- Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension.
Tonight, I'm delighted to introduce to you
Tim Campbell of UW-Extension.
He was born in Iowa City, Iowa, grew up in West Liberty, Iowa,
went to Notre Dame University and got his master's degree at
Oakland University in Michigan.
He came here to the University of Wisconsin- Madison
and then to UW-Extension about five years ago.
He's going to talk to us about 26 years on,
how Wisconsin manages the impacts of the zebra mussel.
I first heard about invasive species
from my high school ag teacher, Al Tieken.
He also introduced me to the land grant university of the
state I grew up in, which is Illinois, and he took to the
University of Illinois in October of 1971.
I basically have a job or the reason I like this job so much
is because it's a public land grant research university and I
first got a whiff of that at the University of Illinois long ago.
Mr. Tieken was also my FFA advisor and took me up to the
Boundary Waters in July 1975.
That was the first time I ever saw a salty,
an ocean-going ship.
This was in the port at Superior, and it was in the
ballast waters of those types of ships that zebra mussels and
quagga mussels first came in.
The irony is, and the sad news is,
Mr. Tieken died this morning.
And so I would like to acknowledge his influence,
not only on me but one of the reasons
we have Wednesday Nite @ the Lab
is because of ag teachers like my ag teacher, Mr. Tieken.
There are about 300 ag teachers in Wisconsin.
They're jewels and gems of their communities,
and they carry on the work of teaching stewardship
of lands and our soils and our waters.
They help advance the mission of the land grant and the sea grant
universities, including this one.
And, tonight, we get to hear how that kind of work and
stewardship continues to go and grow.
Please join me in welcoming Tim Campbell
to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
[applause]
- Awesome.
Thanks, everyone, for coming out tonight.
I can't think of a better way to spend a Wednesday night.
I've always seen Wednesday Nite @ the Lab,
popped in once or twice, and I was like
it'd be cool to speak at Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
Here I am.
So, hopefully my presentation is interesting, informative,
but hopefully entertaining.
Sometimes I think we talk a lot about invasive species, and it
can be kind of depressing and a bummer.
But we're doing a lot of really interesting work.
It's an interesting story, and I hope to convey that to you guys.
And if you came here tonight
hoping to get profiles of all the different invasive species,
I'd be happy to do that afterward.
[laughter]
But that's all information very readily available in fact sheets
on the internet, and I have a little bit of that here, but
hopefully I'm telling more of the story and what we're doing
here at the University of Wisconsin and across the region
to manage the impacts of aquatic invasive species.
I'll get into the logo farm here in a second.
But in addition to everything I just talked about,
I think beginning of the presentation
I'd like to talk a little bit
about where we've been and what happened to get us to
where we are today in terms of invasive species management.
I'd always think about it-- It's kind of been 26 years of
invasion biology as a science or something you could actually do
for a living, but there's so much stuff that happened
way before the zebra mussels even got here
that's important to know.
And then, I'd also like to talk a little bit about where we're
going and, you know, where are we now and where we're going
because I think as somebody that deals a lot with invasion
biology, there's a lot of really interesting stuff that we're
going to be doing in the future that I think will help us
manage all of these impacts.
So, I threw together a ton of stuff, and when I was putting
together my presentation, normally it's not this big of a
collection of information.
I don't have nearly enough stuff.
I have way too much stuff.
So we'll see how much we get through.
But before I think we should get started, we should talk a little
bit about how I got here.
I think it's always good to have a little frame of reference for
where I'm coming from with all my information.
And, well, I guess to get started, my father was
a conservation officer with the Iowa Department of Natural
Resources, and I apologize for a few blurry logos.
I didn't get a chance to swap them all out.
But he worked on the Mississippi River in Muscatine County, Iowa.
So I spent a lot of time near the water, not as much on the
water as I'd like because if your dad spends 40 hours a week,
more like 60, out on the water, the last thing you want to do
is go back out on the water. [laughter]
But we spent a lot of time next to it.
And we dealt a lot--
Or I always heard stories about game infractions,
people poaching, you know, work on the river with
sturgeon and catfish, but as I was growing up, zebra mussels
were discovered in the Mississippi River.
And most of the time people don't care about mussels, but
Muscatine, Iowa, was the pearl button capital
of the United States, or whatever.
They made a lot of pearl buttons there.
So you'd walk around and see a lot of mussel shells.
For whatever reason, I was really interested in mussels,
knew zebra mussels had an impact on native mussels, so I kind of
got the gears turning there a little bit.
And then I do remember at one point in time in my life--
I am not in this picture.
I wish I was in this picture. [laughter]
But my dad worked a lot of sport shows during the winter and
inevitably found himself next to a charter fishing company.
And this was something we were supposed to go do on Lake
Michigan, but before we could do it the charter captain told us,
you know, maybe you shouldn't do that, the fishing's not so good,
we're not really catching any perch anymore like we used,
you should go salmon fishing instead.
So we went salmon fishing and it was cool.
But this always sounded like a lot of fun to me,
and at the time I didn't really get why we didn't get to do this
and now I understand that invasive species had a big role
to play for me not being able to go catch perch.
And if you're somebody that remember fishing for perch in
Milwaukee off the piers or the breakwalls back in the '50s,
kind of a similar story.
As Tom said, I went to college at the University of Notre Dame,
but a big influence in my time there was spending a summer at
the research station in Land O' Lakes.
I did do some work, but I tried to crunch all my work in
the morning so I could fish all day in the private lakes.
There were 40 lakes up there that had no traffic outside of
researchers and priests that were going on vacation. [laughter]
So the fishing was awesome.
But I managed to--
My adviser there was a PhD student in David Lodge's lab,
and he's a very prominent invasion biologist for
the Great Lakes and I kind of fell into invasion biology by
working in his lab, which, oddly, one of my duties in the
Lodge Lab was making coffee for the coffee group
that worked out of that building.
And one of the post-docs there started a lab up at Oakland
University, needed a few graduate students, so I went up
there to do some work on the tributaries of the Great Lakes.
And that got me to Sea Grant,
where I have been for the past five years
but I've added a few affiliations on there now.
So I guess, what do I do for a living?
I'm an aquatic invasive species outreach specialist.
That means I do a lot of things
for a lot of different organizations.
I'm housed out of UW-Extension, but I'm specifically in the
Environmental Resources Center, which is at the intersection
of communities and natural resources.
So we know a lot of our environmental problems are not
just ecological problems.
They're human problems too.
And so I like taking that science and working with
communities to help come up with workable solutions for everyone.
I also work for the Wisconsin department of DNR and help
manage some of the aquatic invasive species,
communications, and they fund a lot of AIS work in Wisconsin
that I'll be talking about here in a little bit
through their AIS grants program.
