PARADISE, Mich. — Tahquamenon Falls State Park in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which is home to the largest waterfall in Michigan, served as the classroom for Dr. Becky MacKay’s General Ecology Lab on Saturday, May 25.
During the first week of the 2024 spring term at the University of Michigan Biological Station, the field experience inspired the more than 20 students taking MacKay’s course for the next month to think like scientists.
“Today we are visiting Tahquamenon Falls to explore the ecology of this system and also give them a great example of how diverse the ecology of Michigan can be,” said MacKay, who teaches during the field season at UMBS and is an assistant professor of biology at Northwestern Oklahoma State University.
UMBS is a more than 10,000-acre research and teaching campus in Pellston, just south of the Mackinac Bridge in northern Michigan.
“We’re looking at the terrestrial environment,” MacKay said,” so these trees, all of the erosion, these understory plants and also what’s in the water. We can’t get in the water with the falls due to safety, but we look at the different flows and talk about what could be there to inspire their ideas for projects that we’re going to run for the rest of the semester.”
The Tahquamenon Falls are a series of waterfalls on the Tahquamenon River, shortly before it empties into Lake Superior.
“Teaching is my very favorite thing,” said MacKay. “To see the students see the falls is amazing, but for me personally, what’s more cool is for them to see the falls and turn around and ask questions. Then it shows you’re thinking like a scientist and like an ecologist. For me, that’s my number one course objective. Think like an ecologist. Enjoy your natural environment. Think about all of these interactions and how everything is affecting one another.”
The 200-feet-wide Upper Falls is one of the largest waterfalls east of the Mississippi River.
The Lower Falls consist of several cascading spots that go around an island.
“When the students came to the falls and they were like, ‘This is really cool, why is it red?’ Tannins,” MacKay said. “ ‘Why is there all of this foam?’ Turbulence and biotic factors. And we talked about that. As we see things, we talk about it. One of the best things about doing a field course is I can’t tell you how many bracken ferns we’re going to find today, but if we find them, we’re going to chat about them. If we find none, we’ll chat about something else. There’s always plenty to talk about and teach.”
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.
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.
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