Stuart Carlton 0:00
Teach me about the Great Lakes. Teach me about the Great Lakes. Welcome back to teaching about the Great Lakes. A periodic, twice monthly podcast in which hiya Great Lakes novice asks people who are smarter and harder working, and I teach me all about the Great Lakes. My name is Stuart Carlton, and I know a lot about getting carted to go into the casino. It's like being well over twice the minimum age required to enter the casino, and then getting asked a second time hours later, how old you are, and delightfully saying that you are well over twice the age to get into the casino. But I don't know a lot about the Great Lakes, and that is forever. So this year show, and we are live from the International Association for Great Lakes Research Conference at omagio's kill their house in beautiful, yeah, in very nice Windsor Canada. Goodness gracious, the river is nice. No, this is a wonderful town, and we're so far to be here. And we are joined today. We have two hosts, not one, but two special live show. First one is the lake lover herself. Megan. Gunn. Megan, how's your I Adler, been so far, it's

Megan Gunn 1:01
been really good. The sessions that I've gone to have been awesome, especially the education session, but I may be a little biased because I was the co chair, but all the other sessions have been awesome. Also,

Stuart Carlton 1:10
that sounds fantastic, and they will not hear you if you don't put your mouth up here. It turns out I lied. Okay. And our second, our second, or host, excuse me, is Carolyn Foley, research coordinator, Illinois, Indiana, Sea Grant. Carolyn, how's your week so far? It's lovely. Thank

Carolyn Foley 1:25
you. Have you won big no, because I don't play. I just use the free parking. Just

Stuart Carlton 1:31
use the free parking. Yes, you sit at the machine. This is what I do. I sit at the machine, and I sort of look around expectantly, and every now and again, you put in a loony and then you just wait, fantastic or super pumped to be here. Normally, we would have all of this weird artifice and then do transitional. In fact, we're gonna do that this time anyway, but we're live. We have a guest, but before we get to the guest, we must get to our favorite transitional music. This is about the third episode in a row. We're nailing it, so let's go. You a

"theme song" 2:05
researcher feature, a

feature in which a researcher gonna teach us about the Great Lakes.

Stuart Carlton 2:15
Our guest today is Dr. Trevor Pitcher. He's a professor at glear, the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research in the department of integrative, integrated, Integrative Biology, and the director of the freshwater Ecology Center, oh, my goodness, excuse me. Like I said, it's usually me being an idiot. It's right here in front of my face. I'm staring at the words I really am. Shall I try it again? And director of the freshwater Restoration Ecology Center. Trevor, thank you for joining us live at Niagara. How's it going?

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 2:46
It's going good.

Thanks for having me.

Carolyn Foley 2:48
Excellent. Good. You have to like, yeah,

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 2:50
you gotta build like my new best friend.

Stuart Carlton 2:53
We do. I do spray the things and, and, and they sit unused for most of the year, so whatever was on them last year is likely still there. Excellent. Well, anyway, so thank you for joining so far. Are you up or down this week in terms of your women

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 3:11
down in gas money? Because I've been driving all these people around the river for show and tell. Well,

Stuart Carlton 3:15
let's just jump right in then. Mr. Smooth. Okay, fantastic. So what have you been showing and telling people on the river then? So what is the river? First

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 3:24
of all, first of all, we're sitting nearby, about a half kilometer away from the Detroit River, and it's an infamous River, because peoples have been using this river for sport, for fishing, for culture, for fun, for hundreds of years, and we've had the privilege of being a few 100 meters away from it, and I've been taking VIPs up and down the river to see both sturgeon, the new bridge, a six, $7 billion project, and then parts of the wetlands they have never seen before,

Megan Gunn 3:51
but we haven't gone with you. So did you take all the VIPs? Well, that's

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 3:54
tonight, after this one VIP room.

