Antidepressants end up in fish. Tiny shards of plastic end up on beaches and in waters. Invasive mussels end up in lots of places they’re not wanted.
These problems are pressing in the Great Lakes and in Lake Champlain, “our pretty darn good lake,” as Deb Markowitz called it. And there’s “a lot we don’t know,” said Markowitz, secretary of Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources, in her opening remarks to the 58th Annual Conference on Great Lakes Research, hosted by UVM and the International Association for Great Lakes Research.
More than 600 lake scientists and policymakers spent four days, May 25-29, on the UVM campus — and on the shores and waters of Champlain — digging into how some of these problems might be better understood and addressed.
Great as in large
The scientists arrived from all over the world — mostly from Midwestern states, as well as China, Africa, and Canada — for a conference that has traditionally focused on the “big five” U.S. Great Lakes, but this year was explicitly expanding its focus to any “great, as in large” lakes around the world, explained UVM’s Ellen Marsden in an interview on Vermont Public Radio.
“One of the biggest issues we’re dealing with in the Great Lakes and in Lake Champlain is too much phosphorus,” said Marsden, professor of fisheries in UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources — and one of the conference’s co-hosts with professor Jason Stockwell. Conference workshops explored the latest research on the choking algal blooms that can result from this excessive phosphorous — but also focused on a lesser-known culprit in these blooms: nitrogen pollution. “Nitrogen has been underemphasized or overlooked in freshwater,” Marsden said, “we have to control that as well.”
Marsden and her colleagues like to joke that Champlain is a “trial-sized lake” she says: big enough to have many of the same ecological and cultural challenges as the Great Lakes, but small enough to study. Champlain’s relatively huge drainage basin, but modest volume compared to, say, Lake Michigan, make it produce “Great Lakes concentrate,” she says. “It's a very good lake for doing studies that might be intractable on the larger Great Lakes."
Plastics problems
Some of these studies are looking at the growing problem of plastics pollution. A major series of workshops in the conference explored how plastics — including microbeads used in soaps and “fibers from the clothing in the lint in your dryer,” Marsden said — break down into tiny particles and deliver a potentially toxic load into waterways. “They’re showing up in fish tissues, showing up in mussel tissues,” she said. “That's a whole new area of research that we're just beginning to understand.”
In addition to microplastics, the scientists at the conference presented research on “other sources of pollutants,” Marsden said, “that we haven't even begun to regulate” — including medicines that get tossed down the drain. In one presentation, UVM professor Christine Vatovec, a researcher in both the Rubenstein School and UVM’s College of Medicine, noted that of the four billion prescriptions filled in the U.S. each year, about forty-five percent go unused. She presented data from her recent study of the water exiting Burlington’s sewage treatment plant into Lake Champlain: it showed that of 101 pharmaceutical chemicals for which her team tested, 54 were present in the water. What the implications of these washed-out drugs are for ecosystems, wildlife, and human water supplies is largely undiscovered, Vatovec noted.
Scaleable situations
In the spring of 1998, Champlain was briefly designated as the sixth Great Lake when Sen. Patrick Leahy sought money for research and lake work in Vermont through federal Great Lakes funding mechanisms. After people in the historic Great Lakes region erupted in protest, the U.S. Congress hastily revoked Lake Champlain’s status as a Great Lake. The lakes-are-born-great jokes have gone on ever since, but the funding remained and the connections between the two regions continue to yield important scientific findings.
“We have many of the same problems as the Great Lakes, on a smaller scale,” Ellen Marsden said; the Great Lakes have some 200 invasive species to Champlain’s 50, but there appear to be comparable dynamics in understanding and managing a large lake with international boundaries, she noted — giving both regions common cause. “ It's a give-and-take,” Marsden said. “They're learning from us, and we're learning from them.”