cc  >> Nadia Dominguez: Welcome to  Wednesday Nite at the Lab at  UW-Madison Biotechnology Center.  Tonight we welcome Dr. Trina  McMahon of the Departments of  Bacteriology, as well as the  Civil and Environmental  Engineering at the University  of Wisconsin-Madison.  Katherine, or Trina McMahon  as we know her here, has been at  UW since 2003 and is currently  an associate professor here.  Trina obtained her BS, as well  as her MS in civil engineering  from the University of Illinois  at Urbana-Champaign.  She also received her PhD from  the University of California  at Berkeley.  In her own words, she describes  herself as an academic brat.  Her father was a professor of?  >> Electrical engineering.  >> Electrical engineering, and  has traveled around the world  developing smart power grids?  Yes.  And Trina is--  Her focus is more on the  microbial word.  She is passionate about  microbes, as well as water. 

 Her research program focuses on  the role that bacteria play  in controlling water quality  in wastewater treatment plants,  as well as in lakes.  Trina teaches here at the UW,  courses in civil and  environmental engineering,  biocore and also microbiology.  So please join me in welcoming  Dr. Trina McMahon  to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.  [APPLAUSE]  >> Trina McMahon: Thank you.  Awesome.  How's my mic?  It's good? All right.  Thank you all for coming out.  I know this is actually a reason  maybe to be home in front of  your television, I know the  State of the Union is going on  right now, or will be soon,  so thanks for coming to hear me  instead.  But I do want to talk tonight  about something that's very  local, not so much a national  issue.  It is, of course, a national  issue, as well, but it's one  that rings very true for those  of us that live in Madison and  that's about our water quality  here, particularly in the  Madison lakes. 

 And I want to convince you in  this talk that although the  organisms that you can see  with your eye, and the fish, and  the loons that are in Wisconsin  are all very important and  interesting, it's actually the  ones that you can't see that the  absolute most important.  And before I get into that  though I want to point out that  I am kind of a poster child  for how Wisconsin embraces  interdisciplinarity.  So I got my degrees in  engineering, but I also have a  50% appointment in the  Department of Bacteriology.  So I'm 50% engineering,  50% bacteriology.  That makes me beholden to two  deans, two department chairs,  two sets of faculty meetings,  two sets of teaching obligations  and so don't ask me why I signed  up for that, but I actually  really love having my foot in  the applied world of engineering  and then the basic science world  of microbiology.  So that's why I maintain those  two affiliations.  And I'm also affiliated with  several other programs that you  see there listed on the slide.  These are graduate programs so I  can take my graduate students  from many different training  programs on campus.  I didn't actually list them all.  I also belong to the biomedical  engineering program and I think  there must be one other one that  I've forgotten. 

 But anyway, oh, environmental  chemistry and technology, yes.  So I can take students from all  kinds of different places and  that speaks to the  interdisciplinary-ness of my  research program.  So this is the logo that I use  for my lab.  It was actually designed by one  of my graduate students, and it  just shows you in a very concise  way the philosophy that we have  in our research.  So we study applied microbial  ecology, and that really means  we're looking at the microbes  and their ecology and how that  relates to applied systems that  are important to environmental  engineers, mainly water systems.  So we have a lake here which has  all kinds of important things in  it.  The most important, I think,  being the bacteria.  The fish are over here and  they're kind of important  sometimes.  The algae, which we call  phytoplankton, can be important.  And then there's some higher,  higher, larger organisms around  that other people who study  lakes care about but mainly we  study these guys. 

 I also have training in studying  water treatments so if we  collected our drinking water  from the Madison lakes that  would be a concern obviously in  places like Appleton which takes  their water from Lake Winnebago.  They worry a lot also in  Milwaukee where they take their  water from Lake Michigan, that  would be a concern.  But I don't actually study that  here because we don't use the  lakes as our drinking water  source, we use the groundwater.  But that's a component of the  water cycle.  So of course this drop here  represents everything people do  with the water in between their  faucet and their sewer.  And that's when I start to get  interested in it again, when it  gets into the sewer and into the  wastewater treatment plant  because they're actually  bacteria.  There are billions and billions  and billions of bacteria hard at  work at the local wastewater  treatment plant down at Nine  Springs treating the sewage that  you flush down the today.  So think about that the next  time you visit the bathroom and  think about all those bacteria  hard at work.  So we study them and we use  mainly the tools of molecular  biology, so biotechnology which  is appropriate for why I'm here  in this building right now.  We study the DNA of these  organisms because it's the  easiest way to detect them and  to understand their ecology. 

 And you'll see a little bit more  of that later.  So this is kind of our  philosophy.  This is another slide that I  think captures how I feel about  microbes.  And it shows you the two domains  that I work in.  It shows you the wastewater  treatment plant and the lake.  But what we really focus on now  are these organisms that I'm  showing in cartoon form.  These are microbes, these are  bacteria.  And then you see lots of letters  here that represent the  chemistry that those organisms  mediate.  So whether you've recently taken  organic chemistry or not,  doesn't really matter.  This might be something like a  decomposing piece of plant  material like a dead leaf that  fell into the lake. 

 It's breaking down, those  bacteria are absolutely  essential for breaking down that  dead stuff.  And they turn it into something  that is of a concern because  it's a greenhouse gas, CO2, but  in the grand scheme of things I  would rather have CO2 than a  bunch of leaves piling up into  the lake to the point when the  lake gets full of leaves.  So we rely on the microbes to do  that for us.  There's also all kinds of other  cycling that happens in terms of  nitrogen and phosphorus that the  bacteria carry out.  And this is a recycling process  that's very natural, it happens  in any aquatic ecosystem.  It's happening in your gut right  now with digesting the food that  you ate.  So these are things that  microbes do all around us.  And we want to understand how  the roles that they play in  aquatic ecosystems, whether it's  a wastewater treatment plant or  a lake, how that contributes to  the water quality there.  Because obviously these things  can impact the quality of the  water for our use and also just  for the aesthetics of, say,  a surface water.  So a few more things about  microbes and then we'll jump to  water. 