Carolyn Foley 3:57
So where are the wetlands that you've been taking them to,

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 4:01
yeah, the wetlands are more towards, sort of towards Lake Erie. So heading back towards Lake Erie, there's near Amherstburg, which some of us are familiar with. And so there's wetlands out that way. But I've also been showing them the artificial reefs, the areas where we put out rocks for a bunch of the species that have been sort of disaffected by the shipping traffic over the last 100 years

Carolyn Foley 4:19
or so, right, right? And that includes some of the sturgeon, right? Yeah, good friends, a sturgeon. That's, that's, it's possible that some people who have done a couple of Lakey things, keeps not letting the sturgeon win, but the sturgeon are the best, and we know it. So, no, is

Stuart Carlton 4:33
that true? Like, how good is the sturgeon? Sturgeon?

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 4:35
They're really good. They've been around for a while. They've been around since the time of dinosaurs. So they're sort of, you know, before us. So, you know, they're kicking our ass. Yeah?

Stuart Carlton 4:44
I feel like we might be kicking their ass, not in terms of, like, longevity, but you know, and

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 4:50
they do live over 100 years. Don't forget, do they? Yes, yeah. How big is the biggest surgeon you've seen? The biggest one we've caught, yeah, and all ourselves, six, 448 pounds. Man, Joe. Like me, yeah, plus 100

Stuart Carlton 5:03
100 feet of awesome, really, six, four. How do you get what are you catching? It is that like a net thing? Yeah,

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 5:08
we use set lines to essentially, with our partners at us, fish and wildlife. We catch them right in the river, because it's a binational effort. We're right on the border. So we catch them with a set line using, uh, popsicles. We essentially use dead gobies to catch them, really, yeah, they love gobies. Okay, I

Stuart Carlton 5:21
have a question about this. Fire away. So Goby Brown, kind of tubular, right? Yep, in the shape of, like, a hot dog. Essentially, yeah, essentially, it's

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 5:31
like the Great Lakes hot

Stuart Carlton 5:34
dog. It is like, yeah, I've got a why not? For people, this is my

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 5:37
question. Well, once you try it, you'll know why. I'm

Stuart Carlton 5:41
gonna point out exhibit one my shirt. I did notice that, yeah, this is my retirement business. I haven't started yet, but they're huge in Eastern Europe. Everybody loves gobies. I

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 5:51
suggest you invest elsewhere as well.

Stuart Carlton 5:55
All right, good. So you set these items. Is that just part of a monetary thing, or is there something specific you're looking

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 5:59
for? No for the late sturgeon. Essentially, we've been working on restoration efforts for the last 2025, years. And the punchline, essentially, is that for years, we dredge the bottom the river and ruined all their homes, and so we put back a bunch of space for them, and we using conservation. You have to wait 1520, years to see success. But two days after we laid down these artificial reefs, we saw adult Spurgeon spawning on the reef two days. Two days. Never happens that good. Usually, that's wild, incredible.

Carolyn Foley 6:27
So what other species are you looking after in the river? Yeah,

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 6:30
in the river, you know, the benefit of helping the Sturgeon is helps all sorts other species. So you got white fish coming in there. You have many other fish coming in. We would have northern mad toms, which are threatened or endangered, depending on where they are. So when you help one species, you're helping to a whole bunch at the same time. Yeah. So we're sort of stewards by national stewards, with our colleagues in the US for many of these different species. The permitting on that must be a nightmare. It certainly is. I have to fill out CITES, permits to hand a batch of eggs four feet away to another boat. Wow. Six, six months of paperwork for a four foot transition of eggs from one side of a boat to another. Have

Stuart Carlton 7:05
you ever dropped them?

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 7:06
I have actually dropped them in the water

Carolyn Foley 7:09
before. Yes, oh, goodness

Stuart Carlton 7:10
gracious. No, no.

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 7:13
Quite seriously, yeah, we've dropped eggs in the water on the way. Yep, because the boats up and down, up and down. Yeah. But we made it work during Oh, good. We saved the sturgeon. Excellent.

Stuart Carlton 7:23
So if you had to give an award out for Great Lakes animal in the year, would sturgeon win? At

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 7:28
least in the last few years? I definitely give sturgeon the thumbs up.

Carolyn Foley 7:31
Okay,

Megan Gunn 7:32
but what wasn't sturgeon? What would it be if it wasn't sturgeon?

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 7:35
I'm gonna give the northern metom Thumbs up. What it's the most non charismatic species that people adore? Yeah, it's a little species that hangs out near the shoreline that is highly threatened, mostly because this habitat, again, has been robbed from it, but it's cute and ugly at the same time.

