"theme song" 0:00
Teach me about the Great Lakes. Teach me about the Great Lakes.

Stuart Carlton 0:05
Welcome back to teach me about the Great Lakes. A twice monthly podcast in which I twice monthly, hey, twice monthly podcast in which I A Great Lakes novice. As people are smarter and harder working than I am to teach me all about the Great Lakes. My name is Stuart Carlton. I'm Assistant Director at Illinois Indiana Sea Grant, assistant to the director himself. And I know a lot about monitoring certain things in real time that I will discuss later, but I don't know a lot about the Great Lakes, and that is the point of this year show. And we are joined today by the one, the only the special, Carolyn J Foley, the full dog herself. Carolyn, how are things up in Michigan?

Carolyn Foley 0:42
They're all right. Thank you.

Stuart Carlton 0:44
Big announcement. Big announcement. Headed up to Windsor, Canada. Oh, I see this is supposed to be in the wrap up. Well, we promoted it. Congratulations to this. Teach me about the early live tell us about where we're going to be. This is in your old haunts, right? Windsor,

Carolyn Foley 0:56
yes. So we are going to participate. We're going to do a live taping during the International Association for Great Lakes Research Conference in Windsor Ontario Canada, because there is actually a Windsor Nova Scotia Canada as well. So yes, there's, yeah.

Stuart Carlton 1:13
There's like 4 cities in Canada, you think they could have come up with a

Carolyn Foley 1:17
because there aren't 8 million lafayettes In the US anyway. All right,

Stuart Carlton 1:23
city to Lafayette ratio is way different anyway, sorry. Oh,

Carolyn Foley 1:27
go may 21 we'll be sending out a flyer about it. Our guest will be Trevor pitcher from the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research, and we will be at the Kildare house, which is in Walkerville, which is a very cool area. So if people keep an eye out for that, that should be fun. Yeah. Oh,

Stuart Carlton 1:45
if you're dare you want to stay away, excellent. Well, that'll be good. There's always funny games if you haven't been, if you're going to be at iagler, which, if you're listening, it's a good chance you are and you haven't made it to one of our live recordings yet. They're super fun. If nothing else, we're going to free food. Or what did you mention that yet? We're going to free.

Carolyn Foley 2:00
I haven't No, but yes, our plan is to have free food. Yes, our

Stuart Carlton 2:03
plan is to have free food.

Carolyn Foley 2:06
I am 99.9% certain there will be free food, but

Stuart Carlton 2:10
account numbers and whatever is pending, bureaucracy pending the intention. Our intention is to have free food. I've read enough papers with you now one to know that when in doubt. Add more words of caveat.

Carolyn Foley 2:25
No, no, no, we can't say that. All right, so what are we talking today? We are actually going to do a draft, which we have not done. Well, we haven't done

Stuart Carlton 2:32
a draft. We're supposed to do drafts almost every like every quarter is the plan we make our editorial calendar. Every quarter is supposed to be a draft. And so far, we've gone, I don't know, eight quarters without a draft, which is no good. And so Carolyn said she one day, she sent me a text message and said, enough. And I said, enough. What? And it wasn't about that. But then later, we started talking about the drafts, and we said, we have to have a draft. And like, you're right, we have to have a draft. So this is our draft, but we're super excited here to have this draft. We're going to get into it, but before we do our draft, guest today, as you know, by profession, are researchers. So we shall transition using the researcher feature.

"theme song" 3:17
Researcher feature, the feature in which a researcher gonna teach us about the great Blaze.

Stuart Carlton 3:29
I tell you, I think we're playing live at mosey down Main Street this year. Carolyn, not the podcast, but the band that I'm still assembling. So you can come on down to mosey down Main Street West Lafayette, Indiana. You're more of that brilliance. Anyway. Our guest today, our guest today, we have two guests. We have Jesse Grow, research specialist from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences over there, Milwaukee, home of Deidre Perov, friend of the show and friend of mine. Hello, Jesse. Thanks for coming on. .

Jesse Grow 3:57
Hi. Thank you so much for having me. This is going to be fun. Scary. Oh

Stuart Carlton 4:02
no, it's fine. It's only fun. It's only fun, not scary at all. And our second guest is Katelynn Johnson, who's the research and Operations Director, whoa, bigwig, bigwig at real time, aquatic ecosystem observation network, which you and I pronounce rayon at the University of Windsor. Katelynn, thanks so much for coming on.

Katelynn Johnson 4:20
Thanks for having me. And I'm just gonna say I'm definitely not a big wig, but I appreciate you.

Stuart Carlton 4:27
Director you are a big wig. Trust me, as someone who's an assistant director, the secret is all in the way you carry yourself and the way you talk to your minions and peons beneath you. No, that's good. And so we are going to draft real time monitoring techniques like this was a Carolyn topic. She's gonna tell us

Carolyn Foley 4:47
all about that. So first, I would like you both to just tell us a little bit about what you do for your day to day job. So maybe Katelynn, you can go first and tell us kind of what. You do? Sure.