 But I wanted to make sure I  really hammered home why  microbes are so important.  So you might be more entranced  with charismatic macrofauna  like, I don't know, like I said  loons or polar bears which are  endangered and all these things,  but actually the microbes are  really what matter.  And that's because they are in  charge of all the carbon  nutrient and geochemical cycling  that occurs on the planet in any  major scale than you would think  of.  Way more so than plants or  animals.  They also have massive numbers.  The estimates that we have of 10  to the 30 cells is just a number  that even a human can  comprehend.  And it way outnumbers every  other living thing on the  planet.  You have more bacterial cells in  and on your body than you have  human cells.  And they are not the bad ones  that are making you sick, they  are the goods ones that are  keeping your skin healthy and  keeping your guts healthy.  And that's just in you. 

 So you multiply that by all the  people and all the animals that  have bacteria on them and then  all the soil and the water and  it gets enormous.  The biomass is higher than that  of plants, their diversity  outnumbers every other living  thing.  So you have to respect them if  nothing else.  Just respect the microbes.  And here's another reason why  you should respect the microbes.  It's called the big tree.  It's based on a piece of DNA  that is in every living  organism.  So this piece of DNA is in you  and it's also in all the  bacteria.  It's also in giardia, the thing  that give you diarrhea really  bad when you go camping and  drink unpurified water.  And it's also in these crazy  organisms that live in hot  springs. 

 That live at 200-degrees  Fahrenheit and PH2.  So it's a gene that's shared  with all organisms.  And so you are right here.  There's homo sapiens.  The length of the branches on  this tree is proportional to the  genetic differentiation between  any two twigs.  So that means the percent of  difference between that  organism's DNA and the next  organism's DNA.  So here's all the bacteria.  Big branch over here.  This is another group of  microorganisms that are very  important that are in our lakes  and everywhere.  These are all the eukaryotes,  including you, and right here,  see that, it's really small. 

 It says ZEA.  That's corn.  So you're right next to corn.  [LAUGHTER]  So I don't even have frogs, and  plants, and dogs, or anything  else on here.  And lineages of apes and things  like that are here buried in  this branch.  So the tremendous diversity  that's over here, you cannot  ignore.  So that's why get so excited  about microbes.  So if you want to go to sleep  right now you're welcome to.  You know that microbes are  important.  But maybe what you worry more  about locally is the aquatic  ecosystems around us, and, as we  mentioned, the water quality in  them, I look at two sets of  study systems. 

 I'm not going to talk very much  about the one on the left.  This is a picture of the Nine  Springs Wastewater Treatment  Plant.  This is where all those crazy  bacteria live.  Looks like a gigantic swimming  pool but I wouldn't advise  jumping into it because you  would sink to the bottom very  quickly.  That's because we give lots of  oxygen to the bacteria to  oxidize all your stuff that you  put down the toilet that we  won't talk about.  And we study, we can bring them  into the laboratory and make  sort of miniature wastewater  treatment plants and study them  in very great detail.  So I have a program to study the  genomics of these bacteria and  how they respond to different  stimuli so that we can better  predict what they would do in  the full-scale wastewater  treatment system.  But I'm not going to talk much  about that because I wanted to  focus on the work we're doing in  lakes.  So this is a picture of a lake  in northern Wisconsin.  We have a pretty strong research  program going up there. 

 And then we also have a lot of  stuff going on on the Madison  area lakes, which is what I'm  going to focus on, and  specifically Lake Mendota.  And I also mentioned some of the  other ones because a lot of the  problems facing Lake Mendota are  very similar and the whole chain  of lakes in the Yahara Lake  chain.  So this is Lake Mendota.  And we're looking at it down  from the north so this is the  Yahara River coming in from the  north.  This is campus, we're about  right here.  This is Picnic Point.  And the first thing that you  should notice is that the  landscape is very much  intimately connected to the  lake.  Which, of course, makes sense.  The land goes right up to the  lake.  But the land use is extremely  important for the lake which  some people forget about. 

 They think the lake, it's dirty,  it's disgusting, I don't  understand why and then they go  and dump a bunch of fertilizer  on their lawn because they want  their grass to be green and they  don't see the connection.  So the problem that we have with  Lake Mendota is that it has a  very diverse set of land uses  which are often in conflict with  one another and how we might  manage them to improve the water  quality in the lakes.  We have agriculture, mainly on  the north side and also a little  bit on the west side.  We have urban and suburban all  around the south and east side.  And this is growing, right?  So as we consider, there's  actually been a few public  hearings lately about developing  the North Mendota Parkway, which  would be a large road that would  go along here, and developments  over here on the west side.  And this is a concern because as  we transition from agricultural  to urban, that's going to change  the amount of runoff that comes  from those locations and alter  the amount of nutrients that go  into the lake.  We'll talk more about what  nutrients do to the lake in a  moment.  Now some people might think if  we shift from agricultural to  urban, that's a good thing  because farmers put a lot of  manure and fertilizer on their  field, and we know that that  contributes a fair amount of  nutrient load to the system.  So if we shift to urban, that's  a good thing, right, because  then we won't be putting any  more nutrients on the land.  Well, it's not that simple, it's  a lot more complicated than  that. 

