Wisconsin Public Television	Univeristy Place		Wisconsin Academy Fellow:	John J. Magnuson		4/27/14	UP5774  cc [APPLAUSE]  >> One of my tenets of being a faculty member at limnology and the Madison campus has been that a significant portion of my research, teaching, and service should be relevant to Wisconsin and where I live. And I'm going to tell you a few stories. One of my interests, in the 1970s, ecologists made the case that long-term records and analysis were essential to understand the ecological systems, and we live in ecological systems. Much of my science life has been devoted to this area or arena since '82 when we received our first long-term ecologic research grant from the US National Science Foundation. We studied the long-term dynamics of lakes embedded in a northern forest in Vilas County and in Dane County in the area here around Madison. I became and advocate of the importance of time and of space in both the philosophy and practice of research and ecology. The world could not be well understood through a study of one to three years long or of square meter plots. How is the present influenced by what happened last year or last winter? How are those plots linked to landform, vegetation patterns, water flow? The absence of such information was like trying to understand what I called the invisible present and the invisible place. Well, what's the invisible present and place? A time in space that was unknowable, owing to the lack of context, history and geography. You can't understand what's happening right here based on what's here and we can see right now. 

We believed in 1980 that the Northwoods lakes of Wisconsin would be little influenced by human activities. What a surprise we were in for. During the first 10 years of our study, which was in the '80s, rainbow smelt and rusty crayfish invaded several of our lakes. Those of you who have homes in the north or know about these species from the Great Lakes know that they're both destructive invaders and they transform the ecology of the lakes we were studying and thought would be pillars of a controlled part of our world. When we added Lake Mendota to these studies, we again found frequent local extinctions of fishes and the arrivals of new ones is a continuous process. And, at the present time, a fish that you probably don't even know, the cisco or the lake herring, appears to be on the way out owing to excess nutrients and climate warming. Questions we can answer with our 35 years of long-term ecologic research are enhanced by a few even longer observations. For example, I'll talk about one. Ice cover has been recorded on the Madison lakes since the early 1850s. It was recorded initially for the practice called reasons of harvesting ice. 

I bet you don't even know where the ice houses were anymore. And for traveling over ice or water, which as probably a lot easier in those days than moving across land. The bottom line for Lake Mendota is the ice cover duration is about three months on average. Now, whereas in the 1850s it was about four months on average. By this measure, we have lost one-fourth of winter as we knew it, or as our grandparents or their grandparents knew it. One-fourth. Our climate is warming, and we needed no fancy instruments. We didn't even need a thermometer. We didn't need any fancy models to determine this truth. The lake we looked out at told us what was going on. 

Ice cover differs greatly from year to year, and a lot of people have been talking about this last winter. Some of the differences from year to year are quite explainable with phenomena like the El Ninos and La Ninas coming and going and other such large global processes. And some of the differences are just due to the randomness of local weather. This year, the ice breakup on Lake Mendota, April 12th, was later than average, but certainly nowhere close to the latest date that Lake Mendota experienced in the past. Ice break has occurred twice in May. And so if we were in 1857, we'd be waiting until May 6th. [LAUGHTER] If we were in 1881, we'd be waiting until May 3rd. In North America, limnology, the study of inland waters, sort of began here in Wisconsin. The Europeans had a head start on us, but starting in the New World it was here. The Academy office is on the corner of University and what? Birge Terrace. 

Next time you see that sign, Birge Terrace, think of the people who began limnology in the US and in Wisconsin, EA Birge and C Juday. We almost lost this field of study in Wisconsin when these two great scientists aged and passed away. They never planned for the future. But anyway, fortunately, the university hired Art Hasler to redevelop the limnology study and teaching. And I was brought here by Art and the zoology department. I worried about limnology's continuation when Art retired and after I would retire in 2000. The program survived each transition with flying colors. Those responsible for limnology on the Madison campus are here today, and also those responsible for tomorrow and the next day. We did a number of things to ensure survival of an institution that we thought was very valuable, a study of things and that, and they got into this administrative side. We developed more resilient institutional structure, and we grew the staff so that a death of a well known limnologist didn't mean the end of the program unless the university managed to recruit somebody in the future to take it on. 

And so now we have that staff and we have a resilient institutional structure. I know I should talk more about Wisconsin. There's many things with the Academy I could talk about, and some of them are in the material you were handed out today, but all of us probably have the proverbial nine lives of a cat. And I want to share one story from the time before Norma and I came to Madison. My first permanent job was in Hawaii to study tuna fish, that wonderful, majestic tuna fish. Both of our children were born in a hospital overlooking Waikiki Beach. Susan and Jenny and their families are here today. Well, why was I there? There was a vast resource of skipjack tuna spread across the tropical Pacific, but we didn't know how to catch them. Just didn't know how. By the way, they're now the most, they contribute the biggest tonnage of tuna caught in the oceans, this species. 

Well, how to fix this? Study their behavior and help device new fishing methods. And I just want to share one of our adventures. Fishes gather under drifting logs and such on the high seas. We wondered why. Reg Gooding and I made a raft of wood and 55-gallon drums, inserted a viewing chamber so we could climb down and look under the raft into the ocean from the raft. We headed south from Hawaii to the equator where the raft was carefully lifted over, dropped over the rail, and the wind blew us around a lot so we attached a parasol drogue onto the raft so we didn't get too far away from our mother ship. We slept on the research ship during the day and took turns observing the underwater world around us and getting seasick. [LAUGHTER] Well, the fishes, they came. The most common one was one you don't know. It's not a skipjack tuna. 

It was a small freckled driftfish. They foraged on small invertebrates all around the raft. And periodically they would stream back to the understructure of the raft, and when we looked out, coming out of the blue haze, we'd see big predators coming out. And so we essentially had a feeding station. [LAUGHTER] A large whale shark came and scratched its back as it rolled over the line of the parachute. Not many places to scratch one's back on the open ocean. [LAUGHTER] A group of high seas trigger fish, not like the kind you see in Hawaii, gathered at the raft and displayed to other fishes as they came by, and then when that fish came over, they would eat the parasites off the outside of the raft or the critter. Large numbers of mahi-mahi. How many of you have eaten a mahi-mahi? All right. A wonderful fish. 

They gathered but they never seemed to be able to successfully catch those small freckled driftfish. My colleague, Reg, jumped into the water and fed the three- to four-foot long mahi-mahi with thawed frozen squid. These wild fish eagerly ate from his hand like you would feed a goldfish in your home aquarium tank. It was a sight to behold. All in all, it was a wonderful experience, and the message simply is that a life of science is filled with so many stories of research, teaching, and service. Thank you for your attention. [APPLAUSE]