Speaker 1 5:01
So I start by saying my day to day is different every single day, which keeps things interesting. I do a lot of different things, but I guess overarching, I manage small to complex research projects, mostly focused on real time technology and some state of the art using state of the art equipment in the Great Lakes. Notably, I manage a large buoy monitoring project in the western basin of Lake Erie, which we'll probably get into later in the show. But yeah, I do like everything from the field work to the finances to the managing of people, yeah, kind of a mixed bag of things.

Carolyn Foley 5:50
So you're definitely a big wig, then definitely

Katelynn Johnson 5:55
it's gonna be a fake it till I make it. I've

Stuart Carlton 6:00
read enough real big wigs to know that that's, that's the, that's the whole progression, right there. And then one day anyway, then one day you don't do it anymore for any of a number of reasons, both jolly and horrible. But that is not why we're here. Jesse, this is the YouTube

Jesse Grow 6:17
so for me, it's easier to explain what I do by season versus by day. So it's spring right now. It's absolute insanity. I also manage a whole bunch of instruments, just like Katelynn does. I have 11 buoys this year. I started out with three. I don't know how that happened. They just sort of keep multiplying. But spring is really busy. I'm testing all the individual, individual components of the buoys. I'm calibrating sensors. I'm making any repairs that I noticed from last year. I'm usually rewiring or we re waterproofing something, whether I like it or not. And then onto the physical assembly of the large buoy platforms, testing out all of its components together, which is usually when I run into issues. Like they all can work individually, but when I put them all together, nobody wants to play nice, which is very frustrating. And that also includes the solar and battery powers just to and then once the system is put together, I usually set it out in the parking lot for a variety of days, see how things are going, and then actively working with the boat crew to deploy these systems, overseeing deployment strategies. And by overseeing, I mean standing out of the way so the boat crew can, like, handle it. And I'm usually just standing around somewhere, like, like, really nervous that something's gonna break off, and then it goes fine, and it's generally fine. But yeah, so that's spring. Summer is a little bit quieter. I'm just constantly monitoring the buoys performance. If something goes down, I'm usually just like, helplessly, like, I don't know what that could be if I can't get out there, you know, that's, you know, not fun. Sometimes I sporadically will go service things, if photos available, and then I'll do more of the updating SOPs and outreach materials, things like that. And then fall and winter, I won't go on too long anymore. Fall and Winter is sort of the off season for the buoys, but it's really busy for back end stuff. So grant reports, grant writing, updating statistics, yeah, grant writing and project reports are take so much time and planning the next season all at the same time. So same with Caitlin. I'm very active in the grant writing process. I do all the budgets, I design the systems. I try to take a vacation, maybe. But so that's about

Stuart Carlton 8:50
it's okay. So you should have 11 buoys where we'll probably get into this, depending on what you draft. Maybe you don't draft anything related to a buoy. Maybe you do. We'll find out. This is the psychology of the draft. Maybe you want a chance to but so what? Like how bigger so we have, we have two size buoys, two sizes of buoy, right? We have our regular size buoy, I guess is one way to put it. And then we also have the smaller one, which, of course, everybody calls chewy. What? What size buoys Do you have?

Jesse Grow 9:23
So I have a couple different sizes. Our biggest buoys and our sort of long standing systems, are off of Atwater beach in Milwaukee, and then up in sort of mid Bay of Green Bay. And those are about 15 feet tall. They're rated for 1500 pounds of buoyancy. So they're big. Those are most comprehensive systems, too. So they have the most sensors on them. They also give me the most headaches out of all of them, because they are older. But, you know, I still love them. Don't, don't listen.

Stuart Carlton 9:56
I'm having that same problem with our 12 year old right now. The most headaches i. It, believe me,

Jesse Grow 10:02
yeah. So those are our biggest ones this year or last year. Actually, we got some some more smaller buoys. They're 150 pound buoyancy, still with a solar panel and everything from neck sense and Foundry is we get most of our stuff from them. And so those are a little bit smaller. And I have, like, six of those up in Green Bay. We have a couple 950s as well. So it's like the biggest to the smallest. I guess I would say this is simple answer. Well,

Stuart Carlton 10:32
good. If I know what I was talking about, I would compare those to chewy now, but I realized I have no idea. Caroline, how big is chewy? Do you know? No How many poopies

Carolyn Foley 10:41
we gotta get to the draft. Man.

Stuart Carlton 10:45
No, it's Yeah, thanks, Jesse. That's where we're gonna talk about the draft. Let me describe the draft to every or did you have another question you wanted to seamlessly ask?