 There's been research done at  the Center for Limnology and  with their collaborators to show  that even the process of  developing land that used to be  agricultural mobilizes a lot of  the dirt, a lot of the soil  which then runs, if it's not  managed properly at the  construction site, can very  quickly run into the Yahara  River or into the lake and  actually deliver a lot more  phosphorous than it would if it  was just sitting there  undeveloped as a farm field.  And that's because of the legacy  of all the fertilizer that's  been put on that land once it  gets churned up during  construction can cause a  problem.  So there's lots of land use and  land management issues that go  into protecting the water  quality in our lakes which is  not what I study, but there's a  lot of people on campus who are  very involved in that including  Steve Carpenter and Dick Lathrop  who are both in the Center for  Limnology.  So if you ever get to hear a  talk by one of them, you should  definitely check it out because  they're both awesome and they  know a lot about how the land  affects the lake.  What I'm mainly going to talk  about is what's actually  happening in the lake.  So this is from a newspaper,  this is from the Wisconsin State  Journal on the front page last  summer in July.  And it shows a picture of a  person wading into the water  near one of the beaches.  And it's a little hard to see  with this light but the water is  bright green.  And the title says, Madison  Lakes: It's a Shame They're so  Dirty.  And then we have a little  article here about how the  beaches are closed and the water  is disgusting and we see these  articles every summer, so they  come out all the time. 

 And it's been since I moved  here, since long before I moved  here.  So this is something that the  public is very aware of, the  newspapers are very aware of.  There's a lot of mobilization  now with the Yahara Lakes Legacy  Project which is an agreement  between the state, the county  and the city to do something  about the water quality in the  lakes.  And so especially beach closures  are a big focus of that and so  it's got a high public profile.  But I want to think a little bit  about what exactly is a dirty  lake.  It sort of annoys me when, I  shouldn't say that I don't like  journalists, I love journalists,  but the idea of using this word  dirty sort of irritates me  because what exactly is dirty?  I mean, we don't have syringes  and needles washing up on the  beach, and we don't have poop  washing up on the beach.  Is it really dirty or is it just  that the organisms that live  there are not the ones that we  want to be living there right  now.  They happen to be living there  because of what we've done to  the land, but I wouldn't really  say that they're dirty.  But I suppose in a newspaper  article you have to get people's  attention so you say that  they're dirty.  So what's making them dirty. 

 Well, this is a picture of Lake  Mendota and also Lake Monona,  well you see Wingra here, this  is Monona, Wingra and then you  start going farther down the  lake chain you would see Waubesa  and Kegonsa.  And so this is a satellite image  of Lake Mendota, and I don't  remember what year it's from,  but it shows you a very  interesting pattern in the lake  of what is actually a  phytoplankton bloom, an algal  bloom.  And it's been color enhanced  through the wave lengths of  light that come to the  satellite, but it shows you,  first of all, the intensity of  the bloom but then also the  incredible heterogeneity, so the  spatial distribution of those  algae and how complicated that  is.  So of course there's going to be  some green soup here on the  shore where the beach is but  there's going to be really  complicated stuff happening out  here in the lake that we need to  get a handle on if we going to  understand why this happens so  that we can do a better job of  preventing it.  And so there's some amazing,  talented scientists over in the  Space, Science and Engineering  Center and the Atmospheric and  Oceanic Sciences Department that  work on some of this remote  sensing stuff which I won't talk  much more about but if you ever  get a chance to interact with  any of them, you should check  them out because they're great  as well.  So at one level we do know why  these algal blooms happen.  We know that eutrophication is  caused by too much phosphorous.  This was worked out in the  1970s.  There were so very elegant  experiments done by some  Canadian researchers in a place  where they have full access to  their lakes where they can do  experiments on the lakes.  So you think about doing an  experiment on a mouse or an  experiment on a culture of  bacteria but they actually did  their experiments on the whole  lake which is actually really  cool and something that  limnologists, the people who  study lakes, get really excited  about because it's hard to do. 

 And so what they did was this is  an example of here's two lakes  and here's another lake that  they've actually put a curtain  through so that they created a  barrier from one side of the  curtain to the other.  And in both cases you can see  the ones that are sort of  greenish and murky have had  phosphorous added to them.  In this case, there was other  elements, other nutrients added  to the other side.  So this had carbon and nitrogen  added to it; this had carbon,  nitrogen and phosphorous.  So that showed that it was the  phosphorous that was causing  this excessive algal growth.  So eutrophication is the process  of algae, which are kind of like  plants but they're not really,  of growing to great excess in  water because they have all they  need.  They have nitrogen, they have  phosphorous, they have light and  they can go crazy.  Phosphorous isn't toxic it's  just that it makes the algae go  crazy.  When they do that, the water  gets murky, they take up all the  nutrients and deprive other  organisms of it, and then when  they die they create other  problems which I'll talk about  more in a little bit.  So this is the problem that we  have in Lake Mendota. 

 And so we can see evidence for  this very readily.  You go down to the terrace and  have a beer in the summertime  and it sinks.  It sinks because the algae are  washing up on the shore and  they're rotting, I mean they're  decomposing just like garbage  would or anything else.  The bacteria are eating them up,  and that is what makes the lake  smell so bad.  Plus it just looks terrible,  right?  The interesting thing about Lake  Mendota and the other lakes in  our Yahara lake chain is that we  know that the phosphorous is a  problem.  There's so much phosphorous in  the lake now and there's so many  inputs of phosphorous into the  lake that we're starting to  think that nitrogen might be  important.  And that's a controversial  subject because the people who  are trying very hard to limit  the amount of phosphorous going  into the lake don't want to  cloud the issue.  They don't want people to say  it's not the phosphorous, it's  the nitrogen because then that  might divert attention from  trying to limit the phosphorous.  But actually I think it's an  even scarier thing to note that  it's nitrogen because nitrogen  only becomes the limiting factor  until you have so much  phosphorous that you can't even  control it anymore.  So it's actually scary to think  that we would be to a nitrogen  living conditions in these  lakes. 