And I work with all those people that the DNR funds to help make
sure that they have consistent materials, the right programs,
all that kind of stuff.
And, of course, I also work for University of Wisconsin Sea
Grant, which is based out of UW Madison but has field offices
all over the Great Lakes, and they promote the responsible
and sustainable use of our Great Lakes through research,
education, and outreach.
For some reason, that's the only one I've managed to memorize
the mission statement for.
And so I've done a lot of things
I never would have thought I've done.
I've worked with professional fishing tournament anglers
helping, you know, characterize what kind of risk fishing
tournaments pose to invasive species transport and then
develop solutions for fishing tournaments to prevent the
spread of invasive species.
I develop outreach materials with consistent branding.
I work with things other than Stop Aquatic Hitchhikers, even
though this slide seems to suggest that's all I do.
And then, you know, I've even gotten into finding new homes
for exotic pets, which I won't get to talk about this
as much as I'd like,
but pet release is a pathway for aquatic invasive species.
Think about the Everglades in Florida.
And so we're trying to get ahead of that here in Wisconsin.
So I actually had to hold that snake.
I couldn't find the picture, but I'm kind of like creeped out
holding this really long boa constrictor.
But these are all really random things I found myself doing that
I never would have thought I'm doing or would have been doing.
So, now that we're not strangers anymore, let's talk about
invasive species.
So, let's just-- I guess I'll make sure that we're all in the
same footing here.
What are invasive species?
Does anyone want to provide me with a definition of invasive
species?
- audience: Species that are in the wrong place.
- Campbell: They're in the wrong place.
Anything else?
- audience: Usually out-compete the native species.
- audience: [inaudible]
- Campbell: They'll out-compete native species.
A few other things that we usually give in our standard
definition of invasive species.
- audience: They were never here before.
- Campbell: Yeah, they were never here before.
- audience: Don't have predators.
- Don't have predators.
A lot of these things are actually traits or
characteristics that help make things invasive.
- [inaudible]
- Don't have any economic value.
That's a big thing.
So when we talk about a definition of invasive species
in general, non-native species that have ecological harm,
economic harm, and then we also tag on harm
to human health as well.
So if we talk about like the West Nile virus, that will get
lumped into calculations of how much our invasive species cost.
So I threw up zebra mussels and the rest, crayfish, as good
examples of invasive species, at least in the aquatic world.
Zebra mussels from Black and Caspian Sea in Eurasia.
You know, those are obviously from, you know, a different
country, cause big problems.
I put the rusty crayfish up there as just an example.
You don't have to be from a long ways away.
You don't have to be from a long ways away to be an invasive
species.
The rusty crayfish is invasive here in Wisconsin, but it's
actually native to the Ohio River Basin.
So it's not really that far away.
It just kind of switched drainages pretty easily,
and we think it's fishermen that brought them up
to use them as bait.
So you don't have to be from a long ways away to cause
problems.
And then, if we go down here a second, or just pan out a little
bit, I also brought up these other words that are used to
describe invasive species.
A lot of times people will mention non-native, alien,
exotic, nuisance, and I really like to keep it to invasive
species just because I know exactly what that means.
Non-native just means they're not from here.
It doesn't necessarily mean that they have problems.
I think alien and exotic are really the same thing.
And nuisance could be either a native or non-native species
that's causing problems.
So, I guess just a couple of things to build off that point.
I'm from Iowa.
We used to hunt a lot of pheasants there.
A couple of hard winters and habitat loss makes it so we
don't have pheasants there anymore.
But something I realized growing up
is that pheasants weren't native.
They're actually from China.
And it really got me wondering about kind of the economic
impact of pursuing all these non-native species.
And, you know, kind of the same thing with-- Not kind of.
Exactly the same thing with salmon and the Great Lakes,
which I'll talk a little bit about that story too.
But a big industry has built up around fishing
for these non-native species.
And then, lastly, always happens at a sports show,
somebody asks me when we're going to get rid
of those invasive turkeys or deer or something like that.
[laughter]
Definitely native.
Both cases are actually great conservation success stories.
But they can be a nuisance to some people, and they oftentimes
confuse those two words.
So, a lot of things can cause problems or a lot of things can
not be from here and actually be really good for us
and our society.
But when we talk about invasive species,
it means a very specific thing.
And so I really kind of focus in on the zebra mussel because
that was in the title, so I felt obligated to talk about it
at length for a little bit.
We can walk through some of the impacts of the zebra mussel
to show that they have ecological impacts.
There's definite impacts on our native mussels.
The zebra mussels attach to the native mussels, make it so they
can't move around so that way they can get silted in.
They also, obviously, populate or become very dense in the
bottom of a lake or river, and that has big impacts for
filtering the water.
There's, I think-- Somebody did the math, but like
7 trillion quagga mussels, which is in the same genus as zebra
mussels in Lake Michigan, and they filter through all of the
water in Lake Michigan in about a week.
So it has very big impacts for water clarity and
the amount of food in the water.
And if we zoom in a little bit on this graph or graphic
right here, you'll notice that
there's an interaction between zebra and quagga mussels.
Filtering out the water it makes it clear so that way more
sunlight gets to the bottom and then you get more algae.
In the case of Lake Michigan, they have a Cladophora problem,
which is in part because of zebra mussels and quagga mussels
making the water clearer so then there's more algae at the
bottom, or more sunlight getting to more algae, and then the
zebra mussels and quagga mussels also concentrate the nutrients
at the bottom of the lake.
So it makes the Cladophora/algae problem really bad in like
Cleveland, Manitowoc, Two Rivers area.
So these are all ecological impacts.
Let me see. What's next?
So I think next is a video of-- There we go.
A quagga mussel sped up, filter feeding, just to kind of give
you guys an idea of how this actually works because it's not
something that ever happens particularly fast.
So that you actually get to see it is kind of cool.
Maybe.
Oh, there we go.
I feel the need to narrate it,
but John did a pretty good job with the text.
So you can see them sticking out their siphon here in a second.
And then you'll see them pull material in, and then you'll
also see them spit material out.
That's called the pseudo feces, and that's the stuff that'll
concentrate at the bottom that promotes the Cladophora growth
in Lake Michigan.
And then if you've heard, I guess, about the shift in energy
dynamics in Lake Michigan and some of the Great Lakes and how
it's going from more pelagic to benthic oriented, this is
generally the process that's driving some of that.
So I know, it's super exciting.
A really fun thing to do is if you're with a bunch of kids, you
need an NR 40 permit to do this, which means you can transport
invasive species and posses them, but get some green water
and put the zebra mussels or quagga mussels in the water and
put, like, a container of clear water next to it, and over the
course of the day that water will eventually be clear.