Carolyn Foley 10:56
It's been a while since I've co hosted and like, you can tell right now. It's like, Oh, I forgot that Carolyn always has a plan that she's like, Oh, no, we have to do this, and then we

Stuart Carlton 11:05
have to do this. Oh, here we go. Actually, I have a question I've been thinking about deeply lately that I would like to ask each of you. And that is Caitlin, and then, yeah, Caitlyn, then Jesse. We'll go in that same order again. What is one skill that you've gained through your job that surprises you? And so how about you? What's something so I think of you now is sitting there, basically you just look at data all day, and then you enter things into spreadsheets. But I bet that's not all that you do. What's something surprising that you picked up on the

Speaker 1 11:31
chat? I'm gonna say for me, it's computer programming. I'm still not good at it. I'm not good at all, but I have to know it to program the buoys. And we also have a bunch of a UVs, Slocum gliders, heavily involved in computer programming with those as well. Kind of excited for AI, because maybe that will take over that job, only for that, not excited for that, for anything else except this, but um, yeah, for me, it's computer programming for sure. Never thought I'd be using that. How

Carolyn Foley 12:06
about you? Jesse, yeah. So

Jesse Grow 12:08
honestly, it's all been a surprise to me. I've never I never thought I would do anything like I do now. So I guess, to be more specific, I've discovered that I really like to tinker and build with with build anything, build things. I like to work with my hands a lot. I think when I was younger, I never really gave myself enough grace to pursue anything in the engineering or technical side of things, because I was just like, oh, you suck at math, you know, you can't do but, and so, you know, I went the, like, more nature route. You know, when I was, I was like, playing in puddles and just outside all the time when I was a kid. So I went, like, conservation route. And here I am back sort of in the more technical side of things, which I really enjoy. It's a creative outlet. I really like rewiring things. I learned how to solder. Yeah, it's, it's been, it's been a really fun, sort of, like I said, creative outlet, and it's probably the only area in my life where my crippling perfectionism is a good thing, cable management. So

Stuart Carlton 13:14
how did but so then let's flip that to the other side. So actually, you you were moving in, and the parts that surprised you are the things that I think of you doing and being attuned to do you feel like that playing in puddles and nature stuff when you were a kid? Is that prepared you too? Or is that is that Jesse dead only to be replaced by the Tinker?

Jesse Grow 13:29
She's never dead. No nature. Jesse and tinker Jesse are sisters now. Yeah, yeah. They definitely compliment each other.

Stuart Carlton 13:39
I think Excellent. All right, well, no, I

Carolyn Foley 13:42
was gonna say, like, you're gathering all this really cool data that is vital in support of conservation, right and correct. So that is a really cool way that you can see the value of it in a ways that maybe other people can't. And Caitlin, I have been reading the book robot ellipse, which is all about AI taking over and so, yeah, so

Stuart Carlton 14:02
is it a fiction or a nonfiction? It's,

Carolyn Foley 14:04
well, it's supposed to be a nonfiction, but we'll see.

Unknown Speaker 14:09
It's terrifying.

Carolyn Foley 14:12
But I did, I did appreciate getting, you know, kind of a there is a good thing, because it's going to help me program better.

Stuart Carlton 14:19
That's, yeah, the other day I said to write a program about gonna give me 10. Stuart is awesome. 20. Go to 10. And I just ran that, and it was good, good, AI, alright, well, let's go under there. So we're drafting, tell me what we're drafting, and then I have actually written, I this is true that I have written, and may or may not have run for this episode, a custom R script to randomly pick the order of the draft here. So, Carolyn, what am I drafting again?

Carolyn Foley 14:45
Alright, so Caitlin started to kind of allude to some of the equipment. So we are drafting. So you're creating a dream team. We're going to do two rounds where you get to pick whatever you want. You can't pick something that someone else. Has picked. So whoever gets to go first gets to pick whatever they want, and then everybody else has to pick something different. We will do two rounds, and we are drafting anything, any sensor, any it can be autonomous. It doesn't have to be autonomous. It can be something that you actually control with remote controls, or it can be something that you throw in the lake and retrieve later. It can be surface. It can be up in the air. It can be at the bottom. But any kind of tech that is being used to answer cool research questions or support cool research in the Laurentian Great Lakes, and you get to pick, you know, whatever equipment, onto your team. Then we'll go around to each person. And then, I think, the second time, do we go around again? Or do we want to go? Oh, we

Stuart Carlton 15:49
go around again. We do not do it snakes,

Carolyn Foley 15:52
yeah, okay. And then, and then we'll do kind of a catch all, like honorable mention type thing. So you're, you're creating your dream team to sample the Great Lakes. Oh, this

Stuart Carlton 16:03
is very exciting. Everybody understand, love a good dream team. We got 92 Olympics followed by this here. Alright, so according to my custom random script, which I've saved as T, M, A, T, G, l, dash, draft, dash, order, dot, r, with a capital R is generated first. Carolyn Foley, it's going first in our draft. Carolyn, why don't you start us off?

Carolyn Foley 16:26
Alright, um, so I am going to pick the GLaDOS sensors. The, it's the Acoust. I never I am very bad at acronyms, so it is the, come on computer. Caitlin's like, I could say it for you. No, like, can

Speaker 1 16:45
I say it? Yes, it's the Great Lakes, acoustic telemetry observation system. Shout out to GLaDOS.

