Lake Science

Season 2 Episode 3 | 27m 3sVideo has Closed Captions

We examine Lake Erie’s history of research to better understand its patterns and climate.

We go from the shipbuilding to the shipwrecks. Why is the Erie Quadrangle a thing and what is it about Lake Erie that makes it so prone to shipwrecks. We examine Lake Erie’s long history of research where people have tried to better understand its patterns and climate.

11/17/2023

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Chronicles is a local public television program presented by WQLN

Lake Science

Season 2 Episode 3 | 27m 3sVideo has Closed Captions

11/17/2023

Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback

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Chronicles is made possible by a grant from the Erie Community Foundation, a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, support from Springhill Senior Living, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

This is WQLN. Wow!

Did the glaciers make that?

Just remember that's a pile of slag under there, an old industrial waste. Forms our infrastructure here. We always take a look at the lake and assume the lake has always been that way. But you know, if you go back before the start of the Pleistocene, before the start of the Ice Age. (upbeat music) There's no lake there. It's a huge river valley, the Erigan River Valley. When you fast forward to the start of the Pleistocene, two big lobes of the glaciers came out and they were scouring out the Lake Erie Basin. Just think about glaciers as bulldozers when they're moving forward. They're pushing stuff forward, stuff is embedded, and then when they retreat, they don't kind of pull up their trou.

They melt. And so whatever they're carrying in the ice then settles down and so you had a ridge that was established. And then when they finally stalled the last time at the end of the Wisconsin glaciation... Imagine that they're covering pretty much the entire Lake Erie Basin. And that starts the first of a series of the ancestors of Lake Erie. First, a glacial lake, Maumee. And then, as the glacier starts melting back in these two lobes, it stalls at one point, literally where the edge of the glacier is right between Long Point and Presque Isle. It's just to the north of Erie. Then, fast forward, finally this glacier is poking its way, melting all the way back. And sometime around 12,000, 11,500 years ago, the Niagara outlet opens up. One of the things to celebrate about Erie is you have Presque Isle. You have so many habitats, so much diversity of habitat, and then all of the plants and animals associated with them in such a small amount of real estate. It's part of this biological powerhouse, but it's kind of like you get all of the western basin confined in a small little area right off of downtown. It's a pretty neat thing.

I'm envious. [sound of VCR rewinding] Presque Isle is this 3,200-acre peninsula. We have so many different ecosystems on the peninsula, from the water's edge all the way to the climax forest. And so it supports a lot of different wildlife. And it is constantly changing. [music] You know, I heard the expression used, and I love it, that Lake Erie is like a hummingbird sea. It's got this really fast metabolic rate. [music] Because it's shallow, the furthest south of the Great Lakes, and all of the organic material coming in, not only from the Detroit River, but especially the Maumee River, all of these nutrients coming in, it is a biological powerhouse. And by far and away, it produces more biomass than all of the rest of the Great Lakes, I believe, put together. All of that said, however, it's also exquisitely sensitive to too much nutrients coming into the water. And being shallow, if you get too much algal activity, and then that algae at the surface dies off, and then the things that decompose it use up the subsurface oxygen, you can get dead zones in the lake. And, you know, we know, famously in 1969, when they proclaimed Lake Erie as being dead, it wasn't dead, it just had dead zones in the middle of winter that had become anoxic. While the conferences and committees continue, the dying flow to Lake Erie goes on. And that oxygen is a really important thing, and they wouldn't get any kind of restoration until the fall, when surface waters and subsurface waters reach the same temperature, then you get this turnover of the water, and you have oxygen-rich waters coming down to the bottom, and those bottom waters coming up to the top that help recharge the system. I've wanted to be a weatherman since I was eight years old, so I guess that's 53 years that I've actually enjoyed weather. [Music] If you look at any part of the country, any part of the world, you know, every place has their own little idiosyncrasies, or what we call microclimates.

As the name implies, these are climates on the scale of, you know, maybe a few tens of miles. And Erie is no different.

Erie is unique than most because we also have a pretty good rise in elevation from the lake to even I-90 and beyond. So the lake affects our weather in two major ways.