So if you ever have to do an educational exhibit with kids,
call me first, I can get you an NR 40 permit,
and then you can do that.
So I think part of--
Moving on to the economic side of things.
I think part of the reason why zebra mussels really kind of, I
don't want to say created, but really pushed invasion science
as something you could actually do for a living was it was very
clear what the economic impacts were of the zebra mussels.
If you had a boat and it had zebra mussels in the engine and
your engine didn't work, that made people really mad
and it cost them money.
A lot of other invasive species, we've had to do a lot more work
to really connect the dots as to what the impacts are.
Some of those ecological impacts of zebra mussels, it takes a lot
of time and effort to study those impacts
and connect the dots.
But this, not so much.
If your boat motor doesn't work, if you can't get water through
your pipes, that's a really big deal, or if you can't use a
beach, that's a big deal too.
The western United States, which I don't talk a lot about here,
have actually really gotten on board with a lot of our aquatic
invasive species prevention efforts because
of their water infrastructure.
It's a lot dryer out there so
they have a lot more water infrastructure.
Currently not a lot of zebra mussels or quagga mussels.
And they've calculated that it would cost an additional $15 to
$20 million a year to provide water to an area of like
Los Angeles if zebra mussels and quagga mussels
were to get there.
So, you know, they'll spend a million-plus dollars a year just
to keep them out of that region.
So, you know, again, I think zebra mussels, really easy to
see what the economic impacts were there.
So, but even before zebra mussels, we've had stuff for a
long time that we were bringing over.
For me, before I started this job, the story really started at
zebra mussels because that's what I knew about as somebody
that really hung out inland.
That's what you heard about.
But common carp in all of my research, which I don't know how
much that is, was usually the earliest thing that
I could think of that we've brought over that's
a definite aquatic invasive species that causes problems.
But even when we brought it over,
we didn't really think it was that bad.
It was "the queen of the rivers."
A stately good and very subtle fish.
Even though they're new, it wasn't from,
well, in this case, England.
But from the United States.
It had a lot of food quality, sporting qualities.
People really liked that fish.
I think it only took like seven or eight years
before they were like, "No, don't want anymore carp."
They stopped stocking carp.
But they did a really good job at stocking them in
the six or seven years they did.
So they're currently pretty much all over the United States
except Maine or Alaska.
And so while there are still some people that like to fish
for them, there are carp fishing societies and my grad school
adviser liked to practice catching carp
on the flats of Lake Huron because he said
it was a lot like trying to cast to a bonefish.
So it was good practice for when he went to the Bahamas.
But other than that, not a ton of sporting-- Well, there's
some sporting quality to them right now, but people tend to be
pretty apathetic towards carp these days.
And they actually cause pretty big water quality concerns with
their behavior of rooting around in the vegetation
to try to find something to eat.
They muddy up the water.
And I can't think of a better example of some of these impacts
than our own Lake Wingra.
It used to be an algae dominated lake.
Part of that was due to the turbidity that the carp cause,
and they made it so there were no aquatic plants so you had
algae doing a lot of the primary production.
So they were like, what if we can flip this lake from an algae
lake to a plant lake, and we think we can do this by getting
rid of the carp so that way there's less turbidity, more
sunlight, you get more plants.
And here's a picture of Lake Wingra from 2007.
And you can see where they excluded carp.
There was less turbidity, more plant growth,
the water actually turned clear.
So they were like, let's do this.
So they got rid of, I think, all of the carp from Lake Wingra
except maybe two or three, and they do a good job of keeping
those carp populations low, if they're still there.
But then they've actually made it so Lake Wingra is someplace
you want to go swim and hang out, which I wasn't here in
Madison so I don't know what a green Lake Wingra was like, but
this looks a lot better to me.
So there's actually a lot of efforts in Wisconsin and across
the country to reduce carp populations to, you know, help
maintain water quality and give people back some of the services
from their lakes and rivers.
So, an entirely different story that I'm not going to go into,
the carp story is actually really similar to the story of
the rainbow trout but from a different perspective in that we
actually like catching the rainbow trout still and we like
eating it and we still pay to stock it.
But it's a very similar story that I found really interesting.
So I'm going to plug two books.
You can check them out from the Wisconsin Water Library.
This is one of them.
But a very similar story to the common carp.
So, kind of just moving down our timeline here of things that
have actually been here a long time.
Curly-leaf pondweed was first recorded in the United States in
1841, intentionally planted for waterfowl habitat and a second
invasion by watercraft.
So this is something that's been here for a while causing
problems, moving around, us intentionally introducing it
before we even knew it was a problem.
Like a lot of aquatic vegetation, it just out-competes
our native vegetation, becomes really dense,
stunts fish populations, all that kind of stuff.
Same with Eurasian watermilfoil.
It was discovered or brought over to the United States
a little bit later.
The earliest known record is 1881.
Although, there's like some foggy records from much earlier
than that.
And this has been linked to the aquarium and aquatic nursery
trades.
Again, secondary invasion by watercraft.
Now the similar aquatic plant impacts.
So, if we go to about 70...
before zebra mussels, or the 1920s.
This is when we start to--
The story starts to include the Great Lakes a little bit more.
For me, the story of aquatic invasive species and the story
of the history of the Great Lakes are very intertwined.
It's hard for me to talk about invasive species without talking
about the Great Lakes.
But they made improvements to the Welland Canal.
While the Welland Canal existed well into the 1800s, they made
improvements to the Welland Canal to help-- The Welland
Canal, I should probably explain, is the canal that goes
around Niagara Falls and allows large ships to get into the
upper Great Lakes.
And they made improvements to help larger ships get in.
And so this is where I think our first wave of invasive species
came in.
And most notably in my mind are sea lamprey and alewives.
We had sea lampreys come in.
That's obviously pretty nasty little sucker they have there to
attach to fish, liquify the innards.
While there are native lamprey in the Great Lakes, they're a
lot smaller and good parasites and they don't kill their host.
These are bigger than our native lamprey.
They kill our host.
I think one adult sea lamprey can kill 40 pounds of fish in
its lifetime.
So that combined with commercial fishing really did our native
predators in, like the lake trout.
There we go.
And then the alewives also just swam through and up into the
upper Great Lakes.
And so without the lake trout, and there's another interaction
between alewives and lake trout I won't go too much into, but
without the lake trout there was no predator to eat the alewives,
so they became really embolden.
And I don't remember this, but this looks awful.
I remember, I think, the first year I lived or worked in
Manitowoc, there were some alewives on the beach and I was
like, oh, this is kind of bad.
We had it really good that year, relatively speaking.
So I think this was in the '50s.