Carolyn Foley 16:58
Um, so, yeah. So my reason, yeah. So my reason for picking this, it's this network of sensors all around the Great Lakes, and I think sometimes they can move them and they're adding more. And basically, fish get implanted with some tags, and when the fish swim by, they ping, and so afterward, you get this really awesome, extensive data set of kind of, where the fish are going, and some researchers have used it to answer questions like, what, where are they hanging out at certain times of year, like, are they actually using this habitat? And all sorts of really cool things. So they've

Stuart Carlton 17:36
put into fishes, all right, how do the tags like?

Carolyn Foley 17:40
So so there's there's receivers that are in, like the lake bed that as the fish. So there's a tag in the fish, and then there's a receiver, the stationary receiver, and the fish can move around. So as they go by a stationary receiver, the stationary stationary receiver says, Oh, yep, that's fish such and such, whatever that they have attached to it, like species and size and all sorts of stuff. Got it, got it. Got it all right?

Jesse Grow 18:05
I don't think guys know this, but they do that by blow dart. Intern said, No, I'm just

Stuart Carlton 18:11
No. I was so fired up. That would be so cool. I mean, it seems more accurate. We're actually doing a study on bow fishing right now. We're just starting it up in our lab, along with some some natural scientists. So I we could, let's talk. Let's talk. That's all I'm gonna say. Okay, excellent, GLaDOS, right? GLaDOS is off the board, which is fine by me, because I never heard of it. Jesse, you're our second I had heard of it. Carolyn, that was, exaggerating. She made this horrified face that I never felt like

Carolyn Foley 18:43
I failed as a person. If you had never heard of that, whether or

Stuart Carlton 18:47
not you failed as a person is little too glad to Okay. Jesse. Jesse, you're second according to our custom R script or the negotiation we had before the show started.

Jesse Grow 18:57
Okay, okay, I don't think you're gonna allow me to say year round stable funding, but no, that is, that is what I'd love in my corner. Link like that would be great. But technology wise, I'm gonna go the boring route and say real time monitoring buoys, just because that's where I'm comfortable, and that's most of my babies are buoys. It's you were talking before about seeing the value and things. And one of the greatest values to My program is that the community loves it. So our biggest buoy visitors, you know, digital visitors, whatever users, there you go. Our biggest Boogie users are members of Oh yeah. Well, I'm from Wisconsin, so check out. Yeah. So our biggest users are anglers, boaters, swimmers. So having a lot if we can pepper more buoys along the coast and really get a better understanding, a more accurate understanding of what's going on in the near shore area, the program was only more growing in value. Yes, this, all of our buoys support a lot of really cool research that's happening at many places, including the UW School of Freshwater Sciences, by a lot of our bigwig PIs. But also my favorite part of what I do is learning how members of the public love and cherish these buoys every time we go out in the spring, especially for the Atwater system, our captain Max is, you know, on the radio, and he's, you know, puts a call out, saying, This is what I'm going to do. And so many people radio in, and they're like, Yeah, buddies back. Please don't take it out. Leave it in for the week, like it's so popular. So that's always really validating. So yeah, buoys all the way, we get

Carolyn Foley 20:59
calls that are like, where are the buoys? Why are the buoys not in? Where are the buoys? Yeah, go in. So, yeah, people, we get those too.

Stuart Carlton 21:08
So real time data monitoring buoys, including the ones that Jesse manages, but also including, will Matt and Michigan City and of course, chewy are off of the table. What else could be next to go find out? We'll go to Caitlin Johnson, your third pick.

Speaker 1 21:26
Okay, I gotta go with the autonomous underwater vehicles, the silicon gliders. Yeah, I gotta do it. Um, so actually, there's only eight, maybe nine, in the Great Lakes at this point, and and we have four of them. So it's a really cool, tight knit community of glider operators. I think that the gliders talking about community engagement stuff. I think the gliders are like a lightning rod for engaging communities. People love the gliders. So we definitely have that. They're, of course, real time. So we have that we not only can track environmental parameters, but we can also track fish at the same time. So you get a little bit of everything, the GLaDOS piece, but the real time monitoring piece. And then, of course, you get, like the spatial aspect, so like, a time and space aspect with the glider. So they're not just, you know, sitting in one position. They're pretty cool.

Stuart Carlton 22:28
Am I allowed to ask questions about this Carol? I'm curious about these gliders. So we have to have you both back on something that's fine. Like, how many do you have? Do you set them off? Like, what? How long? How long is the glider glide for at a time they

Speaker 1 22:40
can go up for I think our longest mission is like 25 days. You could bring it onto shore, charge up the batteries and send it back out. But that's just 25 days battery dependent. I mean, they're awesome during covid. Like in the height of covid, we were still collecting tons of data because we had the gliders. So

Stuart Carlton 23:04
have you named? Yeah, what's the best name? The best name, yeah, we don't talk for all of them.

