Stuart Carlton 0:00
Teach me about the Great Lakes. Teach me about the Great Lakes. Welcome back to teach me about the Great Lakes. A twice monthly podcast in which I A Great Lakes novice, ask 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, and I know a lot about how to ruin years of equity by completely screwing up a podcast release schedule. But I don't know a lot about the Great Lakes, and that's the point of this here program. I'm joined today by the one the only the special. It's Carolyn Foley, fall dog. How are you?

Carolyn Foley 0:35
I am doing? Well, thanks.

Stuart Carlton 0:37
Fantastic. I'm glad to hear it. We're gonna jump right in, since we still don't have a beginning segment, if you have segment. Hey, if you have a beginning

Carolyn Foley 0:44
segment idea, we don't need a segment. We need to you're right that we can get faster to the interview. But first you have, we have important

Stuart Carlton 0:50
update. We have an important update. This is from the teach me about the Great Lakes. Hermit Crab. Correspondent, hope charters, uh, she sends in this video, and you'll need to go to teach me about the Great lakes.com/. 85 to see it, or you will need to look in your show notes on your podcast player. Now, normally, my move is to just keep running with the inside joke and alienate anybody who didn't happen to listen. If you want the history of this, you want to go to teach me about the Great lakes.com/ 81 and listen to our interview with the wonderful doctor Katie Stamler. This was live for my Agler and hope brought us some interesting facts about different types of shellfish and whether or not they change out their shells. And we had a fascinating conversation on that. And then we did a little bit of follow up in Episode 82 which I'm just realizing now. I wrote Stuart and Carlton speak with Meredith brown in the show description, that was Stuart and Carolyn. We spoke of Meredith Brown, and we had an important update on different types of shells and which ones switch out or whatever. The

Carolyn Foley 1:49
that interview was probably more interesting than the important update on shells, but go ahead with your

Stuart Carlton 1:55
Yeah. No, that's fine. That was a good those are both really great interviews. I mean, you should listen to those both if you haven't, but the point is this, now we have this YouTube video, Carolyn, there's a hermit crab, but it does not have a regular shell, does

Carolyn Foley 2:07
it? I mean, hermit crabs will use anything as a shell, and this is a fantastic example of them. It's a plastic doll head. That's just plastic doll head, wonderful,

Stuart Carlton 2:17
slash terrifying, like it is. And you look at the comment, comments, some people are like, wow. What resilience. Other people are like, Oh, my God, plastic pollution. And I think the answer to both of those is Yep. So yeah, it's but it's this nightmare fuel, to tell you the truth, looking at it like it's this. And this is not a small hermit crab. This is a large hermit crab in a large doll's head. It's not quite Chucky type. There's no hair, but it's bald and its neck is severed from its body. The hermit crab has the hair. The crab is, what is the hair? I was like, herbic Crabs don't have hair. Do we need a separate mammal segment

Carolyn Foley 2:53
follow? No, this is awesome, but it's

Stuart Carlton 2:55
got, like, a Adam Duritz style fake dreads hair, haircut, yeah, yeah. That's awesome. Anyway, so I recommend you check that out. That is our important hermit crab update. If we have one more, I have to write a theme song. So any other hermit crab news, send it in, and I will get right on the theme song. There are no hermit crabs in the Great Lakes, but that's all right, there are no hermit crabs in the Great Lakes, that is true, but there are many invertebrates. So we spent many, many times talking about the thing is, we, yes, this is a show about the Great Lakes, but it's also a show about hermit crabs and things that switch shells, which snails do not but hermit crabs do fantastic. Well, with that now foot graphic for something entirely different, we have an exciting interview about a science paper today and an important Great Lakes, relevant topic, unlike, say, hermit crabs. And so we're super excited. But first of course, we will transition with, I don't know. I'll just pick one

fantastic Our guest today is Daniele Miranda. She's a research assistant professor in the stream and wetland Ecology Lab at the University of Notre Dame. And she's lead author of a new paper out in a very cool named journal, Science of the total environment, one of the best names for a journal, not a partial environment, the entire thing, every bit of the environment. And this paper is called occurrence and biomagnification of oh boy, perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAs, in Lake Michigan fishes. Daniele, thank you for coming on. How are you today? How are things in whatever the name is, health Bend, Indiana,

Dr. Daniele Miranda 4:34
yeah. Thank you so much for having me here.