Megan Gunn 7:53
Do you always work with endangered and threatened species? There seems to

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 7:56
be that's been the foci for the work we do. Yeah, so we've really moved in on we do a lot of economically, sport, kind of fisheries work that pays the bills. But our passion is really with these endangered, threatened speeches. I love fashion projects, yep. Passion Projects keep things going. All

Stuart Carlton 8:11
right. So for real, I can I realize I don't actually know. I just sort of go along to get along. Yeah. And so you talk about, like, surgeon, we totally host their habitat in Mad times too. Like, what? What have we done? Like, is it generalized River? Is it? Yep. So

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 8:21
in early 1900s just allow these big freighters to come through, they weren't deep enough, so they essentially dredged out the bottom of the river for 100 years. And so by doing that, they wiped out the spawning habitat. So we had a whole bunch of old, really elderly, sturgeon floating back and forth with nowhere to spawn. And when you have no spawning, you have no teenagers. So in the last 20 years, we have, you know, huge number of partners working on this, and now we have habitats all over the river, and these teenagers, the future of lake sturgeon, are now floating around the river

Stuart Carlton 8:49
doing well. Spawning age of sturgeon.

Megan Gunn 8:51
Pardon me, what's the spawning age of surgeon? Unfortunately, it

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 8:56
takes 20 years to mature. So these projects are multi generational. So, you know, the funny thing is, is that we have people that have recently retired, who started the project. You've got my generation, and then now we're mapping out the next generation just to finish the project. You barely even get to see well, I guess, no, because they have older ones, right? They do. But you know, it takes an entire generation to see the change. Yep. What about Mad toms? Or northern mad times northern mid times much faster? Yeah, they're only two or three years so they're much faster. So we do see a change in them much quicker. But at the same time, the sturgeon are sort of more charismatic in Uriel, yeah, right. Especially the baby ones, very cute. I have hundreds of them in my facility. So yeah, the only place, the only place you can see them in Canada, to be honest with you. So, yeah, so

Stuart Carlton 9:37
why? Well, I mean, other than a while, I suppose theoretically. So what do you do in first of all, tell us about your facility in detail, and then tell me why you have sturgeon there. Well,

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 9:46
the facility's called the every every science thing has to have an acronym. So we have to come up with acronyms called Freck. It's the freshwater Restoration Ecology Center. We have t shirts to say, what the f or what the Freck. And so Freck or the freshwater. Restoration ecology is a center underneath the guise of the Great Lakes Institute. And what we do there is we focus on captively breeding endangered fish, freshwater fishes for North America. And so that sounds trivial, but getting them to you know, breeding captivity is quite a trick, and then once you do that, we have to do something else in terms of closing the environmental mismatch between the way they grew up in captivity versus what they're going to see in the wild? Yeah. So there you go. So

Carolyn Foley 10:25
okay, first I have to acknowledge what the frick is like. It was somebody watching Battlestar Galactica,

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 10:33
some Gen Z, but,

Carolyn Foley 10:38
yeah, okay, so how many different species are you rearing right now in your facility?

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 10:42
So the facility turns over different species all the time. Right now, we have two main foci, two species that we're focused on. We have lake sturgeon, and we have something called red side days, which are endangered in all Canada and most of the US as well.

Carolyn Foley 10:54
Okay, tell us a little bit more about the red side. What

Stuart Carlton 10:56
is this day situation? Oh, well, listen,

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 10:58
I brought a prop here. Can you see the prop here?

Stuart Carlton 11:02
Actually a days, wait a minute, wait a minute. So we spoke with so this is where my show amnesia becomes a problem. Who do we speak with about the underwater sounds?

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 11:13
Denise, no.

Stuart Carlton 11:16
Anyway, we actually have recordings of fish underwater in in Lake. Superior sounds might have been a daze. Check this out.

Hey, pidgeownski, we got you baby. Tell me about the base. So is that? So for those who are not, live at omagio's Kildare house and beautiful laser, what Trevor's holding up is a dace model. It is about four ish inches.

Carolyn Foley 11:54
Beautiful looking centimeters. Is it? Stewart?