 And so that's an active area of  research that both my group is  working on, as well as other  people in the Center for  Limnology.  But what we know the most about  so far is phosphorous.  And there are many inputs of  phosphorous and outputs.  There is at least one output of  the lake.  So this is kind of an old map of  Lake Mendota, but it shows  inputs from the Yahara River on  the north side, which has  several tributaries into it so  it's collecting runoff and water  from creeks and streams up in  the agricultural landscape to  the north in Dane County.  And then there's also an input  over here.  And then there's a few smaller  ones, as well as storm water  which carries some phosphorous.  But most of it is coming from  the Yahara River and from a few  of the creeks coming on the west  side.  There is one outlet.  Of course, there's at Yahara  River that then flows into  Monona. 

 So all the phosphorous that's  leaving Lake Mendota goes into  Lake Monona and then it goes to  Waubesa and Kegonsa.  It's hard to get rid of it in  all those lakes.  So actually Kegonsa, most  recently, has been having worse  algal blooms, worse blue-green  algae than Lake Mendota has even  had.  So I mentioned, just now, I said  algae and I corrected myself and  called them blue-green algae.  If you go back to this article  from last summer, you'll notice  that right here it says  blue-green algae and bacteria.  So blue-green algae are a little  bit different from regular  algae.  Regular algae are like plants.  They actually are more like you  than they are bacteria.  Does that make sense?  They are more closely  genetically related to you than  they are to bacteria.  There's blue-green algae which  are a little bit different. 

 They are more closely related to  every other bacteria than you  are to algae.  Wait, no.  You and algae are really  similar.  Blue-green algae are really  different.  You remember the tree that I  showed you?  This one.  So you and algae are here.  And the blue-green algae are up  here.  Okay, so they're really  different.  That makes sense.  But there's something in the  language of how we talk about  algae that people have gotten a  little bit confused over the  years. 

 So when you see blue-green  algae, what they're actually  talking about is a bacterium and  the group is called  cyanobacteria.  They are also photosynthetic.  They're green.  They get their energy from  light.  They do photosynthesis.  But the cyanobacteria are the  real concern.  Algae, we don't worry as much  about unless it's like  filamentous, like cladophora  over in Lake Michigan.  But the cyanobacteria are  particular special in terms of  their dirtiness.  So why do we care about  cyanobacteria specifically in  our lakes?  These blue-green algae?  Green water is yucky water.  If you see it's green, you don't  want to go swimming, you don't  want to go water skiing because  it's green. 

 And that's probably programmed  in you somewhere because  actually it cannot be very good  to drink that water, contact  that water or inhale anything  that would aspirate from the  water like an aerosol from when  you're water skiing.  That's because some of them make  toxins.  So there's probably something in  your DNA that tells you I  shouldn't drink that water  because it might make me sick.  It's not going to give you  diarrhea gastroenteritis like  E coli would or salmonella,  but it could be a liver toxin,  it could be a neurotoxin and  have other affects.  So the toxins are what we're  worried about.  Every summer we hear about dogs  having seizures if they drink  water from the lakes and that's  because of the toxins that are  in the cyanobacteria.  The decomposing cyanobacteria  that I told you make the lake  smell so bad in the summertime  create other problems besides  making the water smell bad, they  actually deplete a lot of the  oxygen in the water.  So algae, when we die, sink and  they go to the bottom of the  lake.  And there there's plenty of  bacteria that want to eat them  and recycle all their nutrients  which is a good thing because  otherwise the cyanobacteria  would just pile up in the lake  and the lake would get full.  So we want the bacteria to  decompose then, but the problem  is that those bacteria breathe  oxygen very similarly to the way  that you breathe oxygen and so  they use up all the oxygen. 

 So the bottom of the lake  becomes anoxic or maybe you've  heard the word hypoxic like the  Gulf of Mexico dead zone where a  lot of fish and shrimp farming  is in danger because of the lack  of oxygen.  So we have the same problem at  the bottom of Lake Mendota that  those decomposing cyanobacteria  cause oxygen depletion.  And then there's other sort of  ecosystem level affects that  cyanobacteria have that we're  only starting to figure out.  So those are three big reasons  why we worry about the  cyanobacteria in the water.  So that's great, we know that,  how do we get rid of them?  Well, I would say that there's  two big ways to get rid of them  and both of them are really  hard.  The first is to make sure that  we don't get anymore phosphorous  in the lake.  And there's lots of people  working on this.  There's efforts to build a  manure digester in Dane County  that would collect up manure  that farmers don't need on their  fields for all the fertilizer  and so that's a great thing to  try to keep more manure from  going on the field.  But that's not all we need to do  because there's obviously this  issue of legacy phosphorous in  the soil and other inputs that  we're trying to get a handle on.  If you could suddenly, tomorrow,  stop all of the phosphorous from  going into the lake, there's an  estimate that it would still  take about 150 years for the  lake to get to any state where  you would call it recovered  where the cyanobacteria and the  algae wouldn't be such a  problem. 