Stuart Carlton 4:37
So let's start with the basics, because we talk about PFAs a lot, and I do the episode, and then I instantly forget all about PFAs. And we'd like to scaffold up for all of our viewers, like we have experts on PFAs listening right now, and we have people who know nothing about it. In fact, we have all of those on this call. But so let's start at the bottom of the scaffolding. So PFAs is, of course, a perfluoroal. How do you pronounce it? And what is it? Basically

Dr. Daniele Miranda 5:00
PFAs acronym for actually, per and polyfluorocal substances. But in this paper, it calling only perfluorocal substance, because we are only look for those type of compounds. PFAs is this group of more than 10,000 manmade compounds that are primarily composed of carbon and fluorine,

Stuart Carlton 5:20
where does so and so, they're man made meaning. So these are, you know, these don't occur naturally. Where do they? Where do they come from? PFAs, they

Dr. Daniele Miranda 5:27
are synthesized, and we can find them in different day by day applications. For example, they are present in firefighting forms that we are we use them to distinguish fire and also in non stick cookie wear as oil and water repellent, the oil repellent. But they are also present in food packagings and also in cosmetics. So they are, we are going to contact with them every day. So the kind of this

Stuart Carlton 5:58
is interesting, because this is what always confuse me. Because whenever you read about PFAs, they talk about PFAs, they talk about firefighting, and I'm like, how much firefighting are we doing? That's, you know, it's like, I've never fought a fire. And, but so these things are everywhere, knock on wood, and, but, but so it's a lot of other things too, including food packaging, which is kind of a rough thing for them to be in.

Dr. Daniele Miranda 6:19
Coming back to the these firefighting forms we have training. We train the military. How do you call that military training stations? Yeah. So in in military training stations, they use the firefighting forms to train it basically, not every day, but often. And then this, yeah, the foam is with the runoff, goes water and contaminated water base and going to the food packaging, you can find it in several, several areas. I'll give this example of popcorn, microwave popcorn, and also fries. So having that plastic layer in the fries to avoid our fingers to get sticky with oil, so they put the B files in this layer as well. I'm not even

Stuart Carlton 7:11
kidding. That's like my entire diet is micro.

Carolyn Foley 7:14
You can microwave popcorn in just a regular brown paper bag. Yeah, yeah, certainly, that's it, but yeah, so, and there are some places where they have, I think, on the east coast, because the military installations is where they first kind of found the big hot spots, right? And then there are some places that have actually legislated that there they now practice with phones that don't contain the PFAs. Yeah, but PFAs is still in all these other things that are around us. Oh, God. Oh, interesting. So, so how do they get into the food web?

Dr. Daniele Miranda 7:59
So with those using them in our everyday products, they end up in wastewater treatment plants. They will end up in landfills. So with that, they go to the talking here about aquatic ecosystem. The wastewater treatment plants end up in water, water bodies, and then the organism they can be exposed. And we also have actually atmospheric deposition, so the individuals, they can be exposed through the exchanging gas to the respiration and also ingesting water, contaminated water, and also eating other animals that are contaminated with PFAs.

Carolyn Foley 8:42
So why is that a problem? Why should we care that it's everywhere and getting into the food web and things like that?

Dr. Daniele Miranda 8:50
Yeah, we should care because there are many, many peer reviewed students saying that those compounds can be related to deleterious effects to the human and animals, wildlife, health, for example, they are they have been associated with cancer, the several types of cancers and humans, low birth weight, and also immune system depression and immune system responses, and also depletion in response to vaccine. So I don't think we you want then around.

Stuart Carlton 9:32
So then the PFAs story, if I can summarize, for those of us who don't know, is like, they're not just in flame retardants, they're also in, like, food packaging, cosmetics, probably not the cosmetics I use and and french fries. And we know they're in your cat, and maybe not your cat, but our cat. And so what they do is they have a lot then they get everywhere, they go into wastewater treatment and all sorts of things. And then they they get into the environment, where they get into the different animals out. There, and they can cause low birth, weight cancers, just all these deleterious effects. We're just getting started. And these things don't go anywhere, right? They call them forever chemicals. And so they don't, they seem to stay in the environment once they were there.