I think Time magazine ran a cover article on it once where
they had to take tractors and move them off the beach.
So this is kind of the state of things in the '50s.
But then, some genius fisheries guy from Michigan was like,
I've got an idea.
I'm going to get rid of these alewives.
I think he might have been told to get rid of the alewives.
So I'm going to introduce Pacific salmon because these
things are engineered to eat little silver fish swimming
around at the pelagic zone.
So, first it was coho salmon and then Chinook salmon, which
people tend to really like the Chinook because
they're a lot of fun to catch.
Cohos are fun to catch too.
But then that sport fishing industry took off, and even
today that sport fishing industry in the Great Lakes
valued at $4 billion to $7 billion a year.
So these non-native species eating non-native species is
really fueling that recreational fishery.
And even today you can still go catch fish
out on the Great Lakes.
This was my family two weeks ago out of Racine
catching a boatload of fish.
A lot of fun.
So you still can go catch fish out of Lake Michigan.
But a lot less Chinook and more cohos and things that have a
little bit more diversity in their diet.
So if we move to the '70s, what do we have here?
Oh, more improvements to the Welland Canal.
So they didn't improve it enough last time, and the ship traffic
had started increasing enough that it was starting to delay
traffic in downtown Welland.
They had a drawbridge and every time it went up it would delay
traffic about 30 minutes.
Sorry, 10 minutes.
And so they're like, we need to fix this.
We need to build the canal around the city.
So they did that and the process made it slightly larger and it
reduced the canal transit time by 30 minutes, which allowed
more boats to get and out of the Great Lakes.
So, more traffic, bigger boats.
And that kind of led to I don't want to say an explosion because
I haven't done the work to say that properly, but we have a lot
more boats going in and out of the Great Lakes.
And this is a graphic showing how connected Great Lakes ports
are today to the rest of the world.
The circles are direct voyages to the Great Lakes.
And all those little crosses are either secondary, tertiary,
or quaternary connections to the Great Lakes.
Point being, we're connected to the entire world now through
the Great Lakes, which is really good for a lot of our goods
and services that we need to get to the rest of the world.
It's good for us consuming things.
Not so good because it's a lot of ballast water
that's coming into the Great Lakes.
From about the '70s to 1990 to 2000, we had a lot of ballast
water come into the Great Lakes, which, as most people know,
is how a lot of our invasive species
got into the Great Lakes.
So, I didn't have the map, but there's a different map that's
pretty similar to this that shows environmental suitability,
and it's a pretty fun map.
The warmer colors are more environmentally similar.
And we'll notice that the most environmentally similar
part of the world to the Great Lakes is this area,
the Ponto-Caspian region.
Our favorite place to swap species with.
Zebra mussels, quagga mussels, round goby, all those things
are from that area.
And, as you'll see, we're pretty well connected to that area.
So, if we move a little bit further, early 1970s, I think
it's '73, this is when all that nonsense with Asian carp starts.
Silver and bighead carp were brought over for fish farming,
and they weren't what we were actually farming.
They were brought over for their filtering capabilities to help
keep catfish farms clean, and in the ensuing 40 years they've
worked their way all the up the Illinois River to knocking on
the door of the Great Lakes.
We'll talk a little bit more about Asian carp but not as much
as I'd like.
So, year zero.
I was looking at the data records for Wisconsin.
I've always heard 1990 for invasive, or, sorry, zebra
mussels in Great Lakes.
The DNR database goes '89 or '91.
So it's around here sometime.
This is when zebra mussels came in, and that's when we really
started to pay attention to aquatic invasive species.
From here on, for about the next 10 years
it was a new species every six months.
Probably even faster than that.
So your round goby, Eurasian ruffe,
spiny water fleas, white pert.
Tons of stuff.
There's over 180 non-native species in the Great Lakes, so
I'm not going to list them all.
But this is when all of the stuff starts coming in and
changing our Great Lakes, making them the lakes we know today and
not the lakes that a lot of people grew up with.
So, it took about 10 years of stuff coming in before we
actually, I think, were able to figure out what exactly we
needed to do.
And there were some things that happened before that.
Like in the early '90s, the International Maritime
Organization put out voluntary best management practices for
ballast water exchange, but it wasn't until 2000 that it really
became standard that every ocean-going ship coming into the
Great Lakes perform ballast water exchange, which, if you
aren't familiar with it-- So ships bring on ballast, which
helps bring them lower into the water, helps stabilize their
ships, but unfortunately you're not just bringing in water,
you're bringing in all the species that are in the water too.
Journey across the sea, and then once you get here,
you either need to--
Well, you need to get rid of your ballast
to bring on more cargo,
so, as you expel that ballast,
you're expelling everything in it.
So what ballast water exchange is stopping somewhere in the
middle of the ocean and flushing out that brackish, almost
freshwater ballast that you have, bringing in salt water.
So you're both expelling all those invasive species, and then
if anything is there, that salinity shock often kills them.
So, we'll see it here in a second, but we think this has
done a really good job at preventing new invasions.
While we did discover things between 2000 and 2006, we think
that was more of a lag time from them being introduced and taking
that long to find them.
Also about this time, one of the first papers about recreational
watercraft being the vector for aquatic invasive species out of
the Great Lakes into all of the lakes in the Great Lakes region
came out.
And so this is when a lot of our recreational watercraft outreach
really started.
We, you know, could say that, yes, recreational watercraft,
that's how these things were moving around.
So this is when we really started to think about
how do we best reach boaters?
How do we give them the tools to help prevent the spread
of aquatic invasive species?
So, once we knew that, shortly thereafter, the Clean Boats,
Clean Waters watercraft inspection started, which is the
volunteer, we also have paid inspectors now, but program that
help educate boaters on how to prevent the spread of aquatic
invasive species.
If you are interested, I could help you sign up to be a Clean
Boats, Clean Waters inspector tonight.
But you should just send me an email, we could do it later.
But then a lot of other things, like the Stop Aquatic
Hitchhikers campaign, the Citizen Lake Monitoring
Networks, AIS program, all these things started popping up now.
And then, oh, here we go.
Anyone know what this is?
- audience: Spiny?
- It's not a spiny.
It looks a lot like a spiny.
It's Hemimysis .
It's the bloody red shrimp.
And this is the last invader that we have found
in the Great Lakes due to ballast water in 2006.
It does look a lot like a spiny water flea.
I have a picture of one of those later.
So, 2006 was the last time we've found a new invasive species
in the Great Lakes due to ballast water.
And from what we know of the bloody red shrimp, it does get
really dense in these clouds.
I've heard of people diving at shipwrecks
all across the Great Lakes
and all the sudden they'll see
this like super dense red cloud swimming toward them.
We don't really know what bloody red shrimp do.
