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Stuart Carlton 0:00
teach me about the Great Lakes. Teach me about the Great Lakes. John, welcome back to teach me about the Great Lakes a twice monthly podcast in which I A Great Lakes novice asked people who are smarter and harder working than I am to teach me all about the Great Lakes. My name is Stuart Carlton and I work with Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant, which I remember to say with increasing regularity. And I'm so happy to be joined today by Megan Gunn. Megan, it's been a hot minute, hasn't it?

Megan Gunn 0:28
Yes, it has. And it's also been a hot summer, which I've been enjoying.

Stuart Carlton 0:32
Yes. Reminded me of when I was a kid, one of my favorite Jimi Hendrix songs was long, hot summer nights. And we've had a few of those. Yeah, it's been nice to be warm. But that's enough about classic rock. We don't need to spend any time on that during this episode. So let's see, before we get to today's interviews, I got a couple things going on. First of all, don't forget about the lake ease everybody, right, we've got to nominate things for the lake ease. So for those of you who have missed the last couple episodes, the lake ease are going to be our end of your award ceremony, or as we're calling it, possibly not the least prestigious, great award ceremony that there is. And so what we want you to do is we have a whole bunch of categories, we have like a science communication piece of the year Outreach Program of the Year, scientific research of the year, of course, sandwich, great sandwich of the year, Donut of the year, you know what all these are great lakes related. And so we want you to go to the link which you can find in the show notes or just go to bitly.com/leakey 21 La la que i e s two, one. And nominee thanks for linkys. And because I think it's important that it's just a fun celebration of all the great work that people do throughout the, throughout the Great Lakes. And I actually have a feature leaky nominee right now. So what we're gonna do over the next few episodes is, you know, feature some of the nominees to so people can go check out this good work. And so this is know your insects.org Have you have you? Have you heard of no your insects.org?

Megan Gunn 2:01
No, but it sounds like that's something I should know.

Stuart Carlton 2:03
Yeah, I'll be honest, I had not heard of it either. But this is a listener, an anonymous listener, nominated this. And so I went there, it's a volunteer run website. And they have photos of insects from users trying to help you identify and learn cool things about insects essentially, focus on Michigan, but I think it applies for a lot of the Great Lakes and see what you go there is you can go there and like you click on Start identification, and it'll take you through, you know, essentially a key, right, you've used identification keys before. But what's cool about this is it's got pictures, it's got like descriptive text, you know, usually when you see a key, it's written very in a very jargony kind of way. And if you're not an expert in there, and whatever the taxonomy is that it's hard to use, but this has a lot of descriptive text. It's like, well, if the wings are wet, you might have to careful it, you know, that kind of stuff, right? Pictures. And of course, it's like hypertext is exactly that these keys should be done, as opposed to, you know, where you're clicking on things, and you can click on identifications and stuff like that. So the site is a little. It's an earlier web design, but I think that works. You know, I think that works really well for this. So I like it a lot. So go to know your insects.org and start, start identifying some insects. That'd be cool. Yeah, I think it's especially cool resources, maybe for students or even just interestedly people. So it is cool. But will it be a leaky winter? We'll find out later in this year. And the other quick announcement is don't forget about definitely for the Great Lakes book by Dan Egan that we were reading as part of our teach me about the Great Lakes book club. And that's exciting. That'll be coming up soon as I graduate students who have read the book, and then we will have that I have now finished it. I think it's very good.

Megan Gunn 3:41
I've started it and it is very good. Yes, yes,

Stuart Carlton 3:44
I have some, I have some thoughts on certain parts of it or whatever. But it's really good and a fascinating history about things. I mean. So very worth reading. It's very readable. You know, it's narratively very, it's got a lot of momentum to it. Yeah, I enjoy it. So read it, even if you don't want to participate in the book club, but if you know we are going to be looking for a reader feedback, so I recommend doing it. Oh, wait, Megan, since you're here one other things. We did a Bruton update last week and our last episode with Carolyn Bhutan, total disappointment for me. Have you seen any cicadas this year?

Megan Gunn 4:18
I thought all the cicadas so I spent my summer added Martel fourth, which is when to produce properties with a summer research program that I coordinate. And that was basically the only place in all of the greater lift the Greater Lafayette area that the cicadas were and so it was so loud every day that they were there until they started to die off. And just it was just one day they were just there. And one of the research one of the research groups focused on the cicada emergence and mammal interactions, and they did see they were doing camera traps. They saw a lot more mammal activity once the cicadas were there, and then saw it die off a little bit once the stick ate his day off.