Dr. Daniele Miranda 10:14
Yet for we have, as I said, like a 1000s and 1000s of compounds. And actually only have we're only we are are only studying like our would say, around 50, and for those 50, we have already have results and starts showing their toxicity. So

Stuart Carlton 10:34
then that, with that terrifying background, you decided to study PFAs in Lake Michigan fish, right? Or fishes, for those who don't know ichthyology, types tend to return to refer to fish of a single species as fish, and fish of multiple species as fishes. So you look at fishes and in Lake Michigan, right? That's what you wanted to do. So how did you how did you study this? Exactly, what was your approach?

Dr. Daniele Miranda 10:58
So for this study, we analyzed, we studied nine fish species in between prey and Predator, and we we worked in collaboration with USGS and the US Fish and Wildlife. And this work was supported by Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant and also USGS. And so for this is that we, with the help of USGS and the US Fish and Wildlife, we collected around 208 fish for this specific stud and in different areas of the Lake Michigan to check and their PFAs concentrations.

Stuart Carlton 11:39
And so how did you, how did you look for PFAs in them? What was the I saw you did stable isotope analysis? Yes, now I don't know what that is. In fact, I don't know what an isotope is, dude, what? So again, we'll scaffold up for idiots like me. The only isotopes I know are the Springfield isotopes. So what is a what is an isotope? Exactly.

Dr. Daniele Miranda 11:59
So for in this region, we used two different isotopes, nitrogen and carbon. The stable isotope nitrogen stable isotope were used to look at trough position. So we can, we can use them for that, and with that, we saw, and then also to see predatory relationship and for carbon, carbon stabiso top, we were looking to the different food sources. So with them, grouping the nitrogen and the carbon stable isotopes, we could see which animals are related to each so we could see, as we were looking to the biomagnification of those compounds, or how they those compounds increase in concentration with the food web, we needed first to see to check their trophy position and their relationship with each other.

Carolyn Foley 12:53
So the isotopes were more for drawing the food web and Yeah, and so it's like the relative amount of, you know, different types of carbon. So a stable isotope is one that doesn't this one I can actually answer.

Dr. Daniele Miranda 13:15
We always answer that. So I'm always like, my mind is like a focus on the trough by magnification. Answer, okay,

Stuart Carlton 13:23
so yeah, you look at the relative amounts of these different things to figure out, right?

Carolyn Foley 13:27
So there, there's, there's some isotopes that are not stable, that like they have some, some extra neutrons in there. It's neutrons, right? Yeah, that they have in their nucleus, and they break down over time. And those are, like, the radioactive isotopes. But then there are stable isotopes that are like, they have, like, one extra neutron, like, so a nitrogen normally has 1414, things in its nucleus. But there is some nitrogen that has 15 things in its nucleus and it'll live, like, just, I mean, live half life. Just know this, yeah, I do have a life as a researcher as well. So, so yeah, and then they like, so in the in the organisms you can look at, kind of like the ratio of these two, and that tells you about the things that Dr Miranda was saying that, like, where they are in the food web, what food sources are they relying on? You can, like, draw these cool patterns together, but then you also actually analyze the tissue for their PFAs concentrations, right? Yeah.

Dr. Daniele Miranda 14:36
So first we were looking at the stabilis to see this the predator prey relationships and how they fit in the Lake Michigan, where and how they were fit in the Lake Michigan. And then we look at the PFAs concentration to see which of those compounds were bio accumulating and bioaccumulating in the organisms, and also bio magnifying the food chain. So

Stuart Carlton 15:00
bioaccumulating, I think I got these, but let me see. And so, by accumulating means which which organisms are taking it up, taking them up, but then once you move up the food chain, like a salmon, what does a salmon eat? Carolyn, little baby, probably

Carolyn Foley 15:15
smaller fish, smaller

Stuart Carlton 15:16
fish. Salmon eats a whole bunch of smaller fish, right? And, and, sorry, Thomas and and so this goes around cruise, and since it eats so many smaller fish, it accumulates a lot of these PFAs. And that's bio magnification. Is that right? Yeah, within salmon, you would expect to see more PFAs than you would within these smaller salmon prey fish that they eat, yeah, following

Dr. Daniele Miranda 15:38
with the the because some of those PFAs are pesticide classified as persistent organic pollutant. So following this idea and that they all, they all of those compounds, they biomagnify or increase concentration with the food web. So we would expect to see that happening all salmonids with higher PFAs concentrations than prey fish, but then we had this surprise that, generally speaking, all salmonids, they had those higher concentrations than prey fish, but when we looked to scopes, they had one order of magnitude higher concentration than salmonids. So yeah, what's happening here? Maybe they are not those someone needs. Are not praying those the problem not probably like they were not praying those copies. But how are they being exposed to those super high concentrations? So this is something that we were we have some hypothesis in this, in this paper, but it's still not a very clear to us.