 So we really need to work on  speeding up the removal of  phosphorous that's already in  there.  And why is it hard to get rid of  when it's already in there?  That's because of that process  of the cyanobacteria growing and  then dying and then the  phosphorous is at the bottom and  it gets trapped at the bottom.  And in the springtime and the  fall when the lake turns over,  that gets mobilized throughout  the whole ecosystem.  So you get lots of phosphorous  in the spring, cyanobacteria and  algae go crazy all summer, they  die and then the phosphorous all  gets turned into something  that's accessible again to other  organisms.  Fall, it mixes and now it's  available to everybody and then  spring comes, repeat.  And so it just stays and it  doesn't leave very well.  So it also doesn't help that  phosphorous has no volatile  form.  If you think about carbon,  carbon can become CO2 and it  leaves.  Nitrogen can become nitrogen gas  and it leaves.  Phosphorous doesn't have a  volatile form that accumulates  in any significant amount so it  just stays. 

 So it's unique that way.  That's why nitrogen may not be  such a big deal because it can  eventually go away.  So in the mean time what can we  do because we need to clean up  our dirty lakes.  People want something to be  done.  Well, at the very minimum we can  try to predict when the blooms  will happen because at least we  could issue beach closures or  warn the public not to come into  contact with the water at  certain times.  Right now it's based entirely on  a life guard looking at the  water and thinking it looks a  little bit blue, bluish green.  And that's how they decide  they're going to close the  beach.  And it's a very conservative  thing.  They don't want the beach to be  open if there's any chance that  those toxic cyanobacteria might  be there.  But that's not a very, it leads  to a lot of beach closures that  probably don't need to happen so  it would also be nice to know  far enough in advance so you  could issue that warning before  people actually come in contact  with the water. 

 So one of the things we're  working on in my research group  is to develop the tools to make  those predictions, and what goes  along with that is a lot of very  exciting research, of course,  that's what the students love to  do is to go out and monitor the  lakes at pretty high temporal  frequencies.  So they go out about once a  week, sometimes twice a week in  the summertime and collect  samples from the lake.  And they collect all kinds of  water quality measurements.  So they measure the temperature,  the dissolved oxygen in the  water.  We measure the phosphorous  concentration, the nitrogen  concentrations.  We measure the amount of algae  in sort of a bulk measurement of  their chlorophyll.  And then we also take samples to  look at their DNA.  We use certain molecular tools  so that we can look to see what  species are present very  quickly.  And also to tell whether they're  toxic or not.  Now none of those techniques  that we're using in research are  to the point for measuring the  toxin production or the genetic  composition of the organisms. 

 It's not something that the  public health department can  afford to do.  It's expensive.  We need research grants to do  it, big grants, and it still  takes several days to get the  result.  So it's not to the point yet  where we can use it as an early  warning system online like  monitoring right there in the  field.  So it's still very much in the  research phase but that's one  thing that we're working on.  So these are pictures of, this  is an undergraduate that worked  for us.  She was an engineering student.  This is another engineering  undergraduate.  This is a masters student in  bacteriology.  This is my postdoc who actually  has his degree in microbiology  but now is it working at the  interface of engineering and  biology. 

 So you can see we have a lot of  that sort of disciplinary  diversity even out in our  fieldwork.  So what I'm showing you here are  some data from Lake Mendota in  2008.  And this is what we call a  contour plot or a heat map.  And the letters on the side are  a little small so I'll explain  what they are.  So the top one is temperature.  And it's exactly what you would  expect, that warm color means  warm temperature.  So red is warm, blue is cold.  This is depth in the lake.  So the top is the surface and  the 20-meters is the bottom.  This is at one location in the  lake. 

 It's called the deep hole.  So it's the deepest part of Lake  Mendota.  It's out near the middle.  And along the X axis is time.  So it goes from around middle of  May to middle of October.  So this is in Julian day, which  is how we keep track of it.  It's like you just call January  1st one and then count it all  the way up to 365.  So if you can do the math in  your head in how this maps on to  the month and the day good luck  because I can't do that.  But I know that that started in  May and ended in October.  So what you'll see, first of  all, with temperature is that in  the springtime it's pretty  homogeneous. 

 If this had started even earlier  you'd see that it's completely  homogeneous when the ice thaws  and it's around 4-degrees  Celsius, right around freezing.  And then as it starts to warm  up, as the sun is shining, the  top of the water gets warm.  And warmer water is less dense  than cold water.  So the warm water stays at the  top and the cold water stays at  the bottom.  So you can see that as times  goes on the surface gets warmer  and warmer and it doesn't mix  with the bottom.  So that's part of what keeps all  that phosphorous down there and  what keeps the oxygen from being  replenished is that, we call it  stratification.  It's just like a layer cake  where you get the warm, light  water on top and the cold, dense  water on the bottom.  And this temperature right here  of about almost 30-degrees is  perfect for cyanobacteria.  They love it when it gets warm.  So here around this time of the  year is when they bloom and  really go crazy and that's like  July, August. 

 Here are some other  measurements.  This is dissolved oxygen.  And this is maybe the scale is a  little bit counterintuitive.  Purple is high, red is low.  So gets really high here in  June, that's because we had a  bloom of regular traditional  algae which produce the oxygen  because they're doing  photosynthesis so the oxygen  gets very high.  You'll notice that it stays high  throughout the season because of  the photosynthesis that happens.  And then here at the bottom you  get almost zero oxygen.  That's what I was talking about  with the algae sinking, the  cyanobacteria sinking and the  bacteria decomposing them and  depleting the oxygen.  So no fish hanging around down  here so fisherman worry about  that.  This is pH which I won't talk  much more about but it changes  also because of all the  biological activity in the lake. 