Speaker 1 23:13
Are you sure we have the daphnia, the sturgeon, the cormorant and the Mary Lou. Mary Lou is our she's our secretary at the University of Windsor, and she's awesome. So we had to name a glider after her

Stuart Carlton 23:30
fantastic, excellent. I'm a

Carolyn Foley 23:33
little bit bummed, because that was going to be one of my picks, but that's all right, Mary Lou, referring to the slider, not the Secretary, so Jesse already put in, like year round stable funding. Also very supportive people who help us all the time get all the things done.

Stuart Carlton 23:53
Yes, yes, yes, excellent. Alright, so from my perspective, this one is near and dear to my heart in much the same way that gliders and buoys are near and dear to your heart, and that is looking out of your window and wondering, What the heck is going on with the weather? You see today, we're supposed to have a baseball game at 530 a youth baseball game, but there's maybe going to be rain, maybe not. And so I keep logging on to different weather sites, and we're going to get in the next hour and a half, somewhere between 0.15 and 1.25 inches of rain. The first lighter, drier half means we will play baseball. The second half means we will not play baseball. And the way I will time this in, but we can't figure it out, because every weather site is different, so the way I will tie this in is what it actually we need, as a meteorologist to offer human interpretation on these models right? And because West Lafayette is not a huge town, we don't have as many meteorologists working, and so we're forced to go to the websites, and we don't get the information. So my pick is actually looking out the window and ground truthing and also wondering if you're going to play baseball. But the broader picture is somebody to make sense of all of the data that is gathered. Yeah,

Jesse Grow 25:00
that's a good one,

Carolyn Foley 25:03
as long as it's not a robot that we were talking about earlier the aos. I'm like, okay, but tech, tech, tech, and they keep

Speaker 1 25:11
going back to this theme. It's really, like, terrifying me, but

Stuart Carlton 25:20
All right, well, round one is in the books. Wow. Some good monitoring. Things are off the board, but there's still more to be drafted. And for that, we go back to you. Carolyn,

Carolyn Foley 25:31
okay, so I am going to say cameras. So the there are a bunch of webcams. I mean, I don't know, sometimes it feels like everybody has a webcam where they're just like, taking pictures, you know, so they're automatically updating once an hour, or things like that. And that's one of the things. When we put cameras on our buoys. I remember, you know, when we first had our Michigan City bui I was like, I want to put a camera on it. And people were like, people really gonna like that. And then a number of years later, they were like, yes, they are. They absolutely are. And it's really fun to compare, like, on shore. So I think Jesse was talking earlier about the near shore. So there are some researchers who have kind of set up a camera to take pictures of the the receding shoreline over the course of a winter, different things like that. So webcams that update, or even just cameras that are logging the data over time, that's my second.

Stuart Carlton 26:33
Love a good camera. Love a good you took mine. It happens that's okay. So how do you use cameras? Jesse, what do y'all use cameras for? Is it the same thing, just on the buoy? I

Jesse Grow 26:46
use, I use cameras to pull my hair out. I can my camera situation. I don't you guys have limnotech. Does your buoys Right? Or they did in the past. I can't remember. I don't know they're magicians, because they just have figured out how to do the camera stuff. I again, I don't have any real engineering experience, so I just sort of inherited these systems, and I don't know anything about cameras. I did upgrade two of them recently, and they work okay, but yeah, the whole, the whole back end data storage of that is challenging. But yeah, I won't, I won't ramp, no, it's a big

Stuart Carlton 27:25
problem. And actually, we run into problems we won't talk about now, but in terms of what counts as data and not and do cameras count as data? Do we need to retain that stuff to maintain our to be consistent with our agreements with it's a it's a total it's it's a horizon, a frontier, right? And we're trying to kind of learn as we go. And assumptions we made three or four years ago may not or five or six or eight years ago may not hold anymore. So it's a royal nightmare, but they're a cool source of data. Excellent. Caitlin, tell me about your third second. What? Jesse, oh, she just sat there yakking about cameras because I asked her, thank you, Jesse didn't do a picture.

Carolyn Foley 28:05
She told me that I stole her pick, and I went, Yeah,

Stuart Carlton 28:07
remembering this whole interaction. Now it's all coming back to me, and it's just as if Bowie measured it right. Okay, well, you got to pick. I bet you have another pick. What you got? All

Jesse Grow 28:19
right, sort of to piggyback off of the camera. Thing, I'm going to say better over the water telemetry, cell coverage, Iridium satellite is way too expensive, especially for our little budgets. And again mentioning the cameras, it would be so great if there was better coverage and more bandwidth available to send higher quality images at more frequent rates, because people love the people love the cameras.

Carolyn Foley 28:48
They love them. And then people can do really, really cool things, analyzing the actual images the higher resolution they are too, right? So, yeah, cool. I kind of enjoyed that you're going really big picture with your picks. Okay, Caitlin, what's your pick for round two?