Stuart Carlton 16:46
So you're surprised that sculpins were so high and that wasn't reflected in in salmon. Yeah. So

Carolyn Foley 16:52
there's a really cool your graphical abstract is awesome, like, most of the time I'm like, so we'll put that in the show notes. Um, yeah, what did it mean about the Great Lakes slash, 8585 episodes. This is so cool and weird. Oh yeah,

Stuart Carlton 17:10
there's like a whole break in the line here. Oh

Dr. Daniele Miranda 17:11
my goodness, yeah. Like

Carolyn Foley 17:13
it goes. It gets from like 40 to 200 and for slimy and and, like even deep water scopings. But then gobies, which a lot of people have been worried about, them like competing. They're like, way low, nothing

Stuart Carlton 17:27
in the Gobi. So that I just want to point that out, we'll put a pin in that the gobies seem very healthy, at least in terms of PFAs.

Dr. Daniele Miranda 17:34
Looking at this, I'm also looking at the graph abstract to here, we can see we associated those concentrations to the where they live and also what they eat. For example, Round Goby we we collected large round gobs that it fits more on dressenates and more interesting and are in live in rock. Can I call rock environment? And when you go to the scorpions, they live in more in deeper environments and close to the sediment, and they prey on micro crustaceans and the some oysters in other great lakes and other great lake in the Lake Ontario also saw the same pattern for scoping and the Lake Huron for deep urscoping, same pattern for Slony scoping in Lake Ontario and deep water scoping in Lake Huron, where they had higher concentrations than all their than their salmonids, and they were also associated to these MicroStation that are microcosm fit up. Abbott, and also to be living close to the sediment, be exposed to the concentration of PFAs in the sediment, and

Carolyn Foley 18:50
it's so D Do you all, I know this is all hypothesis, but do you think that the PFAs are kind of like just making their way out to the deeper waters, and just like absorbing onto the type of bottom, like whatever's out there, like the mud or thing, or the filter, things like that.

Dr. Daniele Miranda 19:11
Yeah, we have this class of PFAs, the big class with 10,000 coupons that share some character, share characteristics, but then in the when they go to the small classes, like these, 21 compounds that we were looking at. Some of them are more. You can find more of them in the water, and some of them more in the segment. So, yes, sediment is a sink for some of the compounds, and more for the heavier compounds. That is, they are what we found in those in those fish. So probably the sediment is acting as a sink for those compounds. But

Carolyn Foley 19:49
then there's other PFAs that are still in the water and still in the yes,

Dr. Daniele Miranda 19:53
yeah, some of them going to be partial to parchment, to water, to the I said to the. Atmospheric to the air, in some of the sediment. What

Stuart Carlton 20:02
gets you most excited about this research, like when you're doing it, right? Because presumably you're a big nerd for this stuff. I mean that in a positive way, right? And so when you're in this project, what gets you, what gets you excited, like with these data, or next steps, or whatever,

Dr. Daniele Miranda 20:14
I love, when I can put the puzzle together and understand, I understand more about those compounds that are in our day by days, and how the environment in the environment process drive those contaminants, why we are finding those compounds more in one species than the other species, why you find more compounds in deep waters than in deep waters or in sediment, then in or in water. So I love understanding that and putting this puzzle together. So

Carolyn Foley 20:49
what are some next steps, like the next questions that you would like to ask or explore, or are exploring right now?

Dr. Daniele Miranda 20:57
So something that I didn't mention yet, so we had those salmonids with we were analyzing only muscle for these, for this species, and now we want to see more in PFAs, in other tissues. And also some paper that was published in this that in my globe showed that P files can concentrate more. Some P files can be concentrated more in eggs, in someone with eggs. Now we are trying, we want to understand someone needs, someone it's offloading. Someone is pounding. Can be transferring those compounds from big lakes to the streams here in Lake Michigan is one of the questions

Carolyn Foley 21:44
that is a really cool question to ask, and that one is more like, Oh no, that's really cool. This is really cool work. Thanks for doing is really cool.

