SUTTONS BAY, Mich. — Pulling rope to raise one of three masts and taking the helm of a 105-foot schooner on Lake Michigan, Brittany Amaral is sailing towards her future.
The Rhode Island-native and second-year master’s student in the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) worked on deck alongside fellow U-M students taking part in a hands-on experience through the University of Michigan Biological Station (UMBS), the more than 10,000-acre research and teaching campus along Douglas Lake just south of the Mackinac Bridge in Pellston.
“I’ve never really been on a research vessel before, so being able to do science out in the seas especially on the Great Lakes since I go to school in Michigan but never really had the opportunity to visit one, it’s a really, really amazing opportunity,” Amaral said.
About a dozen students drove more than two hours from the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula south past Traverse City to board The Alliance — their classroom for the day owned by the Inland Seas Education Association — at its Suttons Bay port on Wednesday, Aug. 16.
They sailed Lake Michigan for four hours as part of a UMBS course called Michigan Fishes in Changing Environments.
The research and education adventure is considered the capstone of the two-week extension course taught at UMBS by Dr. Karen Alofs and Dr. Hernán López-Fernández.
“This course is the field extension for Biology of Fishes, which is offered in the fall semester in Ann Arbor taught by Dr. López-Fernández, and Ecology of Fishes, which I teach in the winter semester down on main campus,” said Alofs, an assistant professor of ecosystem science and management in SEAS. “Students who have taken or plan to take either of those courses can then register for this course at UMBS and join us out here.”
When Meredith Dirkman, who hails from Spokane, Washington, read the course description and considered applying for the field extension course in northern Michigan, the Lake Michigan sail was what hooked her.
“This was a huge research schooner you get to go on, and you get to experience something I’ve totally never experienced before,” said Dirkman, a senior at U-M who studies ecology, evolutionary biology and the environment. “There’s a lot of other parts of the course — there’s field work, there’s tissue sampling, all of these collection techniques, but I honestly was excited about going on the boat.”
Before heading out on this field excursion in Lake Michigan, the class worked in creeks and inland lakes like Douglas Lake, where the UMBS field station is nestled. For example, the students found a common snapping turtle — Chelydra serpentina — on Douglas Lake in North Fishtail Bay using a fyke net during their first week. They also saw plenty of invasive zebra mussels in Douglas Lake.
“It’s definitely intense,” Amaral said. “We do a lot of work.”
Aboard the ship on a windy Wednesday, the students conducted water quality sampling in Lake Michigan such as using a Secchi disk attached to a rope to gauge clarity. The crew recorded how far below the surface the black-and-white pie graph disappeared from view.
The students also used a microscope to identify plankton gathered from the water column.
But the most vivid and eye-opening work involved invasive fish called round gobies.
The students experienced first-hand how the round goby has grown dominant in the Great Lakes.
“It’s very different to read about something and rationalize it, and to actually be there in person for a few hours and see how significant it is,” said López-Fernández. “We’re finding enormous amounts of these gobies. Its population size has exploded. And we’re sampling a relatively small area of the bottom of the lake, which sort of gives you an incredibly personal view of how unbelievably prevalent these fishes have become in the Great Lakes.”
The students worked in teams to lower and raise an 18-foot net that is towed behind the Alliance up to 30-feet deep.
“We’re setting an otter trawl off the Inland Seas,” Alofs said. “We’re dragging that trawl along the benthic surface, the bottom of the bay, for 10 minutes at a time and then getting the fish out of that trawl and seeing what we caught.”
Counting by hand, the students were shocked by the lack of fish diversity as they amassed hundreds of gobies in buckets.
In the end, the students netted 1,047 invasive round gobies and almost nothing else.
Adding up the other fish species, the students caught four young smallmouth bass, one rock bass and three brook stickleback.
“Proportionally, that’s an infinitely small amount of the total fishes that we’re catching,” López-Fernández said. “Evidently the ecosystem and the structure of the fish community and other parts of the aquatic system are changing very, very significantly.”
“It’s interesting to see how the round goby invasion actually plays out in real life,” Dirkman said. “That’s been kind of depressing but very interesting to see.”
Round gobies are believed to have come to the Great Lakes in the ballast water of ocean-going freighters.
“There are now mechanisms to stop this from happening,” Alofs said, “but they brought the ballast water over to the Great Lakes and then released that water in order to take on cargo. A lot of invasive species were introduced to the Great Lakes this way.”
López-Fernández said the effect of the gobies is complicated, concerning and changing the food web in the Great Lakes.
“The sheer number, of course, represents an enormous amount of competition for other species,” he said. “As egg predators, they will prey upon the eggs of native fishes, raiding the nests of bass, for example.”
He said it also appears lake trout are shifting their diet increasingly toward goby.
“That means they are feeding on a better source of certain vitamins, as opposed to alewife, which is a poor nutritional source,” López-Fernández said. “That is resulting in an unexpected improvement in the nutrition of native lake trout.”
“It’s really cool to be able to see on a larger scale how these fish I’ve been seeing in the streams are living in a bigger body of water,” Amaral said. “It has been a really adventurous day.”
As part of the course, the students are learning how to collect specimens and contributing them to U-M’s Museum of Zoology as part of the long-term record of Michigan biodiversity.
“It’s cool to be so immersed in nature with people who love nature as much as you,” Dirkman said.
For Alofs, the day offers a meaningful tension to ensure the next generation of scientists and environmental stewards is ready to take the wheel and protect freshwater resources amid a diminishing ecosystem.
“It’s a beautiful day. We’re sailing. We’re out on a Great Lake,” Alofs said. “And balancing that beauty and amazement and joy with that the fact that we’re catching fewer species of fish than we’ve caught anywhere else is something to think about — the impacts of invasive species.”
Watch the video to experience the class journey sailing Suttons Bay.