They get really dense.
That's what we know so far.
And some things eat them.
I don't know what else, but I think we'll figure out more
of what their role is in the ecosystem here soon.
And then, shortly after that-- So, blurry salmon picture.
This salmon is a very unhappy, skinny salmon from Lake Huron.
All of these invasive species that have been piling up in the
Great Lakes, for whatever reason Lake Huron and how that fishery
was structured, there was a lot of different things going on.
There was less food going to the alewives due to zebra mussels
and quagga mussels.
There was natural reproduction of salmon in Georgian Bay.
So too many predators, not enough alewives, collapse of the
salmon fishery, which I think you can pin a lot of that on
aquatic invasive species.
And so that's really impacted how fishery managers think about
the Lake Michigan fishery.
2009, Wisconsin came out with their invasive species law.
It was one of the first invasive species laws of its kind
in the country.
So I'm really proud that we work in a state that's really
pioneered this approach to invasive species management.
It has two different parts.
There's a prohibited and restricted species list.
And then an invasive species transport policy.
And so the prohibited and restricted species are both
things that are illegal to-- Well, they're classifications
that make it illegal to buy, sell, trade, transport
invasive species.
Prohibited species, the DNR can mandate that you take action to
control them if they're on your property and they're illegal to
possess, where restricted, which I misspelled, species are
widespread already across the state.
Things like Eurasian watermilfoil.
I hesitate to call it widespread.
I think it's in about 200 lakes, give or take a few.
And there's over 15,000 lakes in Wisconsin.
But there are things that they're present.
We're not going to expect you to take action to control these
kinds of things.
So, this has been a really powerful tool for keeping things
like water lettuce and water hyacinth out of Wisconsin,
things we know are invasive elsewhere but not established
here.
And then our invasive species transport law.
Before this, it was just illegal to launch with-- Well, illegal
to launch with invasive species on your boat.
So you could be driving down the road with invasive species,
but you had to be caught in the act of
putting your boat in the water, which, good luck.
[laughter]
So this law made it illegal to transport
any sort of plant material on a public roadway,
and any law enforcement can enforce that--
or any law enforcement officer can enforce that.
And we also have rules in there that make it illegal to
transport water.
Some of our bait laws are tied in there as well.
So this has been a much more enforceable law for our law
enforcement officers and a really easy talking point for
people to help them comply with our laws.
Around the same time as when, I think,
there was a carp eDNA, positive.
Are you guys all familiar with Environmental DNA technology?
So there was a carp positive in Chicago.
So everyone was focused on carp for about three or four years.
Haven't really heard much about it in the recent years.
There's the Great Lakes Mississippi River Interbasin
Study that came out with a couple alternatives to the
electric barrier in Chicago and how they could maintain commerce
in the area but still prevent the spread of invasive species.
And after they proposed seven alternatives, now that's another
two years before they recommend one.
So that's kind of where that's at.
Although, the Fish and Wildlife Service still does eDNA sampling
in the area.
There's the occasional eDNA positive, but our understanding
of eDNA has changed to the point that a single eDNA hit doesn't
really mean as much.
There's a lot of different ways eDNA can get places through bird
fecal matter or fish markets in Chicago that are selling Asian
carp and then they dump the water.
So there's a lot of ways eDNA can get around.
So it's repeated detections over time that really hone in on the
fish, and we haven't seen those.
Just like we've had eDNA detections in Sturgeon Bay and
the Fox River, just single hits over a long period of time.
It's cause for concern, but not cause for action, if you will.
So it's kind of where Asian carp are at.
21 AZ or 2011 is a very important date.
It's the date I started working.
I thought you should note that on the timeline.
But in-- It took me three or four years to figure out what
I'm doing.
So the past year I feel like I really got a lot done.
So that puts us to pretty much today and where we are.
And, whoops.
So, I think we have a lot of stuff here.
We've got about 20 minutes.
Not even.
So, we'll see how much we can cover here.
We might skip some of the videos But we have a new species, new
methods, new pathways.
You know, tons of different things that we've been doing,
I think, the past 10 years.
And in Wisconsin we're at the point where we're revising our
initial aquatic invasive species management plan.
We wrote one in 2002, effective in 2003 and kind of in response
to creating of invasive species program in Wisconsin.
And so much has changed since them.
We, you know, our first plan and first kind of body of work was
all about reaching boaters and getting that message out there.
But, you know, there's so much out there now and we've done
such a good job with boaters that I think this will help kind
of show where else we're going and how we're focusing on things
other than the zebra mussel too.
So we have new species, and I hesitate to call them new
because they've been present in the Great Lakes
for other states for a while.
But there are new things to be concerned about
here in Wisconsin.
If you've been paying attention to the news,
you've probably seen a few of these things.
We have the round goby, which was discovered inland for the
first time in Wisconsin in Neenah and Menasha in Little
Lake Butte des Morts, just below the last lock that goes into
Lake Winnebago.
And this is especially concerning to me as a goby guy.
I know gobies eat a lot of fish eggs.
If you're familiar with Lake Winnebago, there are lake
sturgeon there, and gobies love lake sturgeon eggs.
So I'd really like to keep them out of there
for the sake of our sturgeon fishery.
But there is-- Once things learn how to eat gobies, they're
pretty good food, and so you'll notice that a lot of fish coming
out of Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair,
where gobies have been a while, are getting pretty big.
Some people attribute that to the gobies.
So, you know, it could-- There's a little give and take
there, but for me the impacts of the round goby are potentially a
lot bigger than what the benefits are.
And Lake Winnebago's already a really good fishery.
I don't think we need to change much there.
So gobies are something we're spending a lot more time
educating anglers about.
Anyone know what this is?
It sounds like it should be really pretty, and it's present
in Washington County, Waukesha county.
Starry stonewort anyone?
Okay. Me neither.
I wouldn't have known that.
So, starry stonewort is actually a macroalgae.
It looks like a plant.
It has not quite roots.
But it's been present in Michigan for about 10 to 15
years, and maybe even longer than that.
And for whatever reason it just took a long time to get over
here to Wisconsin, probably because we're doing such a good
job reaching our boaters.
And we just discovered it in Big Muskego Lake,
Little Muskego Lake, and two or three other ones.
But there's been a lot of popular literature out there
saying it's a lake killer and all that kind of stuff.
But initially what we found here in Wisconsin, it seems to
have some pretty similar impacts
to our other aquatic invasive plants.
Nothing too much worse.
Unfortunately there's no good chemical controls for it.
So we're really experimenting with other mechanical and, yeah,
mechanical harvesting methods, like diver assisted suction
harvest and manual removal, things like that to try to
manage these populations of this new aquatic plant that's
slightly different than everything we currently have.