Stuart Carlton 5:00
Because the mammals were they eating the cicadas are

Megan Gunn 5:03
Oh, yeah, well, that's what the thought is. No kidding.

Stuart Carlton 5:07
Well, I'm so disappointed. I should have come out to Martel forest because like, I got, no, I got all fired up. My kids got all fired up. And then we got nothing. We had the annual ones right now. They're kind of winding down a little bit. I think what so did you see if I remember from that episode, which everybody should check out with Jessica, where? I'll link to that in the show notes. You had not seen them like crawling around, like just after emergence. Have you seen one of those yet? Yeah, they were. Yeah, they were all there. Okay, because I found one and I took a video for you. Just because you hadn't seen it. And I wanted to fully explain how creepy they were. But I think now you know, it is rather disgusting. It is rather disgusting. And you

Megan Gunn 5:42
would walk around and they would like flying your face because they're very clumsy critters. Yeah. Yeah, you should have come out there.

Stuart Carlton 5:49
Well, I was full of sadness. But the more here you talk about it, maybe it's okay. Maybe it's cool. All right. Well, that's neither here nor there. Today actually, we're going to talk with it's completely non cicada related, although is anything completely non sequitur related? This is pretty close. We're going to talk about nutrients in the in the Great Lakes. We're going to talk with freshwater ecologist or monologist. from the University of Wisconsin Madison, and as you know, he's a researcher, which means it's time for everybody's favorite, the researcher feature theme.

Researcher, a feature researcher teaches about third grade. Our guest today is Dr. Robert Mooney. He is with the Center for limnology at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Rob, how are you today?

Dr. Rob Mooney 6:49
I'm great. Thanks for having me. How are you?

Stuart Carlton 6:51
Oh, well, I'm also awesome. I'm super glad to be here. Megan, how are you? I forgot to ask you.

Megan Gunn 6:55
I'm good. How are you doing?

Stuart Carlton 6:56
Everybody's good. Everybody's glad to be here. Everybody's got to talk about some nutrients, some tributaries. We may pay tribute to nutrients we'll find out. But let's start. So Rob, you're 100? No, are you a monologist, stream ecologist, a nutritionist what is like the right even way?

Dr. Rob Mooney 7:11
I think I typically when I introduce myself to people just sort of call myself a freshwater ecologist, you know, cuz limnology covers the science of inland waters, which is lakes and streams. And I work mostly on streams, but think a lot about lakes and just the sort of general ecology of those systems.

Stuart Carlton 7:30
Okay, great. Well, so how did you get into that? Like, how did you start with lakes and streams, what what led you to start studying

Dr. Rob Mooney 7:36
that? It might sound kind of typical, but I really liked fishing, growing up, and in undergrad, I got really into fly fishing for trout. And time flies and thinking a lot about when different bugs are going to be emerging, why fish are eating when they're eating and that sort of stuff. And then that interest led me to taking a limnology class at University Wisconsin lacrosse. And since then, it's been a lot of summers doing work out on lakes and rivers and taking aquatics classes. And so that's sort of how it all started. Sounds amazing. Yeah,

Stuart Carlton 8:14
it is University of Wisconsin lacrosse. That's where the New Orleans Saints had their training camps. When I was a kid, at actually my, my master's advisor was from the US Virgin Islands. And he played football. And he played football, the University of Wisconsin lacrosse and the, the way they picked there are I don't even know if he I think he played football was he and his friends looked for universities that were near New York on a map. And so they pointed to the Ursa Wisconsin lacrosse because it looked like it was close to New York. And so then he flew in like September or something, and he's a enormous man. I mean, he played line, like a football size dude, everybody thought he played for the saints. But you know, the first thing to do was buy like those, you know, Christmas stories, take winter jackets and like September walking around, so it's a lot colder there in the western US Virgin Islands. Okay. Anyway, focused or you can do this. Maybe we should have had another coffee. So but a lot of what you study is nutrient loading, right? Is that just an outcropping? So why did you study insects? How did you get a nutrient loading? Specifically? I guess that's actually

Dr. Rob Mooney 9:13
a great question and sort of an interesting transition. Because my first undergraduate research research project was looking at how invertebrates, stream insects influenced nutrient cycling in some of these streams. And so that's sort of how I got into that. And then I started realizing that nutrients play this really, really critical role in all things, aquatic ecosystems. And so then my interests sort of shifted from specifically bugs and insects to more nutrient dynamics and ecosystem studies. And it sort of just shifted a little bit over time. So let's go real basic,

Stuart Carlton 9:52
just to make sure we're on the same page because I am dumb about this stuff. When we say nutrients. What do we mean Exactly?

