Over the past few years, Stone Lab’s solar pavilion and the solar panels on the Classroom Building have been a staple view from Put-in-Bay harbor on South Bass Island. Aside from the positive environmental impact, the set-up, along with solar thermal tubes on the Dining Hall roof, offer an exciting opportunity for research and education into solar energy, and a newly developed Solar Technology Curriculum is the first to put that plan into action.

Phosphorus in Lake Erie is known to contribute to harmful algal blooms (HABs) by providing the cyanobacteria that cause them with a major nutrient they need to grow. Management efforts often focus on reducing the amount of phosphorus that reaches the lake, but targeting those efforts can be difficult when phosphorus could be coming from a wide range of sources.

However, some researchers are digging deeper into ways to identify where exactly that problematic phosphorus is really coming from, drilling down to the molecular level by looking at what other elements are bound to phosphorus in the Lake Erie watershed and finding clues to its origins that way.

Finding time and money to take regular water quality samples in a space as large as Lake Erie’s western basin can be difficult for even the most dedicated researchers. But sometimes, help shows up on a lab doorstep and is too good to turn away.

That was the case in 2012, when a group of Lake Erie charter boat captains approached the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) to ask how they could help monitor and improve water quality in the lake on which their businesses depend. They had seen the impact the severe 2011 harmful algal bloom (HAB) had had on their fishing charters and on other Lake Erie businesses, and wanted to contribute to improving the health of the lake.

Climate change is likely to have a profound impact on the Great Lakes, affecting everything from residents’ electricity bills to local crops and insect pests. However, many Great Lakes residents don’t know what those impacts could be, or what actions could address or prevent them.

Ohio Sea Grant’s outreach programs are committed to closing that knowledge gap, with approaches as varied as a webinar series and a curriculum set for middle and high school classes. Stone Lab’s Lake Erie Science Field Trip program has also added a climate change activity to its lineup, using display panels on Gibraltar Island to educate participants about the impacts of climate change on the region, as well as about ways to prevent and mitigate those impacts with personal actions.

No matter how useful it will eventually be, sometimes science just looks silly. In Dr. Suzanne Gray’s lab at The Ohio State University, a fish in a cylindrical tank slowly swims in circles as it follows the black and white panel rotating around the outside of the glass.

Gray and her Ohio State collaborators, Dr. Jeremy Bruskotter and Eugene Braig, are studying how well fish can see both prey and predators underwater, and how that ability is influenced by changes in water clarity. They hope that the research will help Lake Erie fisheries adapt to algal blooms that reduce underwater visibility, which is important to visual hunters such as Walleye. Those important sport fish, along with prey fish like Emerald Shiners, are the current focus of the project.

For about six years, students in Stone Lab’s Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Scholarship Program have participated in a multi-state Walleye movement and mortality study in Lake Erie.

Water sampling on Lake Erie in the summer is pretty simple: check for decent weather, find a boat, cruise to the sampling locations, take samples, bring them home.

In winter, things get a bit more complicated: winter storms on Lake Erie can be frequent, so even if the lake isn’t frozen, chances for sampling trips are likely limited. A frozen lake means needing to recruit an ice breaker to get to sampling locations, and sometimes, even those winter-ready ships aren’t quite able to travel as freely as a research project may require.