“Well, in some cases I literally get paid to fish,” Abel says of his work.
Later, the two student researchers don scuba gear that weighs about 60 pounds each and try not to look completely uncool as they hoist themselves over the side of Micropterus to perform a sort of underwater window-washing. Stretched along the hull of the boat—if you can even find them in the darkness—is a series of sensors that constantly monitor the amount of dissolved oxygen available to Escanaba Lake’s various creatures.
“Algae are constantly growing on the surface of the sensors and absorbing CO2.2 and releasing oxygen. That could really mess up our data,” says Smith, holding a torpedo-shaped sensor in one hand and a tiny scrap of cloth in the other. “So every week we go down there with a little towel or sponge and carefully wipe those sensors clean to make sure we’re getting good data.”
“That’s what science looks like sometimes,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. “But we can hardly see anything down there.”
As small as the cleaning cloth and sensor window may be, the scientific research that takes place at Trout Lake Station is no small feat.
Preliminary and future studies
The data collected by Smith and Abel this week in July 2024 will feed into decades of measurements at Escanaba Lake, where a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources research station has been recording the vitals of every fish caught for nearly 80 years. The crew of the Micropterus will use the data in their walleye study, called “Bright Spots,” to describe what causes robust populations of the fish to maintain strong numbers while walleye numbers in other lakes decline as water warms and other conditions diverge from the iconic fish’s preferences.
“Knowing that we can look back so far and find comparable data collected using the same methods in the same places in the same lakes greatly expands what Jack and I can do in our own projects,” says Smith. “At the same time, we’re contributing to other projects here today that people haven’t even thought of yet.”