Dr. Rob Mooney 9:58
Yeah. So you nutrients, you know, people think about nutrients in different ways depending on the context that you're thinking about them in. But from an aquatic standpoint, really thinking about these sort of key components or elements of biological molecules. So carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, silica, sulfur, and many others. And so all those different nutrients are critical components of nucleic acids like DNA. They're in proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and so they sort of make up all those key biological molecules that you learn a lot about in introductory biology in high school biology and those sorts of classes. And so they're really important for basically all life.

Stuart Carlton 10:43
And so so so when you're looking at nutrient loads in in streams, or whatever, so you're looking at the relative amounts of these different types is that kind of is that kind of what you're investigating on a big picture? Yeah,

Dr. Rob Mooney 10:55
exactly. And so when you think about nutrient loading, you're basically thinking about the amount of nutrients that are entering a lake or a receiving water body from a stream. And we call those streams that are flowing into something a tributary of that receiving water body. And so in the Great Lakes, I've been thinking a lot about Lake Michigan, and nutrient loads or nutrient inputs to the coastal zone of Lake Michigan, and the Great Lakes

Megan Gunn 11:22
facility question. How many tributaries are flowing into Lake Michigan?

Dr. Rob Mooney 11:27
That is a great question. So I've always said about 300 ish, because at different times of the year, different streams aren't flowing, some flow almost all year round. You know, in really dry seasons, like we're having right now, a lot of the ones that would normally be flowing aren't necessarily flowing. And there's a lot of really small tributaries that sort of hover on that border of being a tributary versus not being a tributary, so it's about 300. Ish, give or take. That's cool.

Stuart Carlton 12:01
300 ish, minus the Chicago River now, I guess, right? Yeah. But, so So what do you do? So you study these rivers? Does that involve like a lot of field work? Or? Or how do you do this work?

Dr. Rob Mooney 12:13
Yeah, it does. And so what I've been doing for a lot for the last few years is thinking a lot about the drivers of nutrients in all of these tributaries. And so you know, how different patterns of land cover affects nitrogen and phosphorus in the stream? How watershed size can control these different variables that influence nutrients? So in other words, is it possible that different types of land cover influence stream chemistry different in smaller watersheds versus larger watersheds? And in particular, I've had a lot of interest in very small or not, not necessarily very small, but smaller tributaries that typically get overshadowed by the large tributaries at the enormous size scale of the Great Lakes. Because, you know, like I said earlier, when there's about 300, tributaries, a lot of them are really small. Some of them are pretty big. And those are the ones that typically garner the most attention. Okay,

Stuart Carlton 13:19
so you're looking to small ones, like what is so you say, pretty small, not extremely small, like, like, so their stream order, right? Yeah. And there's like feet across? Maybe some. So what are what are the measures that you use to sort of categorize these?

Dr. Rob Mooney 13:34
Yeah, stream order is a great one. And so I think a lot about first and second order streams. And so those really small ones compared to some of the larger fifth and sixth order streams in the basin. And those are the ones that I've been really interested in. And doing a lot of field work going to all these really small streams. And one of the main reasons that I got really invested into these small streams was on a sampling trip, I started talking with people that own property that had these small streams going through, or people that would go to a beach that was great by a small stream. And they thought it was the coolest thing that somebody that was interested in nutrient loads to Lake Michigan was looking at, you know, their stream, because it's what they are familiar with. It's what they interact with on a daily basis. And if there's one stream or tributary that's going to impact their sort of daily lives or their livelihood, it would be that small one. And so that's really why I initially got interested in thinking about these small streams and spent most of my dissertation thinking about what drives nutrients in these small streams and how might these small streams affect nutrient loads, both at the lake wide scale but also at I hate saying more important scale, but at the critically important local scale.