Dr. Daniele Miranda 21:59
Thank you very much.

Stuart Carlton 22:01
Yeah, no, it's fascinating to hear about and to come on and learn about. You know, from the very basics of what are PFAs and isotopes all the way up to this really cutting edge work that you're doing, finding out how totally hosed we may be. But that's actually not why we invited you here on teach me about the Great Lakes this week. The reason that we invited you on teach me about the Great Lakes is to ask two questions. And the first one is this, if you could choose to have a great donut for breakfast or a great sandwich for lunch, which one would you choose?

Dr. Daniele Miranda 22:30
This is a very good question, but just say, I'm going to for the sandwich lunch because I'm not of I don't, I don't like sweets in my breakfast.

Carolyn Foley 22:42
Yeah, it's

Dr. Daniele Miranda 22:43
a limitation that I have, sorry. And the answer for the sandwich is also weird, but it's my preferred. It's tofu and avocado. Tofu and

Stuart Carlton 22:54
avocado. That sounds wonderful. Okay, do you make that? Or is there a place to get it? I make it. You make it. So when I'm up in I'm going to come up to South Bend to visit Tom Coons, teach me about the Great Lakes weather correspondent, go to his house on the first day and get a BLT with tomatoes from his garden. And that'll be nice. And then I'll go do whatever you're doing South Bend. I'll hold up my arms like this at the football field. I will whatever else you do. And then on day two, I will come over to your house for lunch, and we will have tofu and avocado sandwiches. And

Dr. Daniele Miranda 23:27
I like the tomato addition. It can we can also add tomatoes,

Stuart Carlton 23:32
perfect. This is the time of your food. Honestly, now we're starting to get somewhere, yo.

Carolyn Foley 23:39
It's kind of funny. Like, I really enjoy when, when people pick sandwich and they say, You know what, just come to my house and I'll make you a great

Stuart Carlton 23:49
that's the move. No, those are the best, those are the best sandwiches. I completely agree. And yeah, so super I'll bring, actually, I won't bring up tomatoes this year, because something is eating half of every tomato in my garden. I don't know what it is, but, like, I come out in the morning, I think it's a raccoon, and there's, like, just half a tomato still hanging on the vine like this, and everything else is completely, you know, the other half is gone, and there's little ants on it. And I don't know what this little goofball is, but so I can't bring tomatoes this year, but hopefully Coombs will have them. Fantastic. Carolyn, do you want to

Carolyn Foley 24:20
right? So our second question that we'd like to ask you is, what is a special place in the Great Lakes that you'd like to share with our audience, and what makes it special for you? So

Dr. Daniele Miranda 24:30
I don't know much about the Great Lakes yet. I know I'm not from here, so I know a lot about the south of Lake Michigan, and that would say the dunes, it's such an incredible place, and just go there and spend some time and watching the sunset. We can see the sunset from there, but some place that is in my heart,

Carolyn Foley 24:53
I've just lost those dunes as well. It's like, yeah, it's. My My husband and I used to like because he's from Northwest Indiana, so when we were dating, we would go, like, in the winter and go see the shelf ice and stuff like that. So yeah, that's

Stuart Carlton 25:12
Dr Danielle Miranda, assist research assistant professor in the stream and wetland Ecology Lab at the University of Notre Dame. Thank you so much for coming on and teaching us all about the Great Lakes.

Dr. Daniele Miranda 25:22
Thank you so much for an invitation. That's

Stuart Carlton 25:35
a fascinating interview. I got to point out so that one of the things that we always discuss this, how I can't actually record anything at the same time. Dr fish Titus, Illinois. Dr fish Katie O'Reilly and teach me about the Great Lakes. Hall of Famer Brian Roth, would all be very upset if we didn't mention that. Of course, salmon need alewife is the big prey item for salmon in the Great Lakes. So instant feedback there. Save your emails, save your hotline messages, save everything else. And we'll, we'll, uh, bring that up, actually, with, uh, doctors fish next month, when we record our next Ask Doctor fish live, which allows me to plug our next Ask Doctor fish live, which is going to be? When is it? Carolyn? Is it August? 14. August 14. Uh, go to ask Doctor fish.com.