 So the other thing that we can  measure are things that are  hallmarks of these  cyanobacteria.  So this is a very complicated  graph but don't worry about  that, I'll point out what you  actually need to take away.  So X axis is still time but now  I'm zooming in on July in 2008.  So these are times of day.  This is midnight, 6:00 AM, noon,  6:00 PM, midnight.  And we have very high resolution  measurements and we have that  because we have a buoy.  And I'm going to show you more  pictures of the buoy in a  second.  But one of the major advances in  our work was being able to have  something out there that could  take samples when the students  aren't there and measure things  that we care about in between  the times when we go out.  And so this is designed kind of  like an oceanographic buoy.  So it can withstand very high  wind speeds which is good  because the first version that  we had got flipped one year and  that was very bad because all  the instruments got destroyed. 

 It was very expensive.  So we invested, actually the  College of Engineering combined  with the Center for Limnology  pooled their resources to buy  one of these things and put it  out in the lake.  And so it has solar panels that  can capture sunlight to make  energy and power a battery which  is kind of submerged here.  You can't really see it, it's in  a water-tight case at the bottom  of the buoy.  And then there's a bunch of  sensors that dangle down into  the water that measure important  things.  So temperature, dissolved  oxygen, all the easy things to  measure.  But they also measure things  like wind speed and the radiance  from the sun.  Things that are meteorological  that might affect the lake.  So we get all those nice  parameters.  It also has a cool ability to  measure the fluorescence of the  algae. 

 So algae have pigments just like  plants, they're green, that's  why the water looks green.  And so do cyanobacteria.  Cyanobacteria look a little  blue-green.  Well, that pigment, if you hit  it with a certain kind of light  will fluoresce and make another  kind of light and so we can  detect that.  And you can do that with a  pretty simple sensor that's on  the buoy.  It's not terribly expensive.  And you can then record the  data.  We have it set up so that it  sends it wirelessly back to the  Center for Limnology with a 10  minute time lag.  So we get a measurement every 10  minutes, and the measurement  that we look at on our computer  sitting in the office is from 10  minutes ago in the lake which is  fabulous when it's really  disgusting out and you don't  want to go sample anything if  you don't have to.  The students are a little bit  worried that they're going to be  obsolete because the buoy is  going to measure everything and  they won't get to go out in the  boat anymore. 

 But I don't think that's going  to happen anytime soon.  So what it's measuring, first of  all here's temperature, this is  the air temperature.  It's not doing very much, as you  can expect.  Or no, that's the temperature  right near the surface but you  wouldn't expect that to change  very much.  And the wind speed is green.  So it's not doing a whole lot.  Or no, yeah, wind speed is  green.  And I think that the black must  be the wind speed.  That might be mislabeled.  What you should pay attention to  though is this blue line. 

 That's the most important line.  So the blue line is the pigment  that's in the cyanobacteria.  It's the one that's fluorescing.  So notice that it's very low  here and it suddenly gets very  high.  So we saw this, actually this is  a fun story, one of my graduate  students was sitting on the  terrace drinking a beer and he  had his iPhone and he was  looking at his iPhone and he was  looking at the data from the  buoy on his iPhone because we  have an app, we have an app for  that, we can look and see what  the buoy is measuring in  real time, or 10 minute delay.  And he saw, he was sitting there  right around 6:00 PM and he saw  it going up.  And he said, oh, my gosh I have  to go get a sample.  So he jumped in the boat, he had  only had like half a beer,  hadn't had that much beer.  He jumped in the boat with a  couple other people and they  went out and they collected a  sample that night.  And so if he hadn't seen that  measurement from the buoy, he  wouldn't have gone out and  gotten that sample. 

 And this is a very important  time point to catch.  And, actually, it was extremely  fortuitous that he did that  because that same night a girl  went swimming, it was like at  3:00 in the morning, so the next  day at 3:00 in the morning, and  had a reaction to the water.  So she had a rash and her joints  hurt and she felt nauseous and  the doctor that examined her  attributed it to a blue-green  algae toxin.  And so that particular bloom  that my student saw on his  iPhone and then was able to  sample because of the buoy,  ended up being a pretty  important public health event  and we were able to capture a  lot of information about that  event and different measurements  that we made.  And so we're still analyzing  those samples trying to figure  out, we know that the organisms  that were present that day are  capable of producing toxin.  This is some of the molecular  biology data that we get from  these samples.  So each one of these is a sample  that they collected.  And this peak right here that  looks kind of like this pointy  thing is coming off of an  instrument that measures certain  types of DNA sequence and what  we see are the presence of these  two genera of cyanobacteria, the  microcystis being one that's  particularly good at producing  toxin.  And so we are also looking at  the toxin abundance in that  sample, as well as all the  others, and trying to relate it  to some of these other variables  that we measured with the buoy.  And I should point out that the  people who have been doing this  are my postdoc Todd Miller, who  is looking for a job, not  because I'm kicking him out but  because he's been here for three  years and he wants to be his own  professor sometime soon, so if  you know of any professor  positions, let him know, and my  master student Sheena Chaston,  who got her degree in  bacteriology, holding a really  disgusting bottle of green water  from one of her sampling events. 

 So I wanted to show you a little  bit more about this buoy just  because it's so cool and I get  really excited about it.  So here's a picture of it.  This is deploying it.  So we actually drag it out with  a rope on the back of a motor  boat from the Center for  Limnology, which is really near  the Union, and anchor it out  near the middle so it's by the  deep hole, the deepest part of  the lake.  You can see it says UW Limnology  on it so if you're ever out  there I heard that some boaters  and some fishermen, it might  even be, maybe it's Hoofers that  it's some tradition to go out  there and pee on the buoy.  [LAUGHTER]  So please don't pee on our buoy,  because it's really gross when  we go out there and try to work  with it and thinking about  people peeing on it.  So please don't do that.  This is the technician who is  now a graduate student who has  been really involved.  He designed it.  His name is Luke Winslow and so  he's a material scientist  engineer turned ecologist who's  interested in water quality. 