Speaker 1 29:04
Okay, I have so many pics. This is hard. I go with an ROV system to recover lost equipment on the bottom of the lake, and it would just be awesome along the theme of cameras, but underwater. I mean, it's not like they're not attainable, but I would just like to have one, and we have a lot of equipment on the bottom of the lake over from over the years of just putting out so much. And then inevitably, you know, things happen, especially Lake Erie, it's it's not the funnest place to work. So, yeah, there's, there's $2,000 of equipment down there. I'd like to recover it. I'm gonna go with ROV

Carolyn Foley 29:51
and, yeah, like, the western basin of Lake Erie, like a storm picks up in like, it's wild, right? Like it's, like, yeah. Yeah, It's

Speaker 1 30:00
wild. Honestly, I have to say, like, think No thanks to me, this is thanks to my colleague, Todd. He's like a magician. He's like, perfected deploying buoys and deploying equipment. And last year, in knock on wood, we lost nothing, and we have seven buoys out there with a bunch of sensor lines associated with the buoy. So we'll have, like, a buoy, and then up to a kilometer away from the buoy, we have a smaller hazard buoy, and that has our water quality sensors on it, so that we can go out and clean the sensors off, like every couple weeks, every week, depending on the time of year, and we could just grab it and put it on our boat, rather than having to, you know, recover an entire buoy. So he's developed this amazing system, and it gets better every year. So it's exciting, but there's still lot of stuff out

Jesse Grow 30:53
there. We have a little ROV that you can borrow or, you know, just, you know, email me find your stuff

Unknown Speaker 31:01
amazing.

Stuart Carlton 31:02
The bar movie, fantastic. All right, and then I will bring up my second pick. My second pitch is pick, excuse me, is going to be social media text analysis, which is different, but I'm a different type of scientist than you are, and that is now that people are constantly providing status updates, sometimes on different websites, an evolving set of websites. What they're really doing is providing data, right? And so you can pull that data, you can scrape it, and you can do all kinds of analyzes. On there I'm going to link in the show notes to a blog post I wrote, oh gosh, a long time ago now, since before I started here, so probably seven or eight years ago, called 122,379 tweets about climate change. And in there I scraped a bunch of data from Twitter to look at what people were thinking in a very limited time about climate change based on analyzing the text. And you'll see people using this in increasing ways to look at, you know, things like sentiment analysis, topic analysis, what are people talking about? How are they talking about it, and things like that. And so in there you can get a real time, or nearly real time, automated look at what is happening. And in the social sciences, there's a lot of movement in these sorts of areas, especially frankly, as things like survey response rates go down, and we're looking for other ways to gather data, and as the number of sensors out there go up, because now everybody in their pocket is carrying something that that they can both produce data on purpose, through things like social media posts, but also through data that's being kept passively gathered by, uh, large corporations. But so there's so much more data out there, and learning how to harness it, I think is going to be a key skill in the social scientists in the coming decades. And for me, what that means is, look at the stuff you wrote online, scraping it and analyzing it. So that is my pick number two.

Carolyn Foley 32:56
See now I'm gonna start singing the kitty man. But anyway, um, my Canadian is showing okay. So, okay, so we're going to do one more round where you get to mention any thing that you really would have liked to talk about. So it's lightning, though, so it's just kind of really quick. I would have picked this. And we can just go around, and if you don't have anything, you can say, pass. And we can, you know, yeah, what

Stuart Carlton 33:19
else is on your list, bring out your dead Yeah.

Carolyn Foley 33:21
Okay, so I can start. So there's these really cool. It's one of the best tensors I ever had. You like, attached it to a net, and when you dumped it in the water, it would start to record both the temperature and the depth, so you knew exactly like when you took it out, and it would stop logging as soon as it came out, and you would get exactly the temperature and depth that the net was pulled through. Super, super helpful. Okay,

Jesse Grow 33:48
cool, Jessie, that is cool. I've never heard of that. Okay, lightning round, how about this is sort of more troubleshooting. How about something to help me remove muscle bearding from delicate instrumentation without scrubbing it with some material that I shouldn't be scrubbing it with, because that's not fun.

Stuart Carlton 34:10
What is muscle bearding? I don't know

Jesse Grow 34:13
if that's what it's actually called, but it's just when, like a Quagga muscle or a zebra mussel is stuck on something for a period of time, it sort of attaches itself with those little fibers, and I power wash everything, and, you know, gets most, most of the guts and stuff up. Little Fuzz is stuck there, and

Speaker 1 34:31
it's this threads, thistle threads. Thank

Jesse Grow 34:34
you so much. A real scientist, ladies and gentlemen, oh

Unknown Speaker 34:37
no, no. You've

Carolyn Foley 34:39
just had to deal with them too, and you're like, cursed. This will thread. Okay. Caitlin, how about you?

Speaker 1 34:45
Okay, that's funny because I'm on the I'm on the same theme as Jesse, something that I don't know if this is exists, but someone needs to create some type of wiper system that doesn't break, that lasts all season long. Because. That can clean the sensors. Yeah, that's what I would love to have, and that's not going to weigh down the buoy like some kind of lightweight, nice little wiper with no problems. That's what I would love.

