Great Lakes Echo (http://greatlakesecho.org/author/c-thompson/page/4/)
Whether it’s a regular chiming in or a newbie venting over the latest smoking ban news, our readers add to stories with their comments. This is our first installment of our favorite reader comments of 2011. Don’t see yours? Leave us a comment!
Tim Campbell at the Wisconsin Sea Grant has found a way to bring the Great Lakes to your holiday celebrations. Sit around the fireplace and sing The Twelve Days of Aquatic Invasive Species Christmas with all your lake-lovin’ friends and family.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, a freighter sent to me
Twelve quaggas clogging
‘Leven gobies gobbling
Ten alewives croaking
Nine eggs in resting
Eight shrimp a’swarming
Seven carp and counting
Six lamprey leaping
Five boat-wash stations! Four perch on ice
Three clean boat steps
Two red swamp crayfish
And a carp barrier in the city! Check out the full version for details on each aquatic invasive.
Take a break from the eggnog, fuzzy sweaters and family parties to take part in the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count, a citizen science program that’s been running each winter since 1900. From Dec. 14 until Jan. 5, help out by counting birds in specified areas and submitting the data to the Audubon Society. The information helps scientists study the long-term health of North American birds.
Hunters across the Great Lakes region can turn sporting into charity through one of the many programs that connect harvested game to hungry people.
America’s Top Power Plant Toxic Air Polluters, released by the Environmental Integrity Project, contains data on toxic power plant emissions and puts Great Lakes states right at the top. Some highlights:
Six of the top 10 arsenic emitting power plants are in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania power plants emit 28 percent of the nation’s arsenic air pollution from power plants
Two Consumers Energy plants in Michigan emit 86 percent of the state’s total chromium air pollution from power plants
The Miami Fort Generating Station in Ohio is the nation’s top polluter of hydrochloric acid among power plants
The Discovery Channel’s Drain the Great Lakes dives below the surface of the Great Lakes. See the underwater topography of each lake and learn about shipwrecks, submerged waterfalls, craters and invasive species. The lakes hold almost 20 percent of the world’s surface freshwater … but what if the water was gone? The program explores some of the man-made and natural wonders underneath the waters, and exposes the geographic uniqueness of the giant water bowls that surround us.
Martin Reinhardt, member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and teacher at Northern Michigan University, is planning a Decolonizing Diet Project, where he and a group will only eat food that was available 300 years ago in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The project officially starts spring 2012, but Reinhardt is already collecting wild foods and developing recipes. He’s made wild rice milk and pectin, gathered cranberries, leeks and ferns and been hunting to stock his kitchen. Reinhardt has already tried out the decolonized diet with a week of eating indigenous foods.
This video game by the Entertainment Technology Center and The Field Museum of Chicago, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, lets you take over the Great Lakes, protect them, and learn about invasive species. In round one, you are the carp. Fight native perch for food (and watch them float up to the surface with X’s in their eyes) and get your carp friends to jump out of the water and knock boaters out of their boats. In the next round, you are the Carp Czar appointed to keep the carp out of Lake Michigan. You have to find the carp and build barriers to stop them from getting to the lake, all while keeping up public approval.
There’s no federal requirement that municipalities have to disinfect the groundwater and Wisconsin scientists found that viruses can get into deep wells and make people sick.
A big stretch of white, sandy beaches is a picturesque scene for vacationers looking to swim, read or build sandcastles. But a clear shoreline on Great Lakes beaches can also attract pests — birds.