It's been updated a lot. It's really nice.
The person that she came, she fixed it, she put her two weeks in.
Okay.
Ready to meet you guys, huh?
Okay. So, I guess the story is about the 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's 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 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 the job you're doing 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 of fish, and now I'm managing the project.
So, I was able to see that through.
I've been able to work with glyphic 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 glyphic
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
or what we've been talking about?
Do you see the trends going?
Yeah, I was worried you were going to ask that.
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 glyphic,
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 rules enacted to kind of keep mercury emissions lower,
and I think that that did help mercury concentrations in fish.
I think that I'm not sure that we're seeing that as much anymore.
I think that we saw things 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.
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 seeded territories
in Wisconsin and Minnesota and Michigan.
I think that's really important.
Long-term, over the next 10 to 20 years, is mercury still a bigger concern than PFAS?
That's a good question.
I think that we know what the effects of having too much mercury in your body are,
so I think 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 research needs to be done to determine the effects.
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.
Okay, 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's really long.
Christine Polkinghorn, C-H-R-I-S-T-I-N-E,
the last name is Polkinghorn, 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 University?
Yes, so...
What's the...
Yes, it's at the Lake Superior Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin Superior.
Okay, great.
Yeah.
I'd like to have the...
Yes, and technically I think it's University of Wisconsin Superior,
Lake Superior Research Institute.
Gotcha.
I think UW is supposed to come first.