Fishing
for Answers: Teachers to Study Life in Lake Ontario

by Paul Westmoore, The Buffalo News

July 15,
2008

Jul. 15--YOUNGSTOWN -- Seventeen teachers found out on Monday the
most efficient way to catch fish in the Niagara River is to shock
them to sleep with an electrical charge.

The teachers, many from Western New York, are spending this week
in Lake Ontario aboard the Peter Wise Lake Guardian, a 180-foot
floating science lab owned by the federal Environmental Protection
Agency.

The vessel docked for part of Monday at the U. S. Coast Guard
Station at the mouth of the Niagara River to give teachers a chance
to see how government scientists collect and study live fish.

Michael Goehle, a fish biologist with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife
Service, demonstrated how the "electro shocker, or electro fisher,"
rigged to a smaller boat, sends out an electrical charge into the
water that knocks out the fish within its range.

Goehle collected a couple smallmouth bass, a sucker fish and a
yellow perch, all of which floated to the surface near the Niagara
River shoreline.

"The trick is to stun them, but not hurt them," Goehle told the
group, with the goal to determine if they are healthy and how the
lake environment is impacting them. The electro shocker "puts them
to sleep involuntarily and they stay unconscious for a while."

Helen Domske is a coastal education specialist with New York
State Sea Grant component of the Cornell Cooperative Extension
Service. She took the perch and showed how it is designed to be
camouflaged under water with its dark green color and the even
darker bars along its sides to resemble the vegetation its hangs out
in.

Domske also showed the teachers the lateral lines on a small
mouth bass and a sucker, which she described as "a sixth sense for
fish."

"If we had lateral lines, we'd never stub our toes," she said.
"We'd never bump into anything. They can sense things with them
including temperature. It's amazing."

Domske said the fish demonstration was only a smidgeon of what
the teachers would do through Saturday while working alongside the
Lake Guardian's scientists.

Described as the only self-contained, nonpolluting vessel on the
Great Lakes, the ship will spend the rest of the week in Oswego and
Clayton in eastern Lake Ontario helping collect and report data for
appropriate state and federal agencies.

Plant and animal life will be studied, and teachers will analyze
sediment on the bottom of the lake, the water in the lake and the
air above it. Their work will help show how the environment is
supporting life in and along the lake, and whether there are
problems that should be addressed.

There is a lot of bad news around the world about what's
happening to the planet's environment, but Domske said in the past
15 years that U. S. environmental laws have been responsible for
reducing pollution in Lake Ontario by 90 percent.

The teachers on the ship this week hail from as far away as
Wisconsin, Chicago and Syracuse, all traveling under the care of
Captain Robert S. Christensen, who has commanded the Lake Guardian
for the past 10 years. The ship isn't scheduled to return to Lake
Ontario for another five years.

Michelle Tabone, a seventh-grade science teacher at Buffalo
Public School No. 197, said she was taking the program "to give my
students a first-hand experience on [the study of the lake's
environment] through me. I want to show them all the work the
government does" to study and help preserve the lake.

She and Larry Grisanti, an East Aurora High School biology
teacher, said that among other things they want to learn more about
invasive species like the zebra mussel and round Gobi fish, which
have changed the lake's environment.

Kenneth Hull, a science teacher at Mill Middle School in
Williamsville, said he teaches a unit called "Environmental
Detectives," which looks at the source of pollution. He wants to
include the Great Lakes in that curriculum.

"This gives me the opportunity to work with researchers in their
field and make the content more interesting and more relevant for my
students. They can learn things through my first-hand experiences
and the photos I bring back," he said.

"Just the experience of being out there on the lake," Grisanti
said, "and to be able to bring back these important resources to our
kids makes it worth it."

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