 So again he has that really  weird combination of  disciplinary backgrounds.  He actually knows a lot of  electrical engineering which is  good because there's lots of  that that goes into putting the  buoy together.  Now, if you yourself want to see  what the buoy is doing at any  given time, you can do that  by going to a Web site.  Actually, I can show you  how easy this is.  You don't even have to write  down the Web site.  Go to Google,  type in Mendota buoy.  And it's the first hit.  And this Web site is hosted by  the Space, Science and  Engineering Center which takes  some of the data from that buoy  and serves it up so that regular  humans can understand it.  Unfortunately, today the buoy is  not on the lake because there's  ice on the lake.  We take it out in November  because the ice on the lake  would destroy it. 

 Because even though it's an  oceanographic buoy and very  solid, the ice out there is  extremely powerful and would rip  it apart very quickly.  So these measurements that you  see over here on the right, this  is where all the measurements  would be if it was working.  You can see the day we took it  out, it was November 25.  So it's exactly the time that we  took it out of the water.  And at the time, the water was  cold, 7.2 degrees,  45 degrees Fahrenheit,  and you can kind of see  what was going on with the  atmosphere at that time.  Here's a picture of the lake  where you can see where the buoy  is.  I kind of lied when I said it's  in the middle.  It's the middle from the  perspective of the depth  distribution.  So it's in the deep hole.  So if you wanted to see archived  data, so data from previous time  points, you can see that here. 

 It's going to take a little bit  to load.  Maybe it's going to be too slow  for me to use.  I thought I could do this in  real time.  Basically, if this would load,  you would see at the bottom  there's a place where you can  dial in the dates that you want  to see.  So we could actually dial in  July 1st to July 30th of 2008 or  2009.  And it would pull that data up,  and it would show it to you.  So it's recorded and archived.  So if you wanted to know what it  was like on a particular day,  you could look it up.  And it shows you the air  temperature, the wind speed, and  then temperature at different  depths in the water, the surface  and different depths.  And actually there's people,  fisherman use this. 

 Obviously people who like to go  sailing because they want to  know the wind direction, the  wind speed, and so there's a lot  of people who use this for  non-research purposes, they just  use it because they want to know  something about the lake in  order to use it.  So that's very cool.  So check that out when you have  some free time.  Another cool thing, now that I'm  on the web, I wanted to show  you, it's something that the a  professor in the Civil and  Environmental Engineering  Department is working on here.  His name is Chin Wu, and he has  a very similar Web site to  access data about all of the  lakes in the Madison area.  So you can see the buoy right  here.  He also has instruments that  measure flow rates of water at  all the different important  locations along the lakes.  So that's where these red dots  are.  So those of you engineering  nerds like me can look at,  Q is a flow rate, so it's  9.5 cubic feet per second.  And I think that's actually like  what it's doing right now  because this is coming off of  data from the USGS,  the US Geological Survey. 

 So this Web site is a little  harder to find.  I think it's actually not public  yet.  I'm probably breaking some rule  showing it to you, just because  it's got this weird address  I don't think it's public  right now.  So it's a research project in  action, and it's being funded by  a huge group of people including  all of the public entities that  you would hope for like the  city, the county, the DNR and  the National Science Foundation.  So when this goes really fully  public they'll be links to it  from that buoy Web site that I  showed you, and if you're really  excited you could right those  numbers down and find it  yourself but I don't know how to  find it with Google.  So we've got lots of cool ways  to monitor stuff on the lake.  And I mentioned that, of course,  what we're trying to do is  develop tools that we can use to  predict what's happening in  terms of when the blooms will  happen.  What I just showed you was a lot  of monitoring, so us just  observing the lake to try to  figure out when stuff happens so  that we can develop those tools.  What I'll show you now, we're  going to go back to the web  again, is another tool that  we're working on and this is  complicated.  So I'm going to warn you right  now. 

 You got to concentrate on this  one.  So this is a model.  A model is something that a  scientist or an engineer uses to  predict something.  So it's usually a bunch of  equations in a computer and you  press go and the computer tells  you an answer.  The person who has to write all  those equations and make the  computer configure to do that,  they're really smart.  Way smarter than me.  So they built this model, it was  actually a group at the Center  for Water Research in western  Australia who we collaborate  with.  And they built this really  sophisticated water quality  model, and what you need to know  is that it has all this  complicated stuff.  Each one of these boxes is an  important thing in the lake.  So there's, let's see if there's  something that we could care  about. 

 Here's phosphate, this is  phosphorous right here.  Nitrate which is an important  nitrogen species.  There's things like pH,  dissolved oxygen and there's  stuff that's happening in the  sediment.  There's other pools of dead  things over here, it's called  detritus.  There's a whole bunch of  phytoplankton which are algae.  Here's zooplankton, here's fish,  here's bacteria.  I sort of get insulted that the  bacteria is just one little box  over here, we're trying to fix  that, but you can see that what  goes into each one of these is a  long equation.  So this is pretty scary math, if  you can read it in the back.  You can click on it and see  other equations and so for each  one of these they have their own  equation, this guy has his own  equation.  So lots of equations. 