Here's spiny water fleas.
Again, it was present in the Great Lakes, I think, early
'90s.
I'd have to look up the date to nail that down.
But it's mostly been limited to the Great Lakes and a handful of
other lakes.
But in 2009 we discovered, by we I mean Jake Vander Zanden's
limnology class here at UW- Madison, discovered spiny water
fleas in Lake Mendota and have actually measured them at the
highest concentrations of anywhere known in the world.
But they have a lot of impacts.
A paper recently studied by that lab suggests that
it's not as easy as saying
that they cost us $3 million to $5 million a year,
but we'd have to pay $3 million to $5 million a year
to get those impacts back due to decreases in water clarity,
which we spend a lot of money in the Madison lakes watershed to
keep water quality and water clarity high.
So spiny water fleas are reducing that.
There's also impacts to fisheries
that spiny water fleas have.
When they get all globbed up on fishing lines like that,
they can cause line to snap due to the friction.
So I already mentioned water lettuce and water hyacinth.
These things have actually popped up in Wisconsin a few
times the past couple of years.
They were very popular water garden plants.
They're now, in our most recent revision of NR 40, they're
prohibited species.
So, illegal to buy, sell, transport.
People still get them because you can drive to Minnesota and
buy them and drive them over.
That's illegal and I'm not encouraging you to do that.
But people still have them here in Wisconsin.
And, for whatever reason, when they're cleaning out their water
garden ponds decide to dump them outside.
And while evidence suggests that they'd have a tough time
surviving here, I'd never want to give things the chance to
survive here.
So we've spent a lot of time the past two years on response
efforts, manually removing these things, which for the most part
has been pretty easy as far as response efforts go.
You can see the plants on top of the water, get them with canoes.
But what we found out in Lake Mendota is that the water
lettuce leaves act like little sails, so they blew all the way
down-- We found them in University Bay
near the Sea Grant building, and then they blew all the way
down past the Union, I think to the Yahara loch,
or whatever down there in Tenney Park.
So they got quite a ways.
And then New Zealand mudsnails.
I forgot about New Zealand mudsnails, as evidenced by the
tiny picture at the end of this.
But we found these in Black Earth Creek in 2012 or 2013.
The first time they've been found inland in Wisconsin too.
And so they have a big impact on our trout fishing community
because they move on waders, and they can become really dense
and out-compete native macroinvertebrates for food.
They're not particularly good food themselves.
So these are all things that we're spending time with.
If you want to know more about what you should be concerned
about, the Council of Great Lakes Governors came up with a
"10 Least Wanted Species" list.
There's some pretty interesting things on here
that we don't want.
Zander, Wels catfish.
It's on River Monsters .
And then, my favorite is
the Yabby crayfish, Cherax destructor.
Sounds pretty terrible.
We don't want it.
And then, this is just the NR 40 invasive species plant list.
There are a lot of invasive species or prohibited and
restricted plants in Wisconsin.
This leaves out all the animals as well.
So, feel free to look this up whenever.
So we have lots of new methods too.
We used to-- Well, before we get into the really exciting
stuff that I've been working on recently, something that I've
learned a lot more about, if there's any actual social
scientists in the room are probably like why are you
generalizing all of this?
But I've incorporated a lot more social science in our work just
because I realized that just telling people about the problem
doesn't always help them solve the problem and take action,
I guess, to stop or solve the problem.
So, you know, incorporating some of these social science
techniques have really been a lot of fun for me just because
it's not really what I've been trained in.
So, I just took this out of a different talk specifically on
this subject.
But I just-- I'm going to blow through some of these.
So, I'm sorry about the rotation.
That's part of the reason.
So, all of these invasive species that I just blew through
humans brought them here.
That's kind of the common thread.
If something gets here on its own, that's natural dispersal.
If humans brought them here, that'll be an invasion.
And the thing is if all invasive species invasions
are human mediated, that means it's a human behavior
and behaviors change.
People learned how to recycle.
People learn how to stop smoking
so we can learn how to stop moving invasive species.
And like that little fact combined with every invasion is
theoretical preventable makes me really happy and helps me get up
in the morning and, you know, keep a positive outlook on what
I do because invasive species isn't always that.
So, you know, kind of with that, we want people to pick all the
weeds off their boat, drain all the water.
So if we tell them that, combine that with some science and
amazing facts, they're going to stop aquatic hitchhikers,
no more invasive species.
And it's obviously how this works, right?
Right? No.
Unfortunately, it's not quite how it works.
There's some of us that are super motivated,
and with the right knowledge, they're going to take action.
And this is, you know, if you're interested in this, kind of the
deficit model of learning.
Your cup is half full.
We give you some knowledge.
And you have all the knowledge,
you're going to do what you want.
And I think that's how we did
a lot of our invasive species outreach early on.
That we had all these awesome brands and campaigns.
We'll give people the message, you know, all these amazing
facts that blow their mind.
And we'll get that desired behavior that we want.
Unfortunately, you know, that's not really how it works,
like I said.
Life's full of things you do even though you know you shouldn't.
I have lots of examples. [laughter]
I use this.
I know I should not eat a hamburger with fries after--
Probably just shouldn't eat a hamburger period, but if I do,
I should get the salad on the side.
But I'm not going to because fries are awesome.
[laughter]
And nothing pairs better with a hamburger than fries.
But you might put yourself or give yourself like a prompt or
something like that to help encourage you not to do that.
So, like a Fitbit? or something like that.
You can see it and be reminded that, hey, I should maybe make a
healthier decision.
And so, you know, using things like that in our work,
I think we've done a lot of really interesting things
to help people prevent the spread of invasive species.
So it's more like, you know, tell people that they need to
pick their weeds off their boat, drain the water, you know, facts
and science, and then, well, have a whole bunch of other
things.
So we have prompts, which, sorry about that.
I don't know why that did that.
But in our invasive species world, we use a lot of prompts,
which just little reminders to take action.
So we have the key chains, towels, and stickers that all
have the Stop Aquatic Hitchhikers logo on them.
And these are all things people use
at that very strategic point.
The key chains when they're starting their boat,
towels a lot of time when they're on their boat,
and then stickers right on the boat trailer to help remind them
as they're taking their boat out to take action.
And then we also have reminder signs.
You can see them at some of our Dane County landings.
Give people the tools that they need to help clean their boat.
Just try to make it really easy for them.
We also try to offer convenient alternatives.
So we found out that a lot of people weren't draining their
livewells because they needed to-- Like they didn't compute
that taking their fish home in water was illegal even though
they knew that they couldn't take water or transport water.
So we started the "Drain" campaign,
or the "Ice Your Catch" campaign
and started giving people ice packs
when they were taking fish home.
