9UNP1473HD_Tim_Campbell_WordPress

- 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 infract. 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 w 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. 

tional 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 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 tak 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! 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 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)