Stuart Carlton 14:53
Let's go to the nub of it here. So small streams, it would seem like they would have small effect right? Relative to the big streams, but so what can you tell us about that? Is that the case? Or is it? Do they have more of an effect than you might think? Yeah, that's a

Dr. Rob Mooney 15:05
great question. And it sort of depends how you look at it. So a lot of times in the Great Lakes, a lot of people are really interested in loads. And so when I say load, I mean, the quantity of nutrient that's delivered to the lake over time. And so the nutrient load is sort of the product of multiplying the discharge by the nutrient concentration. And so when you have a really large river, they can deliver a lot of a nutrient in a relatively short amount of time, just because they're pumping out so much water into that coastal zone. And so when thinking about sort of the loads, and how the small tributaries compared to the large tributaries from the loading standpoint, they really don't have much of an impact at the lake wide scale at all. So from our study, we found that sixth, the sixth largest tributaries, delivered the vast majority of the nutrient load at a given time, and so the sixth largest delivered about 70% of the total nitrogen and the total phosphorus that was entering Lake Michigan, in a day basically. But the smaller tributaries, they did have some, they had some characteristics that would make them seem like they could have a really large impact at the local scale. And so the smaller tributaries, one, there's a lot of them. And so they're pretty much flowing in every couple of miles every one mile every two miles along the coastline. And so they're really abundant, there's a lot of them. And even though their loads aren't that great, they can have concentrations, that would indicate that they could create hotspots of potential local eutrophication, and algal blooms along the coastline. And another big distinction was thinking about what we call the bioavailability of the low that's entering. And so, in thinking about phosphorus, not all phosphorus is immediately available for algae to take in and sort of expand the population. But there's a specific type of phosphorus soluble reactive phosphorus SRP. It's a type of or it's the dissolved inorganic form. And so once that gets into the water, it's immediately available for primary producers like algae to incorporate. And the smaller tributaries tended to have higher concentrations or more, or a higher bioavailable form of phosphorus than some of these larger tributaries. And so they might not have the largest impact at the lake wide scale. But they're really important for these small local areas. And like I said earlier, which ties back into the importance of sort of understanding what's going on, at every small stretch of coastline along the Great Lakes, because that's how people interact with the lake.

Megan Gunn 17:54
So here in Indiana, most of our nutrient loads are like they come from agricultural fields, but most of the coastline around Lake Michigan is urban. So where are those nutrients coming from?

Dr. Rob Mooney 18:06
Yeah, that's a great question. And so a lot, so sort of the Lake Michigan basin, it's sort of set up with a lot of agriculture and urban development in sort of the southern areas. And then as you get up into the up, that's where you have a lot of your natural forest and wetlands. And so in a lot of these urban settings and agricultural settings, you do get a lot of increased nutrients from fertilizer use. And so the Fox River, as an example, is highly agricultural. That's the river that flows into the southern tip of Green Bay. And so there's a lot of agriculture in that basin, there's a lot of fertilizer runoff. And so a lot of times, it's really any agricultural development within a watershed. But in the urban settings, there's also a lot of urban sources of nutrients. A great example is lawn fertilizer, you know, people like their yards to look green, they want their garden to look, you know, they want their garden to grow. And so there's a lot of fertilizer use, not only in agricultural settings, but also in the more urban populated areas.

Stuart Carlton 19:12
So you say in the smaller tributaries that the phosphorus in particular is more likely to be soluble reactive phosphorus, I call it I call it SRP. But first of all, which is more bioavailable, which I think means like, you know, the algae or wood, like it's more likely to be taken up in turn into algal blooms and whatever. Why, why are the concentrations higher of wsrp in the tributaries and in, you know, your big six or whatever?

Dr. Rob Mooney 19:40
Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, that's something that we're still thinking a lot about and trying to really get at why sort of the general explanation is that large streams and large rivers are fundamentally different from small streams. You know, they're shallower there's more interaction with the stream water and everything growing on the bottom. Another main difference between small streams and large rivers is sort of what we call the flow path distance. And so you can imagine, within a Fox River, which is a massive River, the watershed is very expansive. If you have a mole of phosphorus that enters up at the headwaters of the Fox River, that mole of phosphorus is going to change a lot before it eventually gets to the mouth of the Fox River and then enters Lake Michigan, whereas in the smaller streams, it doesn't take as much time for that mole of phosphorus to make it through the watershed and then traveled downstream into the lake.

Stuart Carlton 20:41
So it changes like over time because it interacts with other water and other chemicals in the water. Or is it is that yeah, so

Dr. Rob Mooney 20:47
little, a lot of those will get taken in by algae. And so there's a lot of algae uptake within the rivers and streams as well. And so I think that's something else it's important to note is that these tributaries are not just these sort of pipelines that are going straight into the lake. There's also a lot of separate ecology and nutrient uptake happening within these streams. And so there's just a lot of nutrient processing that happens within these rivers, and the smaller streams that can change, sort of the fate of that nutrient before it enters the lake.