It affects the temperature, and it affects the humidity. In the summertime, the lake tends to have a cooling effect because the lake is typically, during the day, cooler than the land, so it gives a cooling effect, at least along the lake shore. But really, when we think of lake effect, we think of those heavier snow squalls that are in effect because the lake adds heat, which adds instability, it adds moisture, which not only adds moisture for the clouds and snow to form, but adding moisture also makes the air unstable, allowing the clouds to rise to higher heights and allowing more snow to fall. Officially from a weather service standpoint, most, the weather service divides their forecasting areas into zones. In the vast majority of those cases, they're on a county level.

So Crawford County is a zone, Warren County is a zone. Erie County and many of the zones right along the Great Lakes, at least, in the Chautauqua County, Erie County, PA, and Ashtabula County, there's two zones, basically north of 90 and south of 90.

So there are several zones, and across the country, there are zones where, you know, the microclimate of the lake shore, actually the weather service recognizes that as a separate zone with its own separate forecast. Presque Isle is constantly changing, and so a lot of that has to do with it being right on the front of Lake Erie, subjected to wind and water and waves and erosion, and that changes the shape of it. But we also try to maintain, you know, the existing shape of it because it is an important part of our tourism, of our economy, of, you know, the people that live here, our community. [Music] Hurry, hurry, hurry to the glorious beaches of Presque Isle! If she had her way, Presque Isle would be an island.

But like my second wife, much to her chagrin, we couldn't let her leave. And how could we let her go?

If not for her and the protected bay, it would be just another lakefront, crime-infested backwater village like Cleveland or Buffalo. Gross! Since the turn of the century, our nation's best and brightest minds, the Army Corps of Engineers, has prevented the separation of the Isle from the mainland, creating barriers to keep the sand from wandering, unlike my first wife, Jo-ann. I even named my Paasch turtleback after her, and she still left me for some jokester in Detroit with the Sugarhouse guy. But I digress.

To get back to the baaaayyy-sics.

Ha ha!

Funny! This humble natural oasis offers a quaint little lighthouse ready to move in. Pay no mind to the previous Lighthouse Keeper's review.

It is not, in fact, the loneliest place on Earth. That title's reserved for the Stannard Rock Light in Marquette, Michigan.

And who likes Michigan anyways? As bitter as Keeper Waldo may be, he and his wife Mary still managed to have a beautiful baby girl, the first babe born right on the peninsula. Yeah, not all that lonely after all, huh? Oh, Presque Isle... this lovely sand spit is just across the bay from the hustling bustle of Erie, P.A., the vacation destination of your dreams. Catch a pleasure steamer from the Public Docks to the luxurious Massassauga Hotel, right at the Head of the peninsula, a hoppin' place to see and be seen in various states of undress. You might even see a flirty calf or two during the Sassafras 2-step. [whistles] And if dancing doesn't tickle your fancy, high-rollers can pop upstairs for a high-stakes game of 5-card stud. [record scratch] [music] What's that? [whispers] Ya don't say. I'm sorry folks, the party must have gotten too hot. That's lit. The Massassauga Hotel burned down in 1882. You might have better luck checking out the picnic grounds at the forest by the sea. Waldameer. There's a newfangled trolley that'll take you right there from downtown. And if you do decide to put on your bathing costume and take a dip, don't you fret about riptides. The brave boys at the Lifesaving Service will scoop you up and dry you out like that nuisance sturgeon on the pier. They've got ample practice because they've been doing it since 1876. But boy oh boy, don't think the excitement ends here folks. Big things are afoot. Gossip on the party line is they've made this isthmus you want for Christmas into a whole state park. There's even talk of a paved road. No more trudging through the mucky marsh for you fancy folk. We'll leave the wetland wallowing into the likes of Joe Root. Of course I'd be amiss if I didn't bend the knee and kiss the grits of one Isador Sobel. Like Peter the Hermit, he let the folks of Erie upon a crusade to raise the funds and raise the proverbial roof of our prettiest park. And by golly he did it. And more! Sobel got together five thousand bucks more than what was needed. But we all had cash to spare in the golden days of the roaring twenties. And you'd be a rube if you didn't take this chance to catch all the flora and fauna frolickin' from hither and yon. P.I., as the locals call it, isn't just for the sapiens but also for the birds. This park is a terrestrial and extraterrestrial landmark. Even the feds know it. We're just so good at conservation that the National Park Service just had to recognize us as a natural landmark. Not just that, but even beings from other planets reportedly paid us a visit. With more bird watchers than you could shake a stick at, we're surprised none of them identified this flying object. Now don't worry Patty, it was probably just a Wilson's snipe. Don't wait for the ferry!

