in southwestern Wisconsin. They’ll also study North Woods sites around Trout Lake Station, which is operated by UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology.

“The project spans the state, linking regions that might not otherwise be connected,” Gerrish says.

Those connections will soon stretch all the way to Australia. The diversity of Wisconsin’s native mussel species, and the high caliber of the research already underway here, has attracted scientists from Murdoch University in Perth. Doyle-Morin and Gerrish are building an exchange program with their Australian colleagues. The collaboration will send Wisconsin undergrads Down Under and allow Murdoch students to train here, in the Freshwater Mussel Capital of the World.

“Plastics can be like diamonds: forever,” says Lorena Rios Mendoza. The UW-Superior environmental chemist studies how the nonbiodegradable synthetic materials get into Lake Superior and the problems they can cause as they fragment or absorb toxic chemicals also present in the environment.

Rios Mendoza focuses on microplastics, pieces smaller than a pea, that may look like food to fish and other lake dwellers. When the organisms eat the synthetic materials, they also ingest any toxic chemicals the plastics have picked up. Some of these compounds can cause cancer, birth defects and other health problems for animals higher up the food chain – including us.

Now, Rios Mendoza is working with colleagues from UW-Madison, UW-Eau Claire and the Lake Superior National Estuarine Research Reserve, with support from the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin, to answer key questions about Superior’s tiny troublemakers.

“We know the sources of the microplastics. They enter Superior through the St. Louis River and other tributaries that move the microplastics into the lake,” Rios Mendoza says. “But what is the distribution? What is the speed and flow? How are they transported?”

In summer 2021, Rios Mendoza and her team will collect samples from both western Lake Superior and the nearby St. Louis River estuary. Most previous sampling collected material from the lake’s surface. The new project will also sample various depths of the water column and the lake bottom, where many heavier, denser microplastics are likely to be found.

Colleagues across the state will analyze the samples to learn more about how the microplastics interact with the Lake Superior ecosystem and, potentially, how to reduce the damage they’re doing to even the greatest of Great Lakes.

“If you compare Lake Superior and Lake Erie, Lake Erie is small and shallow and surrounded by a lot of people, so the pollutants are right there,” says Rios Mendoza. “Lake Superior is huge and deep, and people say ‘Oh, it’s the cleanest.’ But it’s not really clean. We still find things.”