Stuart Carlton 21:19
We have, it seems like mainly nitrogen and phosphorus are the ones that we've talked about today. Is that is that because those are the ones that lead to algal blooms? Is that why we care about those? Or are there other ones that we care about? Or what gives?

Dr. Rob Mooney 21:29
With that? I guess? That's a great question. And so we think a lot about nitrogen and phosphorus, because those are typically what we call the limiting nutrients for algae and freshwater systems, primarily phosphorus. And so you know, the basic saying is that plants and organisms will sort of grow until they hit something that limits their growth. And it's typically nitrogen or phosphorus, because those two are usually the nutrients that are in the lowest quantity relative to their biological need. And so there are other nutrients that are at a lower quantity. But organisms don't need as much of that nutrients. And so those are typically the limiting nutrients. And in particular, Phosphorus is definitely the nutrient of most concern within the Great Lakes. One because they are the main limiting factor for algal growth. And they're in a lot of fertilizers that we put on the land to increase crop yield, and make our yards greener. And so there's a lot of excess phosphorus that enters tributaries through watersheds, and then the lake from the tributaries.

Stuart Carlton 22:42
So you can see this being a big deal in some of the Great Lakes but isn't like Michigan, like thanks to our friends, the mussels? It isn't like Michigan actually really clean right now on the water clear. So is nitrogen and phosphorus. Are they effective within the lake, obviously, within tributaries may be different. But in the lake? Does it really matter right now? Or what?

Dr. Rob Mooney 23:00
Yeah, that is a great question. And that brings up a really good point of the nearshore offshore distinction within Lake Michigan and the other great lakes. Because even though the you could imagine because the lakes are so big, that in the middle of the lake, you could have a very low nutrient concentration, you could have low nitrogen, you can have low phosphorus. But then if you look in the nearshore area, the near shore area, there's a lot more, I guess I shouldn't say a lot more. There's different stuff happening in the near shore, like you said, the mussels are one aspect where you have nutrients entering the coastal zone, you have algae, converting those nutrients into algal biomass, and then you have the muscles, eating all of that, and then taking those nutrients down to the bottom. And so I think one, I think I have this right, but it's estimated now that there's more phosphorus in all of the muscles than in the rest of Lake Michigan. And so just recently, an awesome paper came out that talked about how muscles are now sort of the driving factor of nutrient cycling in the Great Lakes. And so you have it's sort of this wicked problem with all different things happening, right, you have changes in nutrient loads, you have the lakes getting warmer, which can lead to more algal blooms, you can have increased precipitation with climate change. And so then you have increased overland flow in these agricultural areas that can increase nutrient loads, and then you have the muscles doing their thing down the bottom. And nobody really knows how all of these different issues are going to combine in the future as you have shifts and nutrient loads, shifts in muscle density and shifts in climate.

Stuart Carlton 24:53
Thinking about this there's nitrogen or phosphorus or other nutrients and it's potentially a problem in all of lakes and I'm really beyond the Great Lakes pack my hometown, we're sending it all down the Mississippi River, right? And so you see what's going on in Mexico. So the common steps you'll hear, you know, watch your fertilizer use at home and things like that. Are there other kinds of steps that people can take? Or doesn't even matter? If it all comes from like, big, big ag? You know, how much does like individual stuff matter? Do you know? Or is this kind of outside of your area of

Dr. Rob Mooney 25:22
so I think that's also why I've had such an interest in small tributaries because, I mean, watershed management for nutrients is never easy. But in the smaller watersheds with a fewer number of landowners and less people within that watershed, that's where small adjustments could really make a difference. What I usually say is just being aware that everyone is living in a watershed, and whatever you do, in sort of your portion of that watershed has the potential to influence stream nutrients, groundwater, nutrients, tributary nutrients, and eventually sort of whatever that downstream water body is. And so that was one of the really cool aspects of doing a lot of fieldwork and going to all of these almost younger tributaries is interacting with people. And sort of, like I said earlier, sort of stopping at all these tributary miles talking with people, they'd asked me, oh, well, what what's, why are these nutrients there? And you know, it's sort of the common answer, as well as your culture, a lot of nitrogen in the groundwater from sort of legacy agriculture, and just sort of informing people that, yeah, you're in a watershed, what you do in that watershed can have long term consequences.

Megan Gunn 26:46
So outside of talking to people, and you're out and about what is a typical day of field like field work look like for you?

Stuart Carlton 26:52
You did three under streams? Yeah. So how do you do 300 streams?

