Great Lakes Region

• Sea Grant provided expertise in the development of the City of Chicago's Nature and Wildlife Plan.
• This is the first habitat management plan for a major urban center.
• The plan is likely to preserve many threatened species within the city.

• The City of Marquette hosted a series of workshops (with Michigan Sea Grant, EPA and MSU Extension) at which citizens worked with urban designers to draft "form-based" code.
• New, form-based code could help Marquette's downtown waterfront district seamlessly blend with the rest of downtown.
• "Form-based code focuses first on the form of the city," said Mike Klepinger of Michigan Sea Grant. "In essence, we set rules about how the public space is going to work out, what we want the public space to look like and we have less to say about what goes on inside the building." 
• The form-based codes for Marquette's downtown waterfront aim to maintain a working waterfront, provide public access to the water, preserve and increase the greenery in the area and provide walkable streets to improve pedestrian connections.

• Jay Austin, a scientist at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, documented this warming. Austin presented his work as part of Minnesota Sea Grant's "Ask a Scientist" discussion series.
• The scientist noted that Lake Superior's surface water temperature last summer reached a peak of 74 degrees. "Until recently, it rarely broke 60 degrees," he said.
• Global warming could be a factor, Austin said, not because the air is so much warmer—but because the winters are shorter and less ice forms on the lake. The result is that the lake warms up sooner and earlier than in past years, and does so rapidly.
• As scientists see the warming of the big lake, they are particularly worried about its vulnerability to exotic species. Right now, the frigid waters act as a natural barrier, he said.
• "The lake is responding much faster to climate change," he added. Whether that might ultimately mean that it won't ice over at all during the winter remains to be seen.

• Scientists are suggesting a common cause for two seemingly unrelated events: the feminization of fish in Jamaica Bay, where the former 50-50 male-to-female ratio has all but disappeared, and enlarged breasts in young boys.
• The common factor is endocrine disruptors (found in detergents, cosmetics and other products) that scientists now believe play havoc with normal hormone activity.
• Sea Grant researcher Anne McElroy's data shows gender change in Jamaica Bay's flounder due to chemical residues (the endocrine disruptors) that find their way into Jamaica Bay where the fish live.
• These residues mimic the female hormone estrogen, which may explain the three cases of enlarged breasts in young boys.
• The three cases prompted the National Institutes of Health to advise doctors to suspect the use of cosmetics that act as endocrine disruptors.

• Ohio Sea Grant researcher Dr. Richard Sayre of Ohio State University has invented two new technologies.
• One will harvest a human antidote to counter bioterrorism. As a result of this research, Dr. Sayre was recently funded by NIH to use his engineered Chlamydomonas algae to mass produce a human anti-toxin to protect the U.S. military from nerve gas exposure.
• Another of Sayre's technologies detects deadly pathogens like salmonella, E. coli, and cholera.
• Sayre’s patent-pending biosensor process can detect the state of more than 50 pathogens within minutes. Pathogens include food poisoning pathogens such as salmonella and E. coli, along with Vibrio harveyi, a pathogen in fish and aquatic animals and Helicobacter pylori, an ulcer-causing bacterium.

• Like most of the world, Pennsylvania struggles with costly invaders known as aquatic invasive species (AIS). However, the Commonwealth now has a plan to fight back.
• The Pennsylvania Aquatic Invasive Species Management Plan was signed by Governor Rendell and approved in 2007 by the federal Aquatic Nuisance Species Task Force.
• "The plan represents a major step forward for AIS management in Pennsylvania," commented Sarah Whitney, Pennsylvania Sea Grant, who chaired the committee that drafted the plan.
• Purple loosestrife, zebra and quagga mussels, sea lamprey, Eurasian watermilfoil, and northern snakehead are just a few of the AIS causing problems in Pennsylvania. These species can interfere with recreational activities, clog drinking water intakes, and reduce the ability of lakes and streams to support native fish and wildlife.
• The goal of the Pennsylvania AIS Management plan is to reduce the harmful ecological, economic, and human health impacts of AIS.

• Sea Grant and the University of Vermont Watershed Alliance are working with a science class at Edmunds Middle School in Burlington to determine if including water quality and water resources modules within an existing science curriculum can increase students' knowledge of urban watersheds.
• The workshops feature a classroom component, where kids are introduced to watershed concepts through an interactive watershed model, as well as a field component in which students take to the field for hands-on water quality monitoring exercises.
• "It's meaningful for the kids to feel a part of something larger than the school, and to know that their data will go somewhere," said Brian Slopey, a U-32 High School Science teacher.
• The University of Vermont Watershed Alliance is a Lake Champlain-sponsored initiative that empowers youth to participate in water quality monitoring.

• A fish virus, called viral hemorrhagic septicemia, or VHS, discovered in Lake Ontario is a threat to the sport and commercial fisheries of the Great Lakes region.
• The highly contagious virus can kill 80 percent of the fish it infects, and has been found in walleye, smallmouth bass, muskellunge, and many more species. The virus has caused large die-offs in lakes Ontario, Erie, and St. Clair.
• It's not clear how extensive the impacts might be, and many questions remain unanswered, according to Phil Moy, Wisconsin Sea Grant fisheries specialist.
• To help answer questions like these, Wisconsin Sea Grant's recent call for proposals has prioritized supporting research into "improved methods to identify, detect and control diseases, parasites and other pathogens."
• "This virus could be a big issue in many of our thematic research areas, including aquaculture, biotechnology, and, of course, fisheries and aquatic invasive species," said James Hurley, UW Sea Grant assistant director for research and outreach. "We're looking for first-rate scientific research into the topic."