Stuart Carlton 35:14
Do you have anything I did? I have two more on my list. One is just text, dr, fish, Titus seilheimer, to find out what's going on right now in the rivers. That that is my preferred way to real time monitor, especially this time of year, which we talk about all of the time. Or Titus, favorite thing to do is to take videos of fish in the middle of that special moment in time. And so Titus, I think gives me real time updates on that very often. So that is was also my list. And then last one is a bit of a random there's a soda that existed for just a few years in the 90s called Orbitz soda, or early 2000s and a colleague of mine, back when I was getting my master's degree at the University of Georgia, it had these little white balls in it and or beads, I guess. And it turns out those have the same specific gravity. I don't even know what specific gravity is, as bass eggs, or striped bass eggs, and so he released them into the river to track where they went, to help model bass egg movement as part of his dissertation research. And that's all I remember about that. But I will look for a reference in the put in the show notes. Those are the two I had cool

Carolyn Foley 36:22
so I had not given my second one yet, so I'll go backwards since Stuart did too. Jesse, is there any other one that you'd want to give a shout out to?

Jesse Grow 36:31
Oh, how about an endless supply of heat shrink butt splices? Because they are my best friend.

Carolyn Foley 36:41
Awesome. Caitlin, do you have any other that you wanted to call it?

Speaker 1 36:44
I have lots, but I it will. We'll be here for hours. So you go ahead, um, okay, I'm gonna pick a phosphorus real time sensor that does all of the different types of phosphorus in real time. But you don't have to go out and change any reagents. It's just, it's just self sufficient. I don't think that exists, but I want that

Carolyn Foley 37:10
good ideas. It's like. So if you could create this,

Stuart Carlton 37:14
manifest it, you got to manage, if you don't manifest it, who will

Jesse Grow 37:18
let's just turn them on our like desperate fieldwork wishlist,

Carolyn Foley 37:25
and I guess so I'll wrap this up with one that we haven't mentioned it all that does already exist that's doing some cool things as various types of drones, right? Like, there's people are putting all sorts of cool sensors where they can, and some of them look really wild, like, some of them are just the little regular drones, and some are, like, these huge devices that are being flown around and stuff like that. So we've also talked about how, you know, it could be really helpful when you have like, episodic events, so like, there's a huge rainfall and a bunch of stuff dumps into the river, and if you can get the drone out fast, you can get a bunch of cool data. So all right, cool. Well, thank you for participating in the draft. I really enjoyed talking nerdy equipment and supports in general with you all, especially in the middle of field season, that's like super, super busy for you as you're deploying all of this equipment. And thank you on behalf of all of the people who love the data that your equipment gathers so but this is not why we brought you on teach me about the Great Lakes. We brought you to ask two questions, and so each of you can answer these questions. So the first is, if you could choose to have a great donut for breakfast or a great sandwich for lunch, which would you choose? And we'll go, Jesse first.

Jesse Grow 38:41
All right, I know you guys probably want me to say donut, but I'm picking sandwich only because it goes better with beer, which is very important to me.

Stuart Carlton 38:53
So, all right, well, you're in Milwaukee. It's like that old song. What made Milwaukee famous made a loser out of me. Let's talk about this. So I'm going to go to Milwaukee, and I'm going to want to get a sandwich and a beer, right? I'm going to visit Deidre. Of course, maybe I'll visit you, and we can talk about buoy cameras, or what have you where. Where should I go here to get this beer and this sandwich? And what sandwich should I get and spend more time on the beer?

Jesse Grow 39:21
My favorite place is really near SFS, and I'm pretty sure Deirdre works in the building. So, you know, just saying, it's called barnacle buds, and it is just a fun place. It's like, right in the marina. It's actually, it would probably be faster for us to, like, kayak over there, then sort of drive through the walkers Point area. But, yeah, it's, it's just a fun place. There's lots of outdoor seating. It's really fun to go there in the summer. If we, if we have a bunch of grad students, or students or people, we're giving tours to whatever, we'll bring them there. They have seafood. But you know, it's not. Like walleye. It's not perch. It's my favorite thing, is just a grouper, po boy. So if you want a huge group or po boy, even though I I realize it's not a freshwater finish, it's really good. It's messy. And usually when you order a beer, I'm pretty sure they mostly have Tallboys. So

Stuart Carlton 40:19
doesn't matter. Can't go wrong with that. Michigan. They call them you per pool. Voice anyway. Caitlin, how about you? Are you a are you a sandwich or a team donut? Here? Where are we going?

Speaker 1 40:29
I'm sandwiched, for sure, all the way donuts. Donuts, sir. Meh. To me, love a good sandwich. Love a good Italian sandwich. Windsor, Ontario is known for good Italian food. We're going to get a sandwich. We're gonna go to julio's. To the back of julio's, which is a grocery store, but in the back is the deli, and you can go ask for their signature sandwich. And it is

Stuart Carlton 40:58
the bomb. All right, I'm writing it down. And how do you spell julios,

Speaker 1 41:01
G, I, G, l, i, o, like

Stuart Carlton 41:06
the Ben Affleck and Jennifer.

Unknown Speaker 41:10
It could be giglios.