Get ready for a trip around scenic Presque Isle! Now with two whole lanes for you and everyone else you can pile into the station wagon. Pro tip, my third wife and I love taking a saunter down at Misery Bay. It's better than Stinkhole. Don't forget your Coppertone and Polaroids; preserve that sunset in your scrapbook, not on your skin. It's all waiting for you at the world famous Presque Isle! It won't be here forever, just like Joanne. I was almost born on Presque Isle Bay. My mom was out fishing the night before I was born. (soft music) Cascade Creek was within walking distance in my house when I was young. And my parents told me, you know, don't go there because you could get sick, you know. There was human sewage floating down that creek. There was oil, there was suds, there were different colored dyes and heavens knows what else was there. A friend of my dad's, Clyde Williamson, said, "Well, when I go to college, I'll study and clean up Cascade Creek.

" Because he said that 100 years before that, he said it was one of the best trout streams in the area. And of course there were no trout there then. As far as the lake itself, it was really bad in the late 50s, early 60s. Presque Isle Bay used to have Cladophora, which is a type of filamentous algae and it would wash up on the shore and just big mats of it. I mean, it'd be all over the shoreline. And it was so thick on the top of the water at times that the turtles could climb up on top of the stuff and be half the shell out of the water just with the Cladophora. When I started with the state, back in 1966 or thereabouts, the Pennsylvania Clean Streams law just went into effect. So here's a kid in his young 20s going around telling people, "You can't dump that in the water anymore.