Dr. Rob Mooney 26:59
In general, so on these sampling trips, what I guess the main objective that I that I had was to try to figure out what's driving nutrient concentrations and differences in nutrient concentrations at these almost 300 sites spatially. And so I was trying to visit all these sites in the fewest days as possible. Because we didn't want to have any major differences in climate, we didn't want to, you know, hit a really big storm that could shift things a little bit. And so what we would do is, we would leave from, we would leave from Madison, go over to Milwaukee. And then over the course of six days, drive around Lake Michigan, and get back to Milwaukee and then get back to Madison. And so a typical day, we would usually drive about seven hours, and stop at between 30 and 40 tributaries. And so, so, you know, you'd sort of wake up in the morning, and put the GPS up on the car, find the daily route and hit go, and it would say, alright, you will reach your final waypoint at you know, in seven hours. And that was always a little daunting when we'd wake up, look at the drive time and then remember, Oh, well, we still have 40 sites that we had to stop at.

Stuart Carlton 28:18
Right, so let's just seven hours of drivetime plus, you got to actually sample the rivers, right? Yeah,

Dr. Rob Mooney 28:23
yeah. And so each site would take it only takes about five minutes at a site. Because we would, it was a very brute force method, you know, you would stop at a road crossing, throw a bucket over a bridge, collect the water, filter the water immediately, and then put it in a cooler. And so the reason one of the main reasons we were able to do all this very quickly, was really the planning aspect. You know, we we have a lot of different GIS resources available to us that have exact points of road crossings, because a lot of people care about road crossings because they can prevent migratory fish passage in the Great Lakes. And so by sort of merging, tributary flow line layers, so basically where these tributaries are with road crossing GIS layers, we can get GPS coordinates for all these different road crossings. And then I could make daily routes in sort of a Garmin driving GPS software. So really cool.

Stuart Carlton 29:20
That is really cool. That's intense, was it Do you have an army of undergraduates? Are you a grad student? Or is it just you in your lonesome thoughts?

Dr. Rob Mooney 29:28
So it was it was always me and another either undergraduate students or sort of research assistant and so it would be two people and we would get to know each other pretty well at the end of the end of six

Stuart Carlton 29:43
days. Is it like a like a Spotify playlist situation or so that's

Dr. Rob Mooney 29:47
actually an interesting question. I the first trip we actually never even listen to the radio because you we were stopping every four minutes or something and you're always sort of looking for the bridge looking for Are the stream trying to jot down if the stream was dry or any notes about the site, but eventually we started scanning sort of classic rock stations. And aside from all the cool tributary notes and tributary research, I also have a pretty impressive dataset on different bands and different songs that we would hear at different tributaries in different regions of the lake.

Stuart Carlton 30:26
So here we go. Alright, good. The reason I asked and this was an honor thing. So if it totally fails, it's my fault. Alright, we're gonna go, we're gonna do your top three songs that you would hear while while sampling distributaries now, here's how we're gonna do it. I'm never explicit enough about this, and it's always a disaster, and that's fine. I'm gonna do a drumroll. You're gonna announce the song. And then I'm gonna play another sound effect a symbol, and then we will comment on the song. And then we're going to do it again. Two more times. Okay. All right. So let's do that. So we're gonna start we're going to count down. So the number three song that you hear while sampling 300 tributaries in Wisconsin is

Dr. Rob Mooney 31:10
scorpions Rocky, like a hurricane.

Stuart Carlton 31:15
That song is a classic, like a deal rocking like

Megan Gunn 31:18
a hurricane. I don't know that song

Stuart Carlton 31:20
scorpions. They're a really a German band. What's the deal with scorpions?

Dr. Rob Mooney 31:24
I think? I think so. Yeah, I think they're a German band. They're, you know, they're they're pretty typical on these classic rock stations, especially once you get up up through the up area. Yeah.

Stuart Carlton 31:37
Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. I I'm very well aware of that song. Yeah. All right. Great. So that was number three. So now the number two song that you hear when sampling 300 tributaries in Wisconsin? Is

Dr. Rob Mooney 31:53
George Thorogood bad to the bone.

Stuart Carlton 31:57
That is a classic. That's one of the first ones I learned to play on guitar, except I couldn't play it right. I remember sitting there and I was like bragging to my dad. I was like, let me show him how to do it. And then I like, totally bleep up the song was like, really bad. And I was like, Oh, I guess I gotta go back to the woodshed. Alright, bad to the bone. Oh, my goodness. So we did this. I totally forgot. We had a talent show in eighth grade. And that was like when Guns and Roses was really popular. And so I went to an Episcopal School. You know, religious school wasn't a Catholic school, but a religious school. Oh my goodness. And we decided to call our band nuns and Moses. Like I was dressed like a nun. Not even kidding. Don't strike me lightning. And we and like the drummer was dressed up like Moses and we played bad to the bone. I completely forgot about that. So so that's good classic nuns and Moses bad to the bone. And number one song you hear about simply 300 tributaries.