So that way it's like, hey, we don't want you to transport your
fish in water, but here's something that's really easy
to do, and then provided literature to say actually
your fish probably is going to taste a little bit better too
if you throw it on ice.
So we found this to be really effective.
I don't know why that happened.
We also use opinion leaders.
So, for the drain campaign, we enlisted professional fishermen.
And this is a Wisconsin Foodie chef just telling people about
the benefits of icing your catch and transporting your fish
on ice as opposed to water.
And then we also, in a fishing tournament project we worked on,
had pro fishermen talk about the importance to their peers about
washing their boats and taking all the weeds off, draining all
the water.
You know, and something from their peer means a lot more than
the guy that gets paid to do it.
So it was really awesome to see that kind of change in behavior
and even mindset of our pro anglers.
We also used pledges.
People that pledged to do something are more likely to do
it.
So, for classroom pets, we had the red swamp crayfish in
Germantown, Wisconsin, which is the first time we found the red
swamp crayfish in Wisconsin.
Oftentimes it is either used in crayfish boils
or as a classroom pet.
And a lot of times classroom pets get sent home with people
and then they get tired of the pet, you let it go.
So to help prevent people from releasing those pets,
we have a pledge form that we can distribute to teachers,
and the teachers have to give this to the student to take home
to the parents so that way the parent knows how to take care
of the pet and that they should never release the pet.
We also try to equip our obligatory hubs with the right
information to help give their consumers.
So one campaign we have here in Wisconsin
is the bait shop initiative.
And the idea is to go to the bait shops, try to develop
partnerships with the people that work at bait shops, let
them know what aquatic invasive species are, give them the
materials they need to give their consumers again because
they're opinion leaders.
These are places that the fishermen go, and so it's a
great place to get our message out.
I'll skip that.
And then, I think we also have something I've been thinking
about more recently.
There was-- So we have, as far as communication goes, all these
ways we can reach people and tools that we have to reach
people.
I never often thought about myself as the tool to reach
people.
And so last fall I took a one-credit class here at
improvisational theater for science communication.
And it put me in a lot of really uncomfortable situations because
I was never an actor.
I was in the band in high school.
Not in theater.
But it got me a little bit more comfortable being uncomfortable.
And I realized the value of that class in helping speak to people
and read your audience a little bit.
And so I think that's something I've been working a little bit
more with our AIS coordinators across the state.
Think about yourself as the vehicle, the message too, not
just the pamphlets and the tools that you're bringing people.
You're important too in helping
making sure our message gets across.
And all of that stuff combined helps us get people
to transport their fish on ice
and drain the water and pick all their weeds off the boat.
It's not any one thing.
It's all of those things
combined and little marginal gains from each one of those.
So that's kind of the social science aspect
to some of this stuff.
And I have a few minutes.
So...
- This is a goby.
- So, sorry.
Thinking about all that kind of stuff, made me think a lot about
our communication materials that we have.
I think they're very good in a traditional sense.
They're good at communicating the topic, but as a
hyperconnected millennial that spends a lot of time on his
smartphone and consumes a lot of my content via Twitter and
Facebook, I realized a lot of the content that we produce
seems like it's more produced for the people I work with
rather than the people I'm trying to communicate with.
And in an effort to try to make sure we're reaching that younger
audience, we really started thinking about different ways we
can communicate too.
Creating videos that might appeal to younger audiences or
people that are just on social media and just try to make
things that we think people are going to share too.
Not just what kind of information can we get out there.
How could we put it out there in a way that people
are also going to talk about it?
Because, again, it means a lot more coming from them
than it does, you know, from me.
So this is an example of a video-- Well, so round gobies
are very easily caught on hook and line, and they're hard to
catch in traps and traditional fishery gear, especially when
they're in really low densities.
So in efforts to try to know where round gobies are, in the
Lake Winnebago system we're encouraging anglers to report
round gobies.
So this little video, we bought a Facebook ad, put it out there.
It was pretty successful in those regards.
But just encourages people to report round gobies and
what to look for in ID of a...
-video narrator: Gobies are bad.
They invade our waters
and threaten the other fish that are good.
- menacing goby voice: I'm going to eat your eggs.
- You can tell it's a goby by its bulging eyes, black spot,
and the weird fin on its belly.
If you accidentally catch a goby,
don't throw it back. That's bad.
Or use it for bait.
That's bad too.
Please do what you can to keep our waters in Wisconsin
goby-free.
If you find a goby on an inland waterway, just call the DNR.
The good fish will thank you by multiplying naturally, and
you'll catch less gobies and more good fish.
End of story.
- So we did get some comments that the video
wasn't scientific enough. [laughter]
It also doesn't show a goby.
But we made some tradeoffs.
And in terms of reaching a lot of people, we reached almost
35,000 people with this video.
Any other video I've ever made
has struggled to get over 1,000 views.
So I think that there's something to this approach.
Whoops.
Wrong button.
So, we won't watch this whole video, but we're also trying to
create tools for people to use online too.
So we have our Clean Boats, Clean Waters program.
Some people, the volunteers maybe don't expect all of the
time.
They only inspect the occasional weekend once a month.
So they don't always feel comfortable
going out and talking to boaters.
So we made these scenarios to help people feel comfortable in
maybe some weird situations that they might get into or some
different situations.
And these have actually got a couple hundred views in the past
year that we've had them out.
But it's just to give you an idea of kind of what happens at
a watercraft inspection.
- Water from boat and even coolers like this
that might contain catch.
Unfortunately, in the lakes here in Madison,
we've got spiny water fleas.
So it's really important to drain this water so these things
don't get to another lake.
Also, with your catch, in Wisconsin you need to
drain all the water.
We don't want to be transporting live fish.
- Yeah, and I'm well aware that I have to drain everything.
I don't use my livewell.
- So not particularly exciting if you're not interested in
Clean Boats, Clean Waters, but a lot of our watercraft inspectors
have found these things very useful in refreshing on
different scenarios.
It empowers them and makes them feel comfortable when they're at
the landing, which hopefully helps them inspect more often.
So, something I've been spending too much time on is a video on
spiny water fleas, which has turned into more of like a short
feature film of about 7 minutes. [laughter]
But I've been working with Dr. Brett Shaw here on campus,
and he's had this idea to try to come up with something that
combines the arts, the natural sciences, and social sciences.
We-- It's something people have been talking about.
You see a lot of films or displays that combine the arts
and some sciences, but it maybe doesn't help promote a
sustainable behavior that we'd like to see.
So, spiny water fleas obviously here in Madison are a big deal,
but they're also kind of a priority species of us statewide
because they're only in a handful of lakes across the
state.