Stuart Carlton 11:58
Thank you. Scary, but, and so it looks like a little trout. Is what it looks like. It does actually, yeah? Little trout. So tell me about the day. First of all is that a life size days you're holding, this is a life size day. So

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 12:11
these adults are about this size. And not surprisingly, their name comes to the fact that they're very red during spawning. Yeah. So as you can see here, they have carotenoids on the side. So with the way it works is that they display the carotid noise to attract the females well. And you know, just like your red shirt, you know, this red male is good looking, and so the more good looking you are, the more red you have, the better you do.

Stuart Carlton 12:33
It's true, very true. We're going to end this line of conversation right now. But So yeah, Dave supports being the Canadian word for red. And so what? What? What are they? What is like their ecological niche? Then these little, yeah,

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 12:46
so the ecological niche so they're more of a stream slash smaller river system fish. But what's unique about them is couple things they are important because they jump out of the water and eat fish. So they're visual feeders. They literally jump two feet out of the water. Little four inch fish jump two feet into the air, grab dragonflies. That's why they're red. Red's coming from the dragonflies. It's our discovery. And they come back down to the water, and they transfer energy from the insect environment to the water. And the second part is that the first one that blinks out if the water quality is bad, so they're sort of your Sentinel. You don't need to hire expensive technicians, or you don't need expensive equipment. Just ask yourself, is the red side they still there or not? And as soon as they're gone, water quality's down

Stuart Carlton 13:24
the crapper, wow. And so why are they? Why are they pregnant? Are

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 13:28
they endangered? They're endangered. They're federally and provincially endangered, and in the States, most places, they're endangered as well. Okay, in fact, I would argue this is the most endangered freshwater animal in North America, really. Yep. Yeah, these fish. There's a couple frogs that beat us, but we don't talk about them. There's something called Mississippi gopher frogs that kicks their butt, but let's not talk about them. All fish, all fish. So these guys are essentially the most threatened freshwater species. Yeah, they're affected heavily by urbanization. So all the time the water is warmer because urbanization, the water's dirtier because urbanization, and of course, the water is more light at night, a lot of light pollution because urbanization.

Megan Gunn 14:08
It's like the people don't care about the things that are in the environment. They just want brew,

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 14:13
except for they figure out too late. When these guys blink out, they realize there's big problems. Yeah, the canary in the cold, exactly in the fish world tasty. I had a Chocolate Room once. It was very good.

Megan Gunn 14:24
It's a chocolate Yeah,

Carolyn Foley 14:25
like, so you caught it and then dipped it in chocolate. And then

Megan Gunn 14:29
we're very literal

Unknown Speaker 14:32
people. Everything is fine. Here,

Carolyn Foley 14:34
everything is I was gonna ask a question about the light pollution, but then I thought we'd go off on it. No, I

Stuart Carlton 14:38
want to hear it. But what's your question about the light

Carolyn Foley 14:41
bulb? No, it's just like, is it something to do with spawning or something like that? Yeah. So

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 14:45
with red side days, the big issue is urbanization. So the biggest threat for them is essentially the warming water. So think about every time it rains in urbanized areas, what does it hit? It hits black concrete. It heats up and then ends up in a storm water system and ends up in their streams. And essentially what happens is they pass out from heat, literally, really, yeah, and they live. It's called CT Max. They have fancy science where you got a fancy science work for everything. So they have something called CT Max, where they pass out, and ecologically, they're gonna die if that water temperature goes up even one more degree. Wow. So that rain hits the hot pavement on daylight today, it's in the storm water system, and they pass out, or gets better. You essentially have washout from rain, and all the dirt gets in the water. They can't see their food anymore. Or gets worse. They keep the lights on all night when they're on the traffic, so they can't, you know, can't sleep, so they get tired and they get stressed. So all those things add up, and it knocks them down hard.

Stuart Carlton 15:35
So I lived in Florida, in the States, yes, for a long time, and they did a lot with lights in terms of the sea turtles. Yes, like you have to turn them off, you have to run out. Are they doing anything with that for days? Are they just not well?