Dr. Rob Mooney 32:52
Black Sabbath paranoid.

Stuart Carlton 32:55
And that is a good thing to be when you're a graduate student or a postdoc collecting data. That was actually a

Dr. Rob Mooney 33:03
pretty easy activity for me, because I have very specific notes on what tributaries we were sampling when those three songs would come on. And so someday, I'm going to generate a map that has all of that data somehow.

Stuart Carlton 33:20
get tenure first, but oh, well, thanks for amusing me there, Rob. And listeners do too. But, you know, this was actually really interesting stuff. But that's not why we invited you here on TV about the Great Lakes this week. And this is my stick every week. But more true than normal this week. The real reason that we invite you on teach me about the Great Lakes is because our friend Madeline McGee, so you have strong opinions about this next question. So I want to talk about this. And the question is this. If you could have a great sandwich for breakfast or a great don't know. Let me do that. Again. Quinn. Don't bother editing it. Everybody should know just how stupid I am. All right. Same question, man. That's like episode 38. You think you get it? The question is this. If you have a great doughnut for breakfast, or a great sandwich for lunch, what would you choose?

Dr. Rob Mooney 34:13
I would absolutely choose a great sandwich for any any meal anytime, any day, so great sandwich easily, but when going around Lake Michigan, I became very familiar with pasties and pass the shops. And so pass these on my sampling trips. If I could have any food for any meal, it would definitely be a pasty.

Stuart Carlton 34:41
Now, now, I had never heard of a pasty until like a year and a half ago. So maybe I'm alone and everybody else in the Great Lakes they know about pasties but if they don't fill me in what is a pasty?

Dr. Rob Mooney 34:53
A pasty it's essentially a savory hand pie and so it's a it's A dough that's you know, filled with potato, rutabaga, carrots, and usually beef. And so they became really popular up in the up, because they were easy to take down in the mines because there's a lot of mining going on up there. And so they will take pasties down. And so as soon as you sort of get up by Escanaba, that's when the good pasty shops really start to pop up. And so I've stopped that quite a few when going around Lake Michigan, and then recently going around Lake Superior, we've got a couple pasties. And so, yeah, they're kind of my ideal food, I think.

Megan Gunn 35:40
Sounds like we need a road trip.

Stuart Carlton 35:42
Yep, definitely need a road trip. So normally, I asked you, where can I get the best, you know, whatever in your location, but I'm gonna ask you a different question. You've sampled 300 tributaries driven up and down all around Lake Michigan, where is the best pasty in Lake Michigan? Oh,

Dr. Rob Mooney 35:56
that is a great question. I think I would say, I believe it's pronounced Lagos pasties. It's up in the up just east of the Mackinac Bridge that connects the up with the Lower Peninsula. And I can tell you that it's right next to the moron River, which is a tributary that flows into the coastal zone up there. And so all of my sort of directionality is where these places are relative to adjacent tributaries that makes sense.

Stuart Carlton 36:33
Warhammer that's perfect. We will try to find this place and put a link to it in our show notes about the great lakes.com/ 38 That's the number three, eight, because this is somehow episode 38. Or you can just look down at your phone or podcast, whatever, and the shoulder should be there. Okay, great. So before we move on to what makes a what makes for a good pasty compared to another? Is it like gotta have a high fat content, so you can really, you know, get the or is it? I don't know, what's the deal, man,

Dr. Rob Mooney 37:00
I think it has to have the right ratio of meat to everything else. And so that's really what would do it for me. And it had to have a nice golden brown pastry on the outside. But I also think it had to do with how hungry we were, by the time we would get to those locations. And so I might have some biases that I'm not accounting for my opinions on pasty shops.

Stuart Carlton 37:27
When you get done with the classic rocket stream paper, you can then model your pasties. Alright, so how about this though? So, one of the things once I get released from Sea Grant for having maybe the world's stupidest podcast is I'm going to go into business selling Goby dogs, right, so we're gonna go bees are hot dog shaped fish, I'm going to pop those on a bun and, and sell them off a cart in the streets of Chicago. And so anyway, so go be pasties. Is that going to happen? Or not? What do you think in there?