So, this is something we've wanted to talk about and really
talk about the actions that you need to take to prevent the
spread of spiny water fleas, which is cleaning your anchors
and draining the water, which is a little bit different than what
we normally tell people of like picking the weeds off your boat.
But this video, admittedly, is really kind of weird.
[laughter]
I'll show you a short clip of it.
But, you know, it draws on a lot of social science theory that
Brett's more the expert on than I am.
But we're really targeting male boaters and anglers.
And we're really looking for that social media crowd that
helps us share it because we obviously don't have a ton of
money to pay for advertising, but if this can "go viral," you
get a big bang for your buck.
- Hi, spiny water fleas.
We should be everywhere and eat as much as we can.
Forget the fish and the fishermen.
We'll eat all the little fishes' food.
We'll get caught in the little fishes' mouths
with our spiked tails.
Ha, ha, ha, ha!
There'll be more algae in the water.
Green water!
Ha, ha, ha, ha!
We shall spread via their bilge water and
on their muddy, unclean anchors.
Ha, ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!
- So, by the end of the video, I think most people end up
really hating this guy.
[laughter]
Which that emotional reaction is actually supposed to make people
care about the subject.
We're really trying to reach these people
that don't already care.
The people that are kind of like
"Eh, I don't know if I care about spiny water fleas."
Hopefully this makes them care about spiny water fleas. [laughter]
And then do something to stop that guy from going everywhere.
So, you should see this next week
because it's going to go viral.
We'll send press releases out next week. [laughter]
You might see it via email,
but it'll probably just pop up on Facebook anyway. [laughter]
We also do a lot of work on new pathways.
I'll kind of go through these quickly.
The internet is kind of a new pathway, relative to the last
time we wrote our strategic plan.
So that's what Amazon looked like, I think, in '95.
That's what eBay looked like in 2003.
When we wrote our last strategic AIS management plan, you
couldn't buy things online.
That didn't exist.
And now this is a way to get species from all over the world,
whether you want plants, animals in the aquarium trade
or the water garden trade.
We get a lot of really invasive things
shipped right to your door.
So I've spent a lot of time working on these
organisms and trade pathways.
I hosted a first of its kind symposium in Milwaukee two years
ago that brought together researchers, managers,
one other group, law enforcement folks, I think,
to talk about Organisms in Trade (OIT) issues
and develop a plan moving forward.
So we've done some pretty cool work there.
You can see that more at seagrant.wisc.edu/oit.
You can see all the presentations and the fact sheet
there that came up kind of with our deliverables
and plan forward from that.
And we'll be having another one next year.
And then another, you know, way that we've been addressing these
OIT pathways is the Great Lakes detector of invasives,
aquatics and trades.
And it's actually a program that has some machine learning
components that finds that you can input all the invasive
species you wanted to look for, and it's smart enough to figure
out when it's a blog post talking about this versus
something that's selling it.
So it's made it a lot easier for us to find the invasive species
online that people are selling, so that way we can reach out to
those people selling them to make sure that they can't sell
them here in Wisconsin.
We've also had specialized watercraft.
So we've been reaching boaters and fishermen in general,
but things that we don't really think a lot about, like,
for example, wakeboard boats that really only started being
produced as is in about 2000.
They have ballast systems.
Like little, mini transoceanic shipping vessels, which
is not something we really knew
because as much as I would like to be a wakeboarder, I'm not.
So, we've done a little bit of preliminary research,
published a paper.
That should be out next month regarding that.
But they have these little ballast tanks in them.
They contain lots of water.
Some of these things will have over, I think, 20 gallons of
water left in the ballast tanks.
We used to be concerned with, like, a cup of water
in a fishing boat, but these have 20 gallons and
hold live plankton communities that can survive weeks.
And that all kind of grew into,
along with a whole bunch of other things.
The American Boat and Yacht Council developing a new
standard for boat manufacturers to help design boats in ways
that either make it easier for consumers to prevent the spread
of invasive species or just make it so the boats don't move
invasive species in general.
So make it so the trailers don't collect plant material,
or make it so the ballast tanks drain more completely.
So that's been a really cool product of that work.
And then, we're starting to think a lot more
about waterfowl hunters.
You know, we think about boaters in the summer, but we don't
really think about waterfowl hunters that are moving a whole
bunch of plant material and mud around on their boats.
So how are we going to reach them?
What kind of risks are there?
And then, I'm not going to spend a ton of time on this because
each one of these things is a 20-minute story in and of
itself, but we have a great partnership of people throughout
the state doing work to prevent the spread of invasive species.
Whether it's some of our pro fishermen partners-- This is
former World Walleye Champion Johnnie Candle sporting our stop
aquatic hitchhikers tattoo.
A couple of our different invasive species coordinators
that are either out in the field doing fieldwork or working with
students and putting together poster contests to help educate
them about aquatic invasive species.
A coworker, Jamie, that works in Green Bay that runs the Exotic
Animal Rescue that helps prevent the pet release pathway.
These are all our invader crusader award winners for
invasive species awareness month, which actually starts
today.
So, happy invasive species awareness month.
So I work with a fantastic network of people that help me
implement the programs that I design but also give me a lot of
really good feedback and ideas for new programs that we need.
So, I guess I'd like to say I don't actually do a lot of work.
I take all the work that people want me to do,
kind of pull a few strings, and have other people do it.
And I talk about a lot of the work that other people do too.
So, at that, I think I gave you like a really big overview
of what's happened, what's going on.
I missed a lot of stuff,
so I'm sorry if I didn't get those questions.
I'd be happy to answer them here in a second.
But this book just came out a couple of months ago,
"Lake Invaders."
There's a really interesting guy that I sit on the Great Lakes
Aquatic Nuisance Species Panel, and it's open to the public.
No people or nor members of the public ever show up because
it's during the week, during the day at some building
a long ways out of Ann Arbor.
But this author showed up for about three or four years
straight just to try to get his thumb on aquatic invasive
species issues in the Great Lakes and wrote a pretty good
summary about what's been happening in the Great Lakes
region for the past 10 or 15 years.
Read it.
It was really interesting, so that's also available
at the Wisconsin Water Library.
So if I missed something, Bill probably covers it in his book.
And I just returned my copy, so it's there for you to check out.
So, at that, if you have any questions that you don't get
answered tonight, you can always shoot me an email.
I'm on Twitter.
Pretty active there, so that's always a good place to get me.
And if you want to follow more kind of broadly what we're doing
here in Wisconsin, we do a good job of updating our Wisconsin
AIS Twitter account too just to see what people are doing across
the state because I think we do a lot of really cool stuff.
And I think you'd all be really interested in that.
So, thanks for your time,
and I'd be happy to answer any questions.
[applause]