Echo

Great Lakes Restoration Initiative may battle beach bacteria

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Editors note: Congress is considering a $475 million appropriation for Great Lakes cleanup.  This story is part of an occasional look at proposals for how to spend it.  Is this an appropriate use of these funds? Weigh in on this and other ideas or suggest your own on Echo’s Great Lakes Restoration Initiative forum. Other stories. By Allison Bush, bushalli@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo
July 21, 2009

Getting buried in the sand at the beach is a childhood rite-of-passage that could have negative consequences. Children could also be playing with bacteria and viruses that can lead to vomiting or diarrhea.

Echo

Wilderness fills Great Lakes classroom; Environmental education at Isle Royale

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By Andy McGlashen
amcglashen@gmail.com
Great Lakes Echo
July 20, 2009

One night shortly after Michael Jackson’s death last month, as mourners’ stereos pulsed with Billie Jean and Beat It, Emily Mugerian was on a craggy island in Lake Superior, training her ears to an unfamiliar note. “I heard the wolves one night,” said a beaming Mugerian, a pre-med senior at Michigan State University. She and 10 other students were camped on Isle Royale National Park for a weeklong outdoor philosophy course offered by MSU. “It was a whole week of personal growth,” Mugerian said.  “I’m just more aware of my actions, and I hope that continues.”

That’s just the reaction that instructors Michael Nelson and Lissy Goralnik hope for. “Good classroom experiences of any kind are supposed to change us,” said Nelson, an environmental ethicist at MSU.  “In environmental education, people say there’s something important about learning in the outdoors, with your feet on the ground, and what we’re trying to do is test that hypothesis and put our finger on what that is.”

Philosophy is “a very indoor pursuit generally,” and the challenges of organizing outdoor classes within the routines of academia make them rare, Nelson said.   Very few other universities offer similar courses, he said, Oregon State and the University of North Texas among them.

Echo

Great Lakes fish consumption advisories rise slightly; researchers question extent of mercury risk

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Allison Bush, bushalli@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo
July 17, 2009

Those looking to enjoy a meal of Great Lakes’ fish are best off going to Lake Superior, according to a recent Canadian study. The report compared the number of fish consumption advisories for each of the Great Lakes in 2009 to the number in 2007. Lake Superior had the least restrictive advisories, said Mike Layton, author of the report by Environmental Defence, a Toronto-based nonprofit that focuses on improving health and the environment. Consumption advisories indicate the presence of chemical contaminants in fish. Lake Superior does not have any advisories that are considered “most restrictive,” where zero meals of certain fish are recommended.  All the other lakes have at least three; Lake Ontario has 18.

Echo

Bacteria in Lake Huron sinkholes may hold keys to new cancer treatments, antibiotics

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By Sarah Coefield
coefield@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo
July 16, 2009

The colorful cyanobacteria coating the sinkholes in Lake Huron may be ancient, but researchers are hoping they will provide new medicines for cancer and infection treatments. Cyanobacteria produce a plethora of complex molecules. Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration asked Dave Sherman to take a look at the bacteria to see if he could find any hints of medical applications. He did. Sherman, the Hans W. Vahlteich Professor in the Life Sciences Institute in the department of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Michigan, studies chemicals produced by microbial organisms and looks for molecules that can fight cancer and infection.

Echo

Sinkhole backgrounder

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Additional information about Lake Huron sinkholes

The Lake Huron Sinkholes Overview

El Cajon Sinkhole

Middle Island Sinkhole

Isolated Sinkhole

Glossary of terms and concepts
The Lake Huron Sinkholes

This map shows the locations of three sinkholes scientists are studying in northern Lake Huron.  The gray area is Michigan and the color gradient represents lake depth. Sinkholes and caves are karst formations created when mildly acidic rain and groundwater dissolve calcium carbonate in the limestone, carving tunnels and holes into the rock. The sinkholes in Lake Huron were most likely formed thousands of years ago, before the formation of the Great Lakes but after glaciers retreated.  When the Pleistocene glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago, they scraped the landscape clean of any older karst formations.  As a result, karst formations in the Great Lakes region formed between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago when low lake levels exposed the limestone bedrock. The sinkholes in Lake Huron range in diameter from a tabletop to a football field. They lie both near the shoreline and in the deeper waters.

Echo

Lake Huron sinkholes give clues to ancient life

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By Sarah Coefield
Coefield@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo
July 15, 2009

The scientists studying the Lake Huron sinkholes know the colorful bacteria they host have a prehistoric ancestry, but a major question remains: Where did it all come from? The purple cyanobacteria mats in the Lake Huron sinkholes resemble mats found in ice-covered Antarctic lakes.  Bopi Biddanda, a research scientist with the Grand Valley State University Annis Water Resources Institute, suspects they may have a similar ancestry.  This suspicion relies on a theory that microbial life is already distributed across the planet, and comes out of hiding when conditions are just right, he said. The Lake Huron mats provide clues for how ocean and lake currents could have spread the bacteria.  Microbial gases in the sinkhole sediment force portions of the cyanobacteria mats to protrude like purple fingers pointing toward the lake’s surface.  The protrusions sometimes tear off and float away on the currents. “I think it is one of the ways (the bacteria) get distributed to other distant regions where groundwater may be coming out,” Biddanda said.  “And if they land there, they can populate with the same kind of microbes.” If the bacteria spread on currents, it likely happened long ago.  “We think they’re survivors of the past, that upon conditions returning to favorable conditions they were able to thrive and reestablish and keep going,” Biddanda said.

Echo

Special Report: Lake Huron sinkholes

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Great Lakes Echo explores the exotic life of Lake Huron sinkholes off the coast of northeast Michigan. Lake Huron discovery is a window on the past and future: Lake Huron’s depths hide a colorful, ancient world that holds keys to the planet’s history and clues for new cancer treatments and antibiotics. Lake Huron sinkholes give clues to ancient life: The scientists studying the Lake Huron sinkholes know the colorful bacteria they host have a prehistoric ancestry, but a major question remains: Where did it all come from? Bacteria in Lake Huron sinkholes may hold keys to new cancer treatments, antibiotics: The colorful cyanobacteria coating the sinkholes in Lake Huron may be ancient, but researchers are hoping they will provide new medicines for cancer and infection treatments. Sinkhole background information: Profiles of the three Lake Huron Sinkholes, how sinkholes form, and a sinkhole glossary.

Echo

VIDEO: Lake Huron discovery is a window on the past and future

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By Sarah Coefield, coefield@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo
July 14, 2009

Lake Huron’s depths hide a colorful, ancient world that holds keys to the planet’s history and clues for new cancer treatments and antibiotics. The locals in Alpena have long known about sinkholes just offshore from their northeast Michigan community.  But it will take researchers several years to unravel the local diving spots’ mysteries. The story of the Lake Huron sinkholes and their exotic ecosystems begins on a ship.  While surveying shipwrecks in the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in 2001, Steve Ruberg and his colleagues were surprised to detect underwater basins 300 feet below the surface.  To their trained eyes, the basins looked like sinkholes. The discovery warranted further investigation. “Looking at the data and understanding what was going on, we actually came back and revisited the sites in 2003,” Ruberg said.  Ruberg is an engineer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory and a project leader for the sinkhole research.

Echo

Wisconsin scientists target invasive species in Great Lakes ballast water

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By Jeff Gillies, jeffgillies@gmail.com
Great Lakes Echo
July 13, 2009

Associated Press reporter Elizabeth Dunbar recently wrote this story that checks in with researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Superior who are testing systems to kill aquatic organisms hiding in the ballast water inside of ships. They’re using a system of tanks and pumps to replicate the innards of a ship navigating freshwater — the only such facility the world. Treatment systems have to eliminate foreign organisms that wreak ecological havoc on the Great Lakes while leaving the water clean enough to return to the lakes.  The systems are one element of the patchwork of ballast regulations passed and proposed by Great Lakes states.  The confusion of following different rules in different states has shippers and environmentalists calling on Congress to pass a unified set of federal ballast rules.

Echo

Big pigs, big problem: Feral swine spread to Great Lakes region

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By Chris Parks
parksch3@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo
July 10, 2009

The wild pigs already troubling southern states are slowly becoming an issue in the Great Lakes region. In recent years these feral swine have been concentrated in California, Texas and southeastern states. But in Michigan alone there were 200 sightings of these animals in more than 60 counties as of late 2008. “Unfortunately, most statewide agencies don’t have individual numbers, but the pigs are now in at least 35 states,” said Seth Swafford, project manager for the United States Department of Agriculture’s feral swine management. And their numbers appear to be increasing in the Midwest, he said.