Dr. Rob Mooney 37:58
I mean, you could probably convince me to try one. I think if you find a bunch of grad grad students that are doing field work, and you say, Hey, here's any food, I think.

Stuart Carlton 38:14
The harder the field work, the better the pasty. So your, as you call it, I wrote down precisely what you call yourself, you call yourself a freshwater? ecologist, right? Yes. What makes you good at that job? Like what makes a good freshwater? ecologist? Do you think? That's a

Dr. Rob Mooney 38:31
great question? And that's always tough to answer, I think, because even though I consider myself a freshwater ecologist, I've also been a grad student for 10 years. I'm a postdoc right now. And so really, for me, it's, it's been trying to trying to figure out what helps me to stay motivated to do all this. And, and that's just I think it sounds like I said, it might be kind of cliche, but waking, being outside and liking to do fieldwork. So enjoying fieldwork has been a really big aspect to what I've done and what I am continuing to do, from both being out in the field, and the planning, and what's really helped is knowing that things are going to go wrong, but just sort of going with it. Right. So sort of learning to go with the flow as things don't go how I originally planned or it hoped that they would go. But also a bigger component is sort of surrounding myself with people that I looked up to and wanted to collaborate with and sort of recognizing sort of my strengths and then working with people that have similar and complementary strengths. You know, from a modeling standpoint, there's a lot of people that do really great modeling work. I am not necessarily one of them, but Working with people that are really strong modelers, and just finding a group of collaborators that have complementary skill sets.

Stuart Carlton 40:07
That's great. Well, Rob, where can people go to find out more about the work that you do?

Dr. Rob Mooney 40:11
I have a, I have a Twitter, I have a Twitter that I update sometimes. And the Center for limnology website at UW is a great website to check out. You can see some of the Great Lakes stuff that I am working on. I also have a project in the Mississippi River. And I am also really interested in teaching and curriculum development. And there's more of that on sort of the CFL webpage, my Twitter and then I have a website, a weebly website as well, that has a lot of that.

Stuart Carlton 40:44
Well, we'll put links all of those in the show notes. So people go check it out. I encourage you to do it. So Dr. Robert Mooney center for limnology University of Wisconsin Madison, thank you for coming on and teaching us so much about the Great Lakes. Yeah,

Dr. Rob Mooney 40:56
thanks for having me. This was great.

Stuart Carlton 41:04
It's always great to talk to people who were really out in the field doing work, and I can't imagine sampling 300 streams in like a few days cheese,

Megan Gunn 41:12
but at least it's just like a quick stop. You get what you need. And then keep going.

Stuart Carlton 41:17
Yeah, not sure. It sounds like no waiters were involved, which is always a good thing. Yeah. Well, it's sort of a good thing when you're doing 300 streams. That's a good thing.

Megan Gunn 41:25
That would make for a long hot week. Yes,

Stuart Carlton 41:28
yes, it would. So make it was something that you learned today from our interview with Rob Mooney.

Megan Gunn 41:32
Well, it was about how many trips run into like Michigan 300 is incredible, but I guess it also makes sense because it hits like three different states.

Stuart Carlton 41:42
Yeah, it does. But it's still a lot you don't really think about I mean, of course, there's so much freshwater in this area. Just hearing it quantified like that is really interesting. I mean, it's actually kind of related I didn't realize that you know, when you're looking at the nutrient loading in Lake Michigan that the biggest I think he's had six rivers contributes 70% of the nutrients so to me, you know, obviously it's secret we don't set policy nor should we but but if you're thinking about policy boy when it comes to nutrients that's got to be the place you start for the big scale stuff. Although then you know, as Rob was saying that the it's really a think globally act locally kind of thing because your local stream you can really make a difference in so I thought that was pretty interesting. All right. Good. Well, let's do a credit to wrap it up. Would you like to read the credits or would you like me to

Megan Gunn 42:27
sure I can read the credits. Teach me about the Great Lakes is brought to you by the fine people at Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant we encourage you to check out the great work we do it I see grant that work and at i l i n Sea Grant on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. Teach me about the Great Lakes is produced by hope charters, Carolyn Foley, Megan Gunn and Rini miles Ethan Chitty, their associate producer and fixer are super fun podcast artwork is by Joel dad and for the show is edited by the awesome Quinn Rose and I encourage you to check out her work at aspiring robot.com If you have a question or comment about the show, please email it to teach me about the great lakes@gmail.com or leave a message on our hotline at 765496 I SG You can also follow the show on Twitter at Teach Great Lakes. Thanks for listening and keep greatin' those lakes!