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 15:45
No, they are now. So the good news is this, because we have the only captive population of red side days in this country and yours, we are able to actually set limits based on some of the work we do, on how much late they can tolerate, how much thermal stress they can handle, and how much turbidity they can handle. So we send that data to the, you know, stakeholders in the big cities, and they actually modify their practice. I'll give you an example. In the winter, they used to pump out all this road salt, and now they say where there's red side days, where you sand in those areas, yeah. So this is, you know, what's cool is my students get excited about the science, but when they see the change in policy, yeah, in these cities, big cities, we talk about Toronto, you know, 6 million people, 7 million people, 7 million people, right? They say, wow, my research led to a change in the way they do business. Well,

Stuart Carlton 16:26
so how's that get done? I'm always so, you know, because, I mean, we fund a lot of science at Sea Grant, and then more things we do is we want to fund science that is actionable, oftentimes, but, but it's so often a huge gap between the science that we fund. And then, you know, step two, real underpants or whatever. And so, um, what was the Yeah, yeah, what was the process for something like

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 16:48
that? So I had an accidental good idea, oh, this doesn't happen to be very often. Must be nice. It's very rare. So here's what I did. I said, let's get some of these red side days from a place where they're not endangered. There's only one place in us. I went to Ohio, special place. I love Ohio. Love it. Love it. Every part of Ohio, they have the best they're the best highway signs I've ever seen. I send home pictures all the time. The highway signs, they're special, the ones that like, yeah, yes, also, yes. So I went to Ohio, the only place where they're not endangered, because there's a bunch of areas in Ohio where there's literally nobody, and they're doing great. And I brought back a sub sample of them, back to here, and I have a captive experimental population where we can ask, in quotes, how much salt can you tolerate? How much thermal stress can you tolerate? How much turbidity can you tolerate? And that information, because what happens is, all these endangered species, you can't study them. Yeah, because when they're endangered in Canada or mostly US and New York, Pennsylvania, you can't even get permits to touch them exactly. So I had this accidental good idea to create experimental populations to inform policy in very short order. So we go from the research, you know, two years ago, to policy change a year later, wow. So we're not talking about decades. We're talking about, yeah, there's another there's a thirst for this information. And the problem is nobody can do it because they're all in danger. So I said, let's find them where they're not in danger. But of course, the outreach part is also equally important. So the science is important, but the outreach is also important. Well, it's

Carolyn Foley 18:24
kind of awesome that you know this is not necessary. I mean, the red is very attractive, but it's not the most like charismatic species ever. And people still care enough about it too. They

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 18:34
do, yeah, they see it as an emblematic species for all the problems urbanization, the Lake Sturgeon juveniles, the babies we have, are super charismatic. Yeah, people fawn over Yes. These guys, not so much. They're little minnows, but what they recognize is that they're unique. They're important for the system. I mean, think about it like construction. If you had a construction crew building your house, you need electricians, you need plumbers, need roofers. As soon as you get rid of one of these, let's say the red side days, let's say they're the plumbers. The rest of the house comes to a creep stops. So we have to recognize the importance of the different players in the system. And so when this one disappears because it's too dirty, too hot, whatever, the rest of the system collapses around it.

Megan Gunn 19:13
What role does it play in the ecosystem? This

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 19:16
one is really unique. Red side days are super unique because they bring in that energy from the insects. So they catch insects in the air, and that energy gets transferred back into the stream system. And so they're unique in that sense, they're also unique because they're great indicators of water quality. Yes, again, as soon as I look into a stream, if there's red side days, I know the healthy system. As soon as I look in there, I know it's healthy.

Megan Gunn 19:35
Do they have any special predators that are in these waters? They

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 19:39
have problems with invasive predators. So when we stock all these salmon in these streams of rivers, these invasive species from the west coast for fishing, which I love to do, of course, it's problematic because a lot of them eat these guys. Okay, so there's a kind of a trade off between the fish we want to catch for fishing and these little guys as well. So there's all sorts of considerations for how we protect them. Yeah, we've

Speaker 1 19:58
talked about that a lot. I bet this. Salmon question. It's, I mean, it's fascinating, right?

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 20:02
Well, like I said, salmon pay the bills, yeah, in my space, and then I use that money to kind of take care of these guys. So,

Speaker 1 20:07
no, no, it's good, yeah. And it's sociologically fascinating, something dangerous society. Absolutely. Double

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 20:13
edged sword. Double edged sword, for sure. Yeah. Anyway, that's

Megan Gunn 20:18
you mentioned outreach a little bit. Can you tell us more about the outreach that you do with your center?

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 20:23
Absolutely. You know, the funny thing is, for a long time, when I first started my job as a professor, I got really fixated on the science. So I wanted to get the science done. I wanted to publish the science. I wanted policy to be impacted. And then what I realized really quickly is none of that was happening because nobody heard or knew or cared about red side days. So we said, let's take this multi kind of tiered approach. And we said, let's do this together. So my graduate students, who deserve all the credit, I just kind of like cheerlead them, but they are the ones that do all the hard work. They said, let's do this multi tier process. So what we do at the facility, which is in LaSalle, Ontario, is we bring in these students, about 3000 a year, and they come in and they either high school or elementary school children, and we have a book, a children's book, available for the elementary school students, and then the high school students, they were like, I don't care about that. So we said, hey, guess what? We just developed a new video game, and that sparks the interest. So we have a book for the younger children. We have a video game for teenagers, and then, of course, we all sorts of props to get them interested in red side days, and then we tell them about a local story. So you may not know this, but right in front of us, in fact, by chance, there's actually a Windsor salt in front of us. And so Windsor salt is ironically found here in Windsor, produced here in Windsor. And then we talk about the effects of road salt on red side days, and the place that produces the road salt is located right under my facility. Really, by

Carolyn Foley 21:46
chance, absolute chance, yeah, because that, yeah, the mine would be under there, right, literally,

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 21:50
right into my facility.

Stuart Carlton 21:51
So for listeners out there, Trevor actually brought us a copy of this kid's book. It's called worry the red side days, by Ashley watt, illustrated by Abigail Kim. And you're probably wondering, how do I know it's a base? Well, listen to this,

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 22:07
that's right. And as she walked by, the way, is a PhD student is just about to graduate, and her real thesis was looking at the different ways to protect red side bees in urbanized areas. Yeah, pardon me.

Stuart Carlton 22:18
So they get to do that in your lab too. What a cool you

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 22:20
know. And this is a new thing that really has cropped up in the last 10 years because of shows like this and other efforts to communicate that traditional science that we used to communicate only in journals. And so this is new for me. I have to tell you, 10 years ago, I wasn't doing this. In the last 10 years, my students said we need to do this. And I said, I'm here to support you. And they actually wrote the book. And she did read all the credit. She actually has a new children's book that just came out on Lake Sturgeon. Oh, nice. Really, yep. So she didn't stop at one. She's got another one just came out great lakes, runner up. And the best part is these books have been sold at major aquarium like Ripley's Aquarium is selling them. Wow. To zoo selling them. Awesome.

Carolyn Foley 22:56
All right, are we? Do you want to move to the wrap

Speaker 2 22:58
up question? No, not yet. Well, that's fine. Loads of questions. Yeah, well, that, and

Stuart Carlton 23:03
that's interesting to see how that's evolved over time. And I commend you for sort of running downhill on that or right, or helping your students run downhill Illinois, that can be hard, all right. This is why, one more question, and this one kind of just came up because I didn't even know I remember. So we're in Windsor. And one of the more notable features of Windsor, other than the casinos, you have to be 19 years old and Terry get carded if you lived under 30, regardless of how old

Carolyn Foley 23:30
you were, not that this happened three times today to start. But

Stuart Carlton 23:33
anyway, and so it turns out the Detroit River, right? And I know this is filled with dead bodies, like just nothing but dead bodies. There's like a tunnel to the states and dead bodies, and that's it. And the tunnel is this big curve, and we're wondering why it has a curve, and now I'm starting to think it's probably dead bodies. So what are the ecological effects of like a dead body in the Detroit River? It's

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 23:54
a good question. It's probably not the main contributor to algal blooms, thankfully, but, but what I will tell you is that, sadly, what people don't understand, the reason dead bodies are relatively sadly common, is that the rip currents in the river are so high that when I dive there, if I'm not tied off, I'll be a kilometer or two down the river in about five minutes. Wow.

