Beautiful. It's been updated a lot.
It looks really nice.
Yeah, the person that she came,
she fixed it, she put her two weeks
in, okay?
Ready when you guys are.
Okay, so I guess the
story is about walleye.
Why, in your estimation,
why is walleye one of the key ones
to pay attention to for these kind
of issues?
Well I think it's important because
it's such, especially for the
tribes, it's such a
important food culturally
to them and it's
just a part of many of their
ceremonies and their culture and
it is important to make sure that
we're keeping their population safe
and looking at how much
mercury is present in those and
then making these consumption
advisories so that people
are informed about what is
a safe amount.
Safe lake to fish in, how many
fish meals they can eat from there
a month basically and
make sure that they're keeping their
families safe.
So when you're doing this work,
I mean this is probably just one
portion of like the job you do
here, but I mean You
talked about you came here the year
after this started.
What does it mean to you to be part
of such a long longitudinal
study?
Right, it's amazing to have
just the breadth
of this and the depth of this
study because we've been able to
work on this for years and I've
learned a lot of things as a
scientist. I started here just
out of graduate school.
I ground a lot fish and now
I'm managing the project.
I was able to see that
through. I've been able to work with
GLIFWC individuals, several
different individuals there,
on writing quality advisories
and looking at what's important
when we're doing the analysis to
make sure that we're answering the
questions that are important to them
and doing really good quality
work so we have the quality checks
built in like duplicates and
standards and reference checks.
So it's important to us.
It's great to be able to give that
information to people.
And I think we just have a really
good relationship with GLIFWC and
to be able to provide that to them.
And it's an interesting topic too,
like everybody's excited about
fishing and everybody loves catching
a walleye, so it's good information
to be part of all of that together.
Anything else that you can think of
that you want to add with what we've
been talking about?
Do you already see the trends going?
Yeah, I was worried you were going
to ask.
Part of the problem is that because
it's a partnership,
one of the things that we do is we
analyze the fish and we write the
report and we hand it off to GLIFWC
and then you guys
make the maps, but I
don't have a clear picture of
what have been the trends over 30
years. We should be able to look at
that. I think that there
were...
There were rules enacted to kind
of keep mercury emissions
lower and I
think that that did help mercury
concentrations in fish.
I think I'm
not sure that we're seeing that as
much anymore. I think we saw
things kind of drop off with mercury
concentrations in fish and now
they've plateaued and maybe jumped
up a little bit.
But I don't know why that is.
I think there's a lot of things that
can contribute to that.
So it would be really nice
if we could take a look at
the data over those years, because
we have lakes that we've
looked at on five-year and
three-year cycles.
So I think we do have the
information that we would be able to
look at data and write a really
good paper on what are the mercury
trends in the ceded territories
in Wisconsin and Minnesota and
Michigan. So.
Yeah, I think that's really
important.
Long term over the next 10 to
20 years,
is mercury still a bigger concern
than PFAS?
Um, that's a good question.
I think that we know what
the, we know
what the effects of having too much
mercury in your body are,
so I think that that's not
going away at all.
I think right now PFAS is
a little bit of an unknown as
far as what are the effects on
people and so I think that
that research needs to be done to
determine the effects and
it's PFAS analysis is
very complicated And
so I think There needs to
be efforts made in that front to
make sure we're doing good analysis.
And hopefully 30 years down the road
they've got something like this that
they can look back on and say,
you know, we've got really good
solid results that we're confident
in the quality of those results.
Can I get you to say and spell your
name and give your title?
Oh yes, this is going to take a
while, my name is really long.
Christine Polkinghorn, C-H-R-I-S-T-I
N-E, the last name is Polkinghorne,
P-O-L-K-I N-G-H
O-R N- E and
my title is Research Program
Manager at the Lake Superior
Research Institute.
Is that technically at
UW-Superior King or
what's the...
Yes, it's at the Lake
Superior Research Institute at the
University of Wisconsin-Superior.
I'd like to have some.
Yes, and technically I think it's
the University of Wisconsin Lake
Superior Research Institute.
I think UWS is supposed to come
first.