Carolyn Foley 26:20
For and then you also wanted to remind people about the newsletter. Oh,

Stuart Carlton 26:25
I failed to do that in advance, didn't I? Yes, we have a newsletter, and I'm trying to actually get issues almost called them episodes of it released with each episode of the podcast. You should go to teach me about the Great lakes.substack.com, sign up for a newsletter. I have little behind the scenes info, a place to comment in case you don't want to be commenting on certain social media places as much as you used to want it to be for whatever reason. And so yeah, you should go to teach me about the Great lakes.substack.com sign up. It's free, free newsletter there, and it's super fun, and I'm going to continue to release them more regularly than I have in the past. Thank you for reminding me of that. Speaking of reminding me, remind me of something you learned about the Great Lakes today. Carolyn Foley, I

Carolyn Foley 27:08
mean, I don't know. I think it's just really, really cool flash terrifying that these are chemicals that you know, they've been around for a while, but it's just sort of come to light that they are problematic, and, like, really problematic, and the that they don't necessarily follow the same type of thing where, like, salmon are the one who have the most, the big salmon, they're the top predators. They don't have the most, right?

Stuart Carlton 27:38
Like, with mercury, that's what you would expect 100% of the time, right? And that's why, yeah, a bunch

Carolyn Foley 27:42
of other contaminants too, kind of follow that same pattern where it goes up to the top predator. And so I think this is just a really, really neat area of research where people are trying to figure out how these chemicals that are super problematic, you know, how they're moving through the food web. And is it just an exposure thing, or does it have to do with, like, what they sequester to their tissues? I just think it's really, really fascinating So, and I really, like, genuinely love, like, their their graphic lab shack. I was just like, Oh man, that is that tells such a good story. Just, yeah, that

Stuart Carlton 28:15
is the story right there. And they didn't usually graphical abstracts are kind of stupid and or just like, oh, look, here's a graphical, you know, it's like, the highlight points that people do a lot of times. And it's like, clearly not the interest of the sun, because, you know, scientists are scientists, right? And this is what they want to get us publication. And the last, but this one is this one, is this one is very, very solid. Although, is it to scale? Is a sculpin that big? We should ask?

Carolyn Foley 28:36
No, it's not to scale. Sculpins are pretty. That's what I thought. I think. Anyway, I don't know. I could be wrong. I should, well, you know, I should note I'm not a great fish person. The sculpin is, like, a little bit bigger than the Gobi, and it's about the same time as the alewife, so that probably makes sense. But yeah.

Stuart Carlton 28:53
Well, anyway, this is another great question for our doctors. Fish next month, why are we just speculating when we can bring in the experts, that sounds fantastic. And I know you're about to ask. So the thing that I learned today was the groby gobies very low on PFAs. So this is good to hear. So we know about gobies. We know they're huge in Eastern Europe. We know that they are the exact shape of a hot dog, and we know that they're low on PFAs.

Carolyn Foley 29:19
But I'm gonna say, she said, 10,000 compounds, 10,000 compounds, and they could only analyze a certain subset. So gobies relatively low on this certain subset of PFAs may have other PFAs and definitely have other contaminants. But yeah,

Stuart Carlton 29:38
well, that is true, my dream will never be crushed, yeah, but that's actually I mean that ties in. The whole deal is it's like we just don't even know what we don't know, right? And that's just super duper terrifying. That's why

Carolyn Foley 29:53
scientists are cool. Teach me about. The Great Lakes is brought to you by the flying people at Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant. We encourage you to check out the cool stuff we do at IC grant.org, and at il i n grant on Facebook, Instagram, the platform formerly known as Twitter and other social media

Stuart Carlton 30:18
teaching about the Great Lakes is produced by hope charters, Megan Gunn and Renee miles. Carolyn Foley is our senior producer. Ethan Chitty, our associate producer and our fixer. The super fun podcast. Artwork is by Joel Davenport, and the show is edited for at least a few more by the awesome Quinn rose. We thank her for everything.

Carolyn Foley 30:37
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 765-496-4474,

you can also follow the show on the platform formerly known as Twitter, at Teach Great Lakes, but like the PFAs in a Lake Michigan salmon, we're a little worried about how toxic. Thanks for listening and keep creating those links you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai