PELLSTON — Using cinderblocks like Lego bricks, scientists at the University of Michigan Biological Station in northern Michigan have creative freedom to simulate stream habitats from scratch every year in a way that provides unparallel possibilities to shape diverse projects in aquatic ecology research.
The Stream Lab Research Facility is located along the East Branch of the Maple River, which takes water from Douglas Lake and empties it into Burt Lake.
It’s part of the field station’s 10,000 acres along Douglas Lake just south of the Mackinac Bridge.
“We take about six million liters of river water a day and re-direct it up here on the concrete pad, and it flows back in the river,” said Dr. Paul Moore, a researcher and instructor at UMBS who has been doing research at the Stream Lab for 28 years. “We also have well water if we need to change water temperatures and nutrient concentrations.”
Researchers use materials to build their own artificial streams for experiments on the concrete pad.
Every year’s configuration is different.
The 2023 slate included 64 small streams, some of the smallest they’ve ever created, led by graduate student researchers from across the country, who receive financial support from UMBS for their work, covering their housing, dining and research fees during their stay at the field station.
“Because we use cinderblocks and it looks like Legos, we call this Legoland for adults or scientists, and some people call it a scientific water park,” said Moore, who also is a professor at Bowling Green State University.
Moore said most stream labs in the world have a fixed design — a certain stream size, shape or gradient — that limits replication.
The UMBS Stream Lab isn’t stuck in any size.
“What makes this facility different than other stream labs across the planet is that here we use cinderblocks and plastics and things like wood or gutters through your house, and we make streams out of them,” Moore said. “It makes it really flexible for us and allows us to be creative in our design, whether we want a small stream, big stream or a lake. And because of the flexibility we have here, we can have large replication, which you don’t often get in aquatic ecology.”
Over the decades, projects have ranged anywhere from algae to trout to crustaceans.
One of three studies last year focused on fear and whether snails grow thicker, stronger shells when exposed to predators during a 10-week experiment.
“For my project it’s really important to have running water, flowing water,” said Madison Wagner, a Ph.D. student studying biology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio who has spent three summers at UMBS. “I’m trying to mimic a river.”
Wagner’s predators are rusty crayfish, which are not native to the area, collected from a river a few miles away from the Stream Lab.
Campeloma snails, native species gathered from Douglas Lake, are the prey. What happens when they’re afraid of being attacked?
“The crayfish release chemical cues, which are just their odors that snails can smell, and they can sense that,” Wagner said. “If I was not using moving water, then the concentration of the smells would just increase. Since I have flowing water, that water is pushing the odor out and it’s constantly circulating new water in, and that is very similar to what happens in a natural system.”
Maggie Menso, a master’s student at BGSU, used three-inch terra cotta pots for her algae and road salt research during her first summer at UMBS in 2023, simulating a similar place for algae to grow as a rocky bottom of a stream.
She wants to know how road salt runoff affects algae growth in watersheds and the creatures that feed on algae.
“I really like the Stream Lab and being able to kind of design streams and build them from scratch,” Menso said. “It has been a lot of fun.”
A native of Chicago who later moved to Minnesota, Menso enjoys snow but has grown increasingly concerned by the large amount of road salt that public works and road maintenance crews apply to de-ice winter roads and the danger it poses for freshwater ecosystems, which is the source for public drinking water and the home of fish and other aquatic life.
“I was inspired by the road salt that I’ve seen growing up in the Midwest,” Menso said. “I decided to look at the effects of road salt and nitrate, which is a common form of nitrogen that runs off in cities, and how that affected algal growth in streams, specifically the benthic algal growth, which is the algae that grows on the rocks and on the bottom substrates in stream systems.”
She used knee-high tights to filter zooplankton from the water and draped shade cloths over her 32 artificial streams to achieve the same light level you’d see out on the river.
Algae grows on the outside of each terra cotta pot.
Inside the pots, Menso put agar — a common growth medium — and mixed in nitrate, table salt and phosphate: “I don’t want the algae to stop growing because it doesn’t have enough phosphorous.”
Menso hopes her research at the UMBS Stream Lab in northern Michigan informs how communities around the world adjust road salt methods to reduce its harmful impact to people and the environment.
“I’m looking to see if there are certain levels of road salt that algal communities withstand without changing it to be more harmful algae or algae that are potentially less nutritious for organisms that feed on algae,” Menso said.
It’s a critical scientific question that also draws inspiration from the city of Toledo’s “Do Not Drink” water advisory in 2014 during a toxic algal bloom in Lake Erie that left half a million residents without safe tap water for three days.
“It made the water undrinkable for people and it led to really big issues with people’s daily lives, so I want to see if the road salt is affecting the water crises that might happen,” Menso said.
Phosphorous also plays a role in the research of Kathryn Schmidt, a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, who started an experiment in 2023 at the Stream Lab testing the connection of microbes — some of the smallest organisms on earth — to the cycle of carbon emissions from freshwater systems, and how stable the microbes’ collective functions are in response to environmental disturbance.
The carbon cycle is nature's way of recycling carbon atoms, which travel from the atmosphere into organisms on Earth and then back into the atmosphere over and over again. Where the carbon is located is always in flux.
“The Stream Lab is an incredible resource to perform experimental and manipulative research on aquatic organisms,” Schmidt said. “It feels like a water park for scientists.”
Schmidt is studying how properties of microbial communities relate to the rate of carbon cycling in freshwater ecosystems, how these properties shift in response to the environmental disturbance of phosphorus loading, and what they tell us about changes in carbon cycling rates.
Schmidt transplanted microbial communities from different lakes with variable nutrient conditions into a shared environment in the Stream lab.
“I tracked changes in microbial community structure, diversity and metabolic activity in response to a phosphorus disturbance,” Schmidt said. “We chose phosphorus since it is often the primary limiting nutrient in freshwater lakes, and phosphorus runoff from agricultural land use is a major cause of eutrophication in freshwater ecosystems.”
Moore helped Schmidt, Menso and Wagner build their experiments, a collaborative practice he enjoys every summer with visiting researchers.
“It’s just really neat to see the diversity of the people, the diversity of the projects and diversity of scales of stuff we do out here at the Stream Lab,” Moore said.
Founded in 1909, the U-M Biological Station is one of the nation’s largest and longest continuously operating field research stations. For 115 years, students, faculty and researchers from around the globe have studied and monitored the impact of environmental changes on northern Michigan ecosystems.
Laboratories and cabins are tucked in along Douglas Lake to support long-term climate research and education.
The core mission of the Biological Station is to advance environmental field research, engage students in scientific discovery and provide information needed to understand and sustain ecosystems from local to global scales. In this cross-disciplinary, interactive community, students, faculty and researchers from around the globe come together to learn about and from the natural world and seek solutions to the critical environmental challenges of our time.
Watch the UMBS YouTube video about the Stream Lab and a few of its 2023 researchers.
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