Stuart Carlton 24:15
Well, that's less fun. Well, yes, like hit jobs, which

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 24:19
are very fun. Well, if you want some hot take, as you seem to like, unfortunately, about a month or about six weeks ago, we had a body show up behind our research facility, right between the docks. Oh my goodness. So it closed down the facility for a couple days. And unfortunately, these events are, when they do happen, they're they're unfortunate, but the rip current, and I don't like use that term, because that's a marine term, but the current is so high because the channelization, that nobody could swim against the current, even Michael Phelps. Michael Phelps here, he wouldn't be able to do it.

Megan Gunn 24:52
Is there anything that we can do to kind of, I mean, channelization is channelization, but is there anything that we can do to kind of slow down that current? No. Don't,

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 25:00
but I think the education is the big issue. So people think, you know, when there's issues, they try to swim across. We've had many issues from Windsor trying to swim across to the Michigan and Michigan back to Windsor. And it's the education piece that where they don't understand the risk they're taking

Stuart Carlton 25:13
when they do these things. Mississippi River is similar, probably more powerful potential,

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 25:17
absolutely. Yeah,

Megan Gunn 25:19
I saw, I walked along the lakefront to get here, the lakefront, the riverfront to get here. And there's all kinds of life saving rings that say there's a reason for that. Please keep these here. A life would depend on this thing. Yes, although, I

Stuart Carlton 25:31
mean, if you're going that fast, I guess you have to look upstream, and so

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 25:36
you literally have to throw it about 40 meters ahead of the person for them to get it. Wow.

Stuart Carlton 25:42
Cool. Well, on that note, it's been really interesting to hear you talk about the fascinating work that you're doing. Actually, it is really interesting. Bob on surgeon, on REDD days and on everything else in the way that you are trying to be really progressive while still doing very high quality research. And that is, that is, that is awesome. But that's actually not why we invited you here on teach me about the Great Lakes this week. The reason we invited you on teaching all the relates is ask two questions. The first one is this, if you could choose to have a great donut for breakfast or great sandwich for lunch, which would you choose?

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 26:11
For me, it's an easy answer, but the backstory is way better. All right, loving it. So this the answer to your question, because faculty are terrible answering questions. I'll be very direct, because I just and then hammer out the bagel. Because when my kids are born, I eat bagels every morning just to survive. So the bagel sandwich dead easy. There's a place in Windsor called, what's it called boss bagel? Oh, is there a second part? It's

Stuart Carlton 26:32
not this is part two of this. I

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 26:34
apologize. Boss bagel makes the meanest bagel sandwich you could ever have here in Windsor. So I go out of my way to find a boss bagel All right, so, and I have no affiliation, so, but if they want to sponsor me, please reach out. So, so,

Carolyn Foley 26:48
so what is on the boss bagel sandwich? The boss

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 26:50
bagel sandwich is just something about the most luxurious bacon and egg I've ever had. So there's something about it. And they do Montreal style, which may not be familiar to some of your listeners, but it's a very different style bagel. It's almost like New York bagel. It's a New York style bagel. But the backstory on this is even better. So the donuts. So when you're a professor and you're bored and you invite your friends over for coffee, my friend showed up one day with 24 donuts, bunch of professors sitting around, and we started creating a donut phylogeny. I wish I wish I was kidding, but I'm not. So we create this phylogeny, sort of like the, like a family tree of donuts. And we spent three to four hours making this phylogeny and having like debates about, awkwardly at this table, they paired the vanilla donuts together and the non vanilla donuts together, and they had croissants on the other end of the table, and it got very heated about which family belongs, which don't belong to which family. And we took pictures of this, and this picture went quite viral when we sent it out into the science community. So there's a lot of pictures. Of course, I still put that in our show notes. I almost tattooed it on my shoulder. No, it's too big for you. You

Stuart Carlton 28:04
can find out our show notes and teach you about the Great lakes.com/nine seven number 97 episode, 97 assuming I uploaded all

Carolyn Foley 28:11
the so I feel the need to admit that the way I used to kind of teach basic phylogenies was with Halloween candy. So it's not like but it's not as complicated. As 24 donuts. It was like Eminem's and Skittles donuts. Was

Stuart Carlton 28:26
there a donut that really gave

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 28:27
there was the cooler. So imagine a big, six foot dining room table, which we had, and all these donuts started to be spread around the table and moved around. And then we started getting we had, for some reason, we have pink tape connecting all the different donuts. My logic and the genealogy of donuts became a heated subject for about an hour, and when it got really contentious about one donut, I solved the problem. I'm here for the donut.