 Complicated.  But this is sort of the way the  ecosystem behaves.  It's actually still a very  simplified version of how the  lake is configured.  So what we're trying to do is  develop ways to measure all the  things that need to go into  those equations in order to make  predictions about the abundance  or the frequency of these  specific algae or cyanobacteria  that might be present at any  given time.  Because they are sensitive to  all these other things and the  equations capture all of that.  So our research projects focus a  lot on trying to figure out how  to parameterize these equations,  so what values to put in for the  numbers.  And then once we know that well  enough, we can feed it into the  computer, press go and the  computer can simulate what will  happen across an entire season  of the lake and say the algal  bloom is going to happen then.  And we can also do it on time  scales of week and that gets a  little bit more accurate.  So start on Monday tell me if  there's going to be an algal  bloom by Saturday.  So that's our goal is to get to  the point where we can do that. 

 We're getting closer but there's  still a lot of measurements to  be made and calibrations of the  model that we have to do.  So our goal is to get this up on  the web so that it can be  predicting, we call it now  casting.  So telling you what the  cyanobacteria are doing right  now.  So that's our ultimate goal.  Let's see if I can get that  going again.  Okay, all right, so that's our  stretch goal, I would say,  getting that tool, that modeling  tool up and running.  The other thing that we can work  on right now, even though we  can't stop the phosphorous from  going in, is trying to  understand how other  microorganisms are cycling that  phosphorous.  Because as I mentioned, when the    cyanobacteria get the  phosphorous they keep it for  themselves.  They're pretty good about that,  that's why they are so  successful.  Then when they die, the bacteria  at the bottom of the lake get  it. 

 And so one thing we would like  to understand is how those  bacteria are recycling that  phosphorous and making it  available then when the lake  mixes again in the fall because  if we could somehow intervene in  that process, then we could  maybe stop the phosphorous from  getting throughout the water  column and recycling.  So we're still very much in the  research stage.  So this is another plot and it  looks a lot like the one that I  showed you earlier but this is  from 2009, and the colors are a  little bit different so still  the top side of this is warm and  the bottom is cold and so this  is temperature as a function of  time, again, and depth.  So the numbers are flipped.  Sorry about that.  This is now measuring from the  bottom so zero is bottom and 20  is the top.  But it's always oriented so the  surface of the lake is at the  top.  So it starts out cold and pretty  homogeneous, gets very  stratified in the summertime.  So what we're worried about is  this big red spot in oxygen.  So this looks a little bit  different from 2008 because it's  2009. 

 But is shows this mass of oxygen  depleted water or hypoxic water.  And we know that what is  happening down there is this  regeneration of the phosphate.  And I have a student who is  studying the bacteria that do  that and bacteria,  unfortunately, don't look very  good in pictures which is why I  haven't showed you very many  pictures of bacteria.  But this is bacteria.  I think they're beautiful.  Especially this one.  So the blue ones are regular  bacteria.  We've stained them with  something that when you look  under the microscope make them  turn a blue color.  But they also get stained when  they have phosphorous inside  them.  And when they have phosphorous  they turn kind of a  greenish-yellowish color. 

 So these ones down here are a  perfect example of some bacteria  that are really good at grabbing  on to that phosphorous and  holding it for themselves.  So maybe they have sequestered  it away so the cyanobacteria can  get it, maybe they decompose the  homogeneous cyanobacteria so  they got their phosphorous.  And so we want to understand how  these bacteria hold on to their  phosphorous, can we make them  hold on to it for longer and can  we slow down the rate at which  they would then release it and  make it available for the  cyanobacteria or the algae to  use when the lake mixes.  And this is a process that we  actually study in wastewater  treatment plants because  bacteria in wastewater treatment  plants are very good at holding  on to their phosphorous also,  and we use that as a way to  remove phosphorous from our  wastewater.  So the processes that we  understand from an engineered  perspective in a wastewater  treatment system could be useful  in a lake if we could somehow  figure out how to control those  bacteria.  Now that's a big challenge  because it's a big lake and  there's not a pump that I know  of that could drain the lake and  recycle it around like there is  at the wastewater treatment  facility because it's a really  big lake.  So there's some scale challenges  there that we have.  But in principle the science  should point us to something  that would be similar that we  could maybe capitalize on if we  can just get the basic science  down.  So what I've talked about is  sort of, I focused a lot on the  bad bacteria.  I talked about the  cyanobacteria, I evened  mentioned E coli once, I didn't  talk very much about the good  bacteria. 

 Even the ones that are doing  this with the phosphorous, you  could say they're bad too  because they recycle it, and we  don't want it to be recycled,  per se.  But I wanted to emphasize that  most of the bacteria in the lake  are actually very good so don't  go away thinking that the  bacteria are bad.  The ones that we tend to get the  research funding to study are  the bad ones, unfortunately.  There's a lot of really good  ones out there doing important  things that we don't necessarily  spend time talking about.  But I have other research  projects that I'd love to talk  with you about some other time  that relate to the good bacteria  and sort of more fundamental  ecology of those bacteria.  It doesn't relate as much to  water quality, but I think it's  still very important in terms of  understanding the world around  us.  And with that, I'll say thanks  to all my students and my  collaborators.  I have a lot of really fantastic  graduate students, that's the  other awesome thing about  Wisconsin is that it draws such  amazing talent from all around  the world and all around the  state of students who are really  passionate about science and  about the environment.  And you'll see that I also  seem to attract a lot of women.  There's only three boys in the  lab and they sometimes feel  outnumbered. 

 But we're generally nice to  them.  So these are all my students and  my postdoc, Todd, and then I  have some collaborators around  the country including at the  Center for Limnology here who  are really instrumental in the  work that we do, and then also  Dr. Wu and his student over in  the CE Department here.  And I have funding, I should  acknowledge my funding, coming  from the National Science  Foundation and Sea Grant funded  a lot of the work I talked about  today.  So thank you, very much.  [APPLAUSE]