Stuart Carlton 41:11
I don't know that's how I pronounce that movie in mine is giggly, but no, it's all right. This is fantastic. Second question we asked a lot like the second question that we'd like to ask is this, and that is one of our purposes in doing this show, is to help people appreciate the great lakes as like a cultural and environmental resource and a really, you know, I think sometimes not people who live right on the lake, a lot of other people can kind of take it for granted. And so we like to share special places, things that make the Great Lakes special, or places that make the Great Lakes special. With our guests, Jesse, is there a place in the Great Lakes to you that's a really special place that you wouldn't mind

Jesse Grow 41:50
sharing? Yeah, so I'm fairly certain that a lot of people would say this, but the pictured rocks National Lakeshore holds a pretty special place in my heart. It is just so beautiful up there. I love the whole up. Honestly, I was kind of going back and forth between pictured rocks or Washington, Illinois, Indiana, Sea Grant, but the up takes the cake. Up

Stuart Carlton 42:15
takes the cake. There it is. Thank you for that. I have to go there. I were thinking about doing up trip this summer. I'll put it on the list. How about you in Windsor or beyond, where's a special place that our listeners can go check out?

Speaker 1 42:29
I I'm gonna have to honestly go with Windsor as as a special place in the Great Lakes itself. I'm I'm from this area. I think everyone who is from this area and leaves always comes back. It's just a special place. I don't know, maybe it gets a bad rep, but I love it. We're in the heart of the Huron Erie corridor, so like, I have Lake St Clair in my backyard, I have Lake Erie, I have the Detroit River. I have access to the US. I just love this area, and I think it's a real gem in the Great Lakes, and I'm excited to see you here at igler.

Stuart Carlton 43:04
That is wonderful. Thank you so much. Well, next time I'm in Windsor, I will go visit the city of Windsor. Then Jesse grow a research specialist at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, School of Freshwater Sciences, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Caitlin Johnson, research and operations director the rod at the real time aquatic ecosystem observation network, rayon at the University of Windsor. Thank you to you too, for coming on and teaching us all about the Great Lakes. Thanks for having us.

Excellent. Always good to get another draft. I'll be honest. Carolyn, pretty sure I'm taking this prize home. I think I won this one. Being honest,

Carolyn Foley 43:49
I enjoyed the creativity, um, for like, tech, and it's like, Okay, we're gonna go, we're gonna get wild with it and think about a whole bunch of different things. So, yeah,

Stuart Carlton 43:59
no, every tech from right, from this, like super high tech drones and underwater vehicles to looking out your window and texting Titus, all which are true. I mean, there's all kind of ways to monitor things, so it's interesting to think about, especially with people like that. We gotta have them back on the I want to we need some deep dives. We need some

Carolyn Foley 44:16
deep dives. Yeah, I sense that you wanted to deep dive. But I personally was like, no, no, no. We can have another episode about that particular

Stuart Carlton 44:23
Yeah, no, and look for that episode tomorrow in your podcast. No, I'm just kidding, but yeah, well, we'll add them to the list. You're on the list. You're on the list. Alright, good. So going to the Kildare house. We're going to Windsor. What is the Kildare house? Anytime it's called the house, I think that's fancy, you know? I'm like, oh, it's the Kildare house. So it must be very fancy. It

Carolyn Foley 44:42
does look like a house, but it's a pub. It's a it's a pub food like but it's a fun atmosphere, and it's a neat part of the city, and I'm excited for people to see it

Stuart Carlton 44:53
Excellent. Well, I'm excited too. You know what? We got 20 minutes until I'm supposed to be at the baseball game, assuming that. That this rain, which has held out so far, has held out that is enough chatter.

Carolyn Foley 45:08
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 cool stuff we do at IC grant.org, and dot i L, I N, S, E, A, T, R, a n, using 10 on

Stuart Carlton 45:27
this book, Instagram, we got our shorts. We're uploading our shorts everywhere, so keep an eye out for those. Our senior producer is Carolyn Foley, teaching about the Great Lakes. Is produced by Megan Lake lover Gunn and Renee miles. Ethan Chitty is our associate producer and our fixer. Super fun podcast. Artwork the one that will be on the stickers at our live event at the Kildare house. So come and get one made by Joel Davenport. Show is edited by the incomparable Sandra.

Carolyn Foley 45:59
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, which is always super hot

Stuart Carlton 46:09
at the highest

Carolyn Foley 46:13
496, i i s g, 4474 you can also Follow the show on Twitter. What Is anyone actually monitoring that in real time anymore? Thanks for listening and greeting. It.

Speaker 2 46:47
Hello Cindy. We are recording. Hello Cindy. We are recording. Hello Cindy. We're recording. I just realized we're recording.

Speaker 2 47:07
Papa, hello, Sammy, we are recording. Hello, Sandy, we are recording. I'm trying to feel time while Carolyn opens a new room, and now it looks like the sun is coming out, so the baseball game is on, unless, of course, the tornado that we're under a watch for happens to come along, and then we'll Be ducking, ducking out of the rain. Come on, Carolyn, won't you send a link again? I.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai