05Jun 2023 by Moira Harrington

Summer loving and the research is fine

When summer stretches before many college undergraduates, they make plans: Spend time outdoors. Connect with friends. Catch up on screen time. For the 31 undergraduates participating in the 2023 Freshwater@UW Summer Research Scholars Program, those plans are the same, with slight alterations. The time outdoors is likely to be spent collecting field samples from a body of water. The friends are new ones—made from the pool of program participants who hail from California to Alabama from Virginia to Wisconsin, and points in between. The screen time isn’t about beating The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but instead entering findings into a larger dataset to further aquatic science projects. “I looked at many summer REU (research experiences for undergraduates) opportunities,” Sofia Mota Chichy, chemistry major from the University of…

Summer loving and the research is fine

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When summer stretches before many college undergraduates, they make plans: Spend time outdoors. Connect with friends. Catch up on screen time. For the 31 undergraduates participating in the 2023 Freshwater@UW Summer Research Scholars Program, those plans are the same, with slight alterations. The time outdoors is likely to be spent collecting field samples from a body of water. The friends are new ones—made from the pool of program participants who hail from California to Alabama from Virginia to Wisconsin, and points in between. The screen time isn’t about beating The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but instead entering findings into a larger dataset to further aquatic science projects. “I looked at many summer REU (research experiences for undergraduates) opportunities,” Sofia Mota Chichy, chemistry major from the University of…

Aquatic invasive species are short-circuiting benefits from mercury reduction in the Great Lakes

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Nov. 4, 2019 by Moira Harrington According to a new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 40 years of reduced mercury use, emissions, and loading in the Great Lakes region have largely not produced equivalent declines in the amount of mercury accumulating in large game fish. Researchers, including those from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, say it’s this is due to aquatic invasive species in Lake Michigan — quagga and zebra mussels — that have upended the food web and forced fish to seek atypical food sources enriched in mercury. Mercury, or methylmercury as it exists in fish, is a neurotoxin that can cause damage to the nervous system if consumed by people or animals. The study has consequences for health officials and natural resource…