" I was not a real popular person. It was different. I had my life threatened a couple of times. I guess part of the thing that I had pride in that I grew up there and I could see changes a little bit at a time, you know? And it wasn't just my job as a God-fearing person. I wanted to do the right thing for the environment and for, try to do the best I could for the public. - Keeping our waters free from pollution and conserving our underground water supply is of direct and immediate concern to us all. For ultimate success, the campaign must have the full and continued support of the people of this great state, a people aware of and willing to pay the cost of vital anti-pollution measures. Only then can we fully realize our goal to bring to all of us at home, at work, at play, once again, pure and clean, the waters of the Commonwealth. - We got two problems. You got the biotic and the abiotic. The abiotic is like the chemicals and the biotic would be the invasives. And even without the invasives, you still have the balancing act of how many fish can you catch in nets or hook and line or natural causes or disease, you know. So everything's playing together. The blue pike, oh, it was a big industry, yeah, yeah. There were a lot of boats going out there and there was a lot of competition too. I had talked to one of the commercial fishermen and he indicated there'd be so many gill nets. When you pulled yours up, if it was at the bottom, you're pulling up somebody else's gill nets and there were miles and miles of gill nets out there for the blue pike and didn't really think that there were a problem at first and they disappeared basically. - Things that were going on 100 years ago or 20 years, we didn't know any better. We were stupid. We were only concerned about getting your business going and we did all kinds of crazy things with the Great Lakes. When I went to college in 1960, there was no such thing as environmental science courses. You could be a doctor, lawyer, an Indian chief, but there was nothing to do with concentrations in the environmental theory. So it's all changed. These are all "new"s. Now blue pike was fished so hard that they eventually vanished. Of course, I was born in 1942, so I was still around, but I remember that was pretty much all the restaurants they had blue pike. It was a really good fish. People liked them a lot better than perch. People chose the fish not only 'cause there's the quantity, but they also had the taste. I think the last year that was recorded, they caught it and blue pike was only 100 pounds taken. Afterwards, 22 million pounds in one year, way back in the 1920s. - You know, the collapse of any fishery changes the ecosystem, changes the dynamics of all the other fishes and other organisms that live there. And so as you see the rise or fall of populations, you also have to be aware that that has almost like a domino effect on other organisms that live there too, whether it's as a predator or prey species, or depending on if they feed on plankton or if they feed on fish that feed on plankton, it really is a domino effect. In the scientific perspective, we're always learning from what has previously happened and trying to anticipate what might be coming up and how we can monitor and just be on the forefront of things as much as possible. - And years later, when I was working with the Fish Commission, trying to figure out why they disappeared, I sent notices out to different commercial fishermen or retired commercial fishermen in the United States and Canada and the consensus, you know, they had ideas, everything from pollution to the mayflies disappearing and to overfishing and everything, but it seemed that a lot of them thought that the invasion of the exotic smelt had something to do with it. - So an invasive species is a species that is not naturally found in the region, but also causes economic damage. And so you will see that invasive species, you know, are species that do cause some type of damage, but then we also have exotic species. So these might be different plants you buy at the greenhouse and plant in your backyard that are not supposed to be here, but they do not cause an economic impact to the environment. - They introduced a bait fish called the rainbow smelt. Now the rainbow smelt, they thought, well, they've been doing a great thing to give the fish something to eat. Well, they did, they loved them, eat them. Trouble is they couldn't reproduce. They have enzymes in their system that inhibits reproduction and that kind of did it. You couple that with the bad water quality and overfishing and it wiped it out. - It isn't all malicious. People thought that they could improve things. Oh, the Fish Commission people years ago, they thought the carp were wonderful. Well, the carp thought they were wonderful too because there's lots of them around, but it isn't exactly what we want. - We got to worry about the Western portion of our Great Lakes and that's around Chicago with the Asian carp. That's a real problem. And again, it's stupidity of man. They brought these fish, there's a flood, the fish got out and there they are. But it's a good side to it. I understand that they have commercial fishermen are dedicated to catching the Asian carp and are selling it to China because the fish in China are all out of contaminated lakes. And ours are not. They're getting a better price for it. - The problem with invasive species is just that. You don't know the potential. (soft music) So what we know about invasive carp is that the invasive carp spawn in deep flowing water during the summer months. We don't have that here. The Maumee River, the Sandusky River does. More than likely what's going to happen is Lake Erie is going to be where they all come because they'll be able to be born in Michigan and Huron. And they'll just funnel their way down into the system. And we probably won't see much natural reproduction of those fish with the way their morphology is now. But they're going to thrive here. They're going to, this is highly productive. It's where they're going to want to be. And the issue with invasive carp is not the fact that they're going to actively compete with the other species, but there's only so much room for biomass. So as you have more and more big fish, something has to give. - So when we look at the idea of evolution by natural selection, we are looking at that in a natural environment, you might have some change that has happened over time. And within the population of that natural species, they are able to respond. And the generational change or shift is responding to that environmental pressure. However, invasive species is not doing that. You are taking something, creating this pressure in a very short period of time. And that pressure can be very detrimental where it's aggressive. It's eating the eggs, it's competing for space, it's competing for habitat, it's competing for food. - Changes in the lake will take place. We can try to do some things like with the lampreys, you can put out lampricide in the streams and kill off a lot of the sea lampreys. But then there's side effects, you could kill off native lampreys or salamanders and so on. And you still don't kill off all the lampreys so they come back. - You can't do that kind of chemical warfare with fish. We know,we've had it happen in Pymatuning. We had the carp herpes virus come down and it only killed carp. And there was tons and tons of carp that died in Pymatuning just a few years ago. And that got the gears spinning. And one of the things that we constantly point out is you do not want to start messing with chemical warfare on fish because that can never lead to good things. - So I think if we go back to those industrial pollutants and you look at PCBs and DDT, kind of that mindset, if a little does it good, then a lot must be even better. Once it was realized that if you apply a whole bunch more pesticide, you're not getting any further ahead. I think once that was kind of understood that there is a balance, we need to protect what is being released into the air and on the land because that also impacts the water. That also eventually impacts us. And so regulations were put in place to control how much of these contaminants were allowed to be used or released in the environment. - So I guess what I'd like to do is make sure that people start paying attention to the chemicals they're putting into the lake. And I don't know, did I say, if I could just leave a message for future generations, don't be as stupid as some of the past ones. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Chronicles is made possible by a grant from the Erie Community Foundation, a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, support from Springhill Senior Living, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen. We question and learn. We here at Chronicles love bringing you in-depth stories about the Lake Erie region. And while we originally planned on airing an hour-long episode tonight, in true documentary form, sometimes things change and we go where the story takes us. We hope you enjoyed this first part of Lake Science. Thank you for your continued support. Please enjoy this episode from season one now.

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Chronicles is a local public television program presented by WQLN