Megan Gunn 28:58
I love it. Actually. Hold

Stuart Carlton 29:00
on. No. Our question was, do you want to sandwich your donut? And you gave us a breakfast sandwich.

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 29:06
I did, yeah, but

Carolyn Foley 29:07
then you gave

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 29:08
I told you, there's a better backstory for the donuts, but I still prefer a

Unknown Speaker 29:12
bagel. Okay, yeah, it works.

Megan Gunn 29:15
Oh, our next, I

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 29:16
chose all the above.

Megan Gunn 29:18
Wasn't that hard, and you gave us a location to try out while we're here. Is it far from here?

Stuart Carlton 29:24
Just down the road? Boss bagels

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 29:27
ask for the breakfast sandwich. Yeah.

Megan Gunn 29:30
So the next question is, what is a special place in the Great Lakes that you'd like to share with our audience, and what makes it special? You

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 29:37
know, I'm really sad to tell you that the answer to that question is not here in Windsor. That's why it's actually in the watershed off of Lake Ontario. There's a river called the credit River, which is very dear and near and dear to my heart. And I work on salmon there every year. And there's times where there's 1000s and 1000s of 30 pound salmon cruising beside me on the river in the middle of Toronto with millions of people and. Nobody knows I'm there. Nobody knows salmon are there. And we do this research in the middle of Lake Ontario, and nobody has a clue they're there. So you have this urban population of adult salmon cruising through the river, and nobody knows. And I feel like I'm isolated in the middle of British Columbia, because I travel out there every fall, and you would never know it. You'd never know you're in a big city. So it's the most beautiful place. Credit river insugg, Ontario,

Stuart Carlton 30:22
told us that before I last year,

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 30:24
I would have but then you would have been there.

Stuart Carlton 30:28
Probably not. My kids were there. It was all I could do to just read it. Dr Trevor pitcher, professor at the Great Lakes Institute of Environmental Research, the Department of integrative Integrative Biology, and the director of the freshwater restoration ecology Sentra, thank you so much for coming on.

Dr. Trevor Pitcher 30:45
Thanks for having me all

Stuart Carlton 30:46
about the great lights. And since Paris is here, we will go this one. Thank

Well, this was cool. Let's do our thank yous. We have so many thank yous, thank you. First of all, to our pals at the International Association for Great Lakes, research for everybody's here. Thank you to our guests in here. Eat more food, because I'm about to descend upon it. Once I've descended upon it, it will disappear. Thank you to Trevor. Thank you to Illinois. Kill their house. It's all sturgeon teach me about the Great Lakes. Is brought to you by the fight people in Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant and gopidog media, thank you no behind the scenes, we encourage you to check out the cool stuff we do at i i Sea grant.org, and at Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant on Facebook, Twitter and other social media.

Megan Gunn 32:02
Our senior producer is Carolyn Foley, and teach me about the Great Lakes. Was produced by Megan Blake, number gun and Renu miles. It's me. Ethan Chitty is our associate producer and fixer and our Superfund podcast. Our work is by Joel Davenport. The show is edited by Sandra samoda.

Carolyn Foley 32:21
If you have a question or comment about the show, please email it to teach me about the Great lakes@gmail.com and possibly tell Stuart that lake sturgeon really are pretty awesome, but

Unknown Speaker 32:32
you could vote for him. Yeah, you

Carolyn Foley 32:34
can also vote for red side days. I

Speaker 2 32:35
mean, am I sensing a front runner? Or leave a message

Carolyn Foley 32:39
on our hotline. Have we ever gotten a message on our

Stuart Carlton 32:44
we've gotten some. We just have to pressure the graduate students to

Carolyn Foley 32:46
do it. All right? 765496, iisg, which is also 4474, you can also follow the show on Twitter at Deep Great Lakes, but like the you in favorite absolutely not I am not reading that loud, and thanks for listening and keep creating those links. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai