This summer, UW–Madison senior Eliana Cook spent her time paddling around lakes in northern Wisconsin in a canoe loaded with research equipment. Each trip was just another day at the office as Cook, along with two fellow students, collected data at 21 sites as part of a collaborative research project on wild rice or, as it’s known to the Ojibwe people, manoomin. The crew spent long hours collecting water samples and identifying, measuring and counting plants. For Cook, that time on the quiet water with towering rice plants wasn’t work — it was magical.
Cook, a double major in conservation biology and anthropology, was one of 19 undergraduate students working as field technicians at the Center for Limnology’s (CFL) Trout Lake Station over the summer. The research station runs under the leadership of Director Gretchen Gerrish and is located north of Minocqua in the heart of Vilas County, which boasts more than 1,300 lakes in its 1,000 square miles. Each summer, students like Cook get hands-on experience developing research questions, collecting data and analyzing results in the lab as they work on topics ranging from fisheries to water quality and, in Cook’s case, research on a culturally and ecologically significant aquatic plant.
“Growing up with Indigenous family members, I was always learning from them, and I became really interested in Indigenous culture,” Cook says. “The wild rice project seemed like the perfect intersection between traditional ecological knowledge and aquatic science.”
Traditional ecological knowledge refers to the deep ways of knowing that Indigenous communities have cultivated after hundreds or even thousands of years of observations and relationships with the environments around them. The wild rice project is a collaboration among several organizations, including the Lac du Flambeau Tribal Natural Resource Department and CFL. Cook’s summer was spent on six different study lakes, all with populations of wild rice in different conditions — some thriving, others struggling. Her crew would go to one of those lakes each day and conduct basic water-quality tests, count each individual rice plant and identify invasive plant species.
Cook also developed her own independent research project, something most undergraduates at Trout Lake Station get to do. With the guidance of graduate student mentors, she formed and tested a hypothesis about why some lakes are seeing mudflats suddenly rise to the surface and upend habitat for wild rice.
Just being able to be out on the water and working with the plant directly has been great.
Cook came to UW–Madison intending to study marine sciences. But she says this summer changed her perspective. “I don’t have to go all the way to the coast to do aquatic science — I can stay here in Wisconsin,” she says.
Marin Danz, a senior at UW–Madison studying botany, environmental science and conservation biology, shares similar sentiments. Danz is interested in agriculture and sustainable food systems, and spending her summer on a project with direct ties to food sovereignty and ecology confirmed her passion for this research.
“Just being able to be out on the water and working with the plant directly has been great,” Danz says. “I feel like I’ve gotten a lot closer to manoomin, and my respect for it has grown.”
Similarly, it was the promise of hands-on experiences that drew Zoe Stansbury to Trout Lake Station. An environmental engineering major, Stansbury is a senior who spent her summer working for CFL graduate student Danny Szydlowski on his research project exploring algal blooms deeper in the water column of lakes.
“This was my first time doing research,” Stansbury says. “I’d done some fieldwork in the private sector for engineering firms but nothing like this. This was just amazing.”
Stansbury’s project explored the drivers behind deep-water algae blooms in two lakes. While most people encounter algae as a green scum on the surface of a lake, it turns out that a lot of it is growing much deeper — down where sunlight starts to fade out.
“When we think about algae, we think about surface blooms and nutrients coming in from from fertilizer, and wastewater turning these lakes we love bright green so we can’t swim in them in the summer,” Stansbury says. “What we don’t think about is how this impacts the lower regions of the water column.”
To get to the bottom of those blooms, Stansbury helped Szydlowski change conditions in one lake to see how its response differed from another lake, which was left unchanged. The duo added dye to the water to block sunlight from going deeper and, in another experiment, added nutrients to the lake to see if they would encourage surface blooms that would shade the algae growing deeper. In both cases, Stansbury says, the deep-water algae blooms virtually disappeared.
Getting to do research to help scientists better understand how lakes could respond to things like climate change and agricultural practices helped Stansbury home in on her career goals.
“I always knew I wanted to do something with water but just didn’t know what,” she says. “Now I know I want people to have clean, available water. That’s what my passion is.”
Mason Polencheck, a senior double-majoring in zoology and microbiology, first came to Trout Lake Station as a sophomore. Now in his third summer “on station,” he’s running his own research project on aquatic salamanders called mudpuppies.
His first encounter with this elusive amphibian was on a fishing trip with his family as a kid. Then, during his first summer orientation at Trout Lake Station, he learned that mudpuppies are part of the local ecosystem and started snorkeling in his free time to find them in Trout Lake.
After that summer, he reached out to nearly a dozen professors to see if any would be interested in starting a research project on mudpuppies. Eventually, he connected with Trina McMahon, a professor of microbiology and civil and environmental engineering. After a few brainstorming sessions, the Mudpuppy Project was born, and Polencheck was headed back to Trout Lake for another summer.
“The [Trout Lake Station] community allows you to collaborate with people from many different backgrounds and ideas, expanding your science beyond anything you would have dreamed of,” Polencheck says. “It’s the perfect place to explore different scientific careers.”
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY! Trout Lake Station is a proud part of the College of Letters & Science, and this year it celebrated 100 years on its lake-rich landscape. Originally built so that the founders of limnology could have access to hundreds of lakes, Trout Lake Station has played a crucial role in the history of the aquatic sciences and continues to support worldclass research today.
