Is Cyanobacteria Always Bad? Algae Research in Indiana Freshwater Lakes

Unlock the mysteries of lake ecosystems with Dr. Joe Frenzel, our guest from Grace College, as we journey into the intricate world of algae science. Now with a thriving career in Winona Lake, Dr. Frenzel shares his unique path and passion for biology and biochemistry. Get ready to explore the diverse world of algae, often compared to a "junk drawer" due to its mix of bacterial and non-bacterial organisms, and learn about the infamous cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, admired for their resourceful survival strategies despite their potential to produce harmful toxins like microcystin.

Have you ever wondered how subtropical algae species end up in places like the Midwest? Join us as we unravel the fascinating ways these organisms travel and thrive, from the movement of boats to seasonal shifts that shape their communities. Discover the resilience of cyanobacteria, capable of lying dormant for years, and the significant roles tiny picoplankton play in aquatic ecosystems. With Dr. Frenzel's guidance, we highlight the critical importance of managing nutrient inputs into lakes to prevent harmful algal blooms, showcasing the impact of human activities and environmental stewardship on water quality.

Dive into the world of algae toxins and their impact on lake safety with Dr. Frenzel's expert insights. Learn about the ongoing research on toxins like saxotoxin and microcystin, and the potential health risks they pose to humans and animals. Public safety and awareness take center stage as we discuss email notification systems that inform residents about local toxin levels, drawing attention to thresholds set by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. As we appreciate the stunning diversity of lake algae, from diatoms to cyanobacteria, we celebrate the intricate beauty and ecological importance of these microscopic wonders, inviting listeners to join us in protecting lake ecosystems and making our waterways clean, healthy, safe, and beautiful.

To sign up for microcystin toxin notifications, sign up here.

Learn more about the Lilly Center's work at https://lakes.grace.edu/.

Have a question we could answer on the podcast? Send an email to lakes@grace.edu or submit a comment below.

Help us improve the podcast by filling out this short survey: https://forms.gle/MzGSXHcnkEQC8T74A.

Transcript

Lake Science and Algae Research

Speaker 1 0:00

Thanks for listening to the Lake Doctor podcast. I'm your host, Susie Light. I get to share some stories and talk about our beautiful lakes with my friend, Dr Nate Bosch. Nate, you graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in limnology only it's focused on freshwater aquatic systems.

Speaker 2 0:26

On this podcast, we're going to dive into lake science. We're going to meet folks who are passionate about our lakes just like we are, and have some fun together as well.

Speaker 1 0:31

Visit lakesgraceedu, where you will learn more about the topics in this episode and can support the Lilly Center's work.

Speaker 2 0:41

In today's episode we have Dr Joe Frenzel. He's a biologist at Grace College who specializes in algae research, and so we're so excited to have him on the Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams team.

Speaker 1 0:53

We are excited about today's episode. The doctor is in. Thanks for joining us today for the podcast. Joining us is Dr Joe Frenzel. Dr Joe, I'm just going to call you Joe, okay. Okay, so you're at Grace College, a biologist that specializes in algae. But tell us a bit about you, like how did you get here to Winona Lake and where did you study? And we want to know about you. Sure thing.

Speaker 3 1:49

Yeah, so I originally came from Illinois that's where I was born and then I attended college at PFW Back then it was IPFW.

Speaker 3 1:59

And so I studied biology and then I went up to Michigan State. I followed my wife up there. She went to med school at Michigan State, and so I went to Michigan State and studied biochemistry and molecular biology, and so a lot of my focus during my thesis was on a type of immune cell called a neutrophil, and so we looked at the stress response and effects on neutrophils. And then after that I spent a couple years homeschooling my kids when my wife was in residency, and then I got into teaching slowly after that, and so I went through the Ivy Tech system, became chair of the sciences in Elkhart County, and then my wife found a position in Warsaw, and that's how I followed her down here, and so that's how we ended up in Warsaw.

Speaker 1 2:43

Well, we are blessed to have you at Grace College, especially at the Lilly Center. Tell us about algae. What is algae? Where does it come from? What does it do? We want to know about algae.

Speaker 3 2:55

Yeah, so algae are a pretty diverse group of organisms, so living things and it's best to think of them kind of like a junk drawer.

Speaker 3 3:05

So you've heard the term bacteria, I'm sure right. So living things, and it's best to think of them like a kind of like a junk drawer. So they're, you know. You've heard the term bacteria, I'm sure right. You've heard of like E coli. Well, algae include bacteria, but they also include non-bacteria type organisms, so what we call eukaryotes in a biology class. So just very diverse groups. So I think of them as a junk drawer. Taxonomically at least Are they plants Animals.

Speaker 3 3:26

Yeah, so they're very similar to plants, right, they're green. Plants are green and what they share with many of these so-called photosynthetic organisms is that all algae have chlorophyll A and that helps them to harness the solar energy and be able to convert that into nutrition. So chlorophyll A is sort of that common denominator that all of algae have, what they all have.

Speaker 1 3:49

I remember that from science eighth grade science class chlorophyll is in plants. Yes, so it's also an algae.

Speaker 3 3:55

Yes, it is.

Speaker 1 3:56

And you specialize in an algae that sometimes isn't our friend.

Speaker 3 4:01

Yeah, yeah, so they're not our friend, but I don't think they mean to not be our friend. I think they get a bad rap right. And so you're talking about the bacterial forms, which is the cyanobacteria the old name was blue-green algae which they're called that because of the color. They have unique photopigments in them and that imparts that blue color, and so, yeah, sometimes they produce things like toxins that can make us sick.

Speaker 3 4:27

But they're not meaning to do others harm. It's not like a defense mechanism where they're trying to kill off other organisms. They're just trying to make a living, and so when conditions get crowded, they're getting starved for resources. They want to gather all the carbon to themselves, and so they secrete these molecules that help them to just do life better, and so that's the purpose of the toxin is to help them out-compete, you know, their neighbors and other algae in the system.

Speaker 1 4:54

Are there other kinds of algae in our lakes?

Speaker 3 4:57

Oh sure, sure, yeah, so cyanobacteria is largely our focus. We focus on them because of the toxin, the toxin producing nature of those organisms. Uh, but there's green algae, there's golden algae, there's a dinoflagellates, so so there's 11 major groups of algae, and so, and and uh, most of those are present in our lakes.

Speaker 1 5:15

What eats algae?

Speaker 3 5:16

What eats algae. So zooplankton eat algae. Um uh, you may have heard of a Daphnia it's a type of water flea and so they make a pretty good meal out of algae. So yeah, so there are microscopic animals that love to consume algae.

Speaker 1 5:31

So I know that some of our lakes have zebra mussels. Can we train those zebra mussels to eat that blue-green algae please?

Speaker 3 5:37

Yeah, you could, but then maybe you might have an explosion of those guys right, so that's always the challenge is uh, you know, when you bring in one species to combat another species, uh, you potentially ramp up the species that you brought in to solve the problem. Now they're the issues. So so, yeah, it is a little bit of a problem. And also, we see, and a lot of organisms that consume algae um, for probably several reasons, they avoid cyanobacteria. It's not always the best nutrition source, and so you may bring them in. They may eat some of of the blue-green algae or the cyanobacteria, but they may also favor the green algae, which are actually helpful for sort of pulling nutrients away from the harmful bacteria or harmful algae.

Speaker 2 6:16

And we've actually seen that with zebra mussels and cyanobacteria or blue-green algae, in that the zebra mussels are great filter feeders, eating lots and lots of algae, also known as phytoplankton, but they don't like the blue-green algae, the cyanobacteria, because of the toxins like. Joe was just saying. And so they will spit the zebra mussel, will spit the blue-green algae back out and even send it out with a little bit of fertilizer.

Speaker 2 6:46

And so it grows even more afterwards, whereas the good types of algae, the ones that don't produce these toxins, the green algae, the diatoms, those will get filtered out preferentially then by the zebra mussels. So as zebra mussels have moved into our lakes, they've actually shifted our algal community that junk drawer of all the different types right More towards the blue-green, the cyanobacteria type, and so we've got a different than a community of algae, than we once did before the zebra mussels moved into our lakes.

Speaker 1 7:18

So algae, though. Tell us about how algae is part of the ecosystem of a lake and why that's important.

Speaker 2 7:24

Yeah, well, as Joe said, they're eaten by zooplankton. So if we think of our food chain again, we've got nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus which feed those algae, those phytoplankton just like nutrients, would feed our lawn or feed trees as well, same sort of thing and then those phytoplankton are going to be eaten by zooplankton. Those are our tiniest little animals that live in our lakes, and so while the algae or phytoplankton are producing oxygen through photosynthesis, those tiniest little animals, those zooplankton, are consuming oxygen. So there's a good balance there between them. And then you've got little fish called planktivores and then bigger fish called piscivores that make up that whole food chain. So the algae are an important part and I think what Joe said is really important to think about. There's not a sort of purpose behind these algae to harm us, but this is just naturally sort of the way that they interact.

Speaker 1 8:23

So, dr Joe, you have a team of researchers that are studying algae. Explain to us what they're looking for.

Speaker 3 8:30

Yeah. So first off, we're very proud of our undergraduate researchers. They do amazing work and I often like to brag on them a little bit. By the time they're done with four years at Grace, particularly working in the Lilly Center as a microscopist, I think their skills rival many sort of middle of the path or even senior graduate students. They're just really good at microscope. And so what they do is they will receive the lake samples. They will filter the lake water onto a filter membrane, that is, think of it as like a fish net.

Speaker 3 9:01

So it's catching fish, but in this case it's catching algae. And so the algae get collected on the filter. And this filter has a grid on it that has known dimensions. That lets us do some math behind the scenes and then calculate how much algae are on that grid space. And then that lets us back calculate how much algae were in the sample to begin with. And so we take that filter membrane, we make a permanent slide out of it using a special resin and then, once that's all prepared and cured, we then mount that onto the microscope and students are looking at these specimen at about 400 times magnification. We use a computer program called CellSense that helps us to take a permanent library of images and then we're able to go through and do all sorts of measurements, look at special features of the algae. That lets us differentiate one from the other. So we do taxonomy.

Speaker 1 9:54

So a permanent slide is preserved from what your students are researching About. How many slides would a student researcher preserve in a semester of work?

Speaker 3 10:07

So most, I would say the glut of our slides are made during the summer months because that's when we do peak sampling. Right, so we sample.

Speaker 2 10:14

I think we're up to 16 lakes a week, 16 lakes every week throughout the weeks of the summer.

Speaker 3 10:19

Yeah, so we do 16 lakes a week, and so each one of those lake samples some of them have beach samples to go with them, and we make three slides for each one because we're trying to gather counts across. Three different slides, because there's subtle differences in prep, and so we want to make sure that we represent the data well, and so, yeah, so 16 times, however many weeks, right? So hundreds of slides, yeah.

Speaker 2 10:42

And what's cool about those slides is those slides then all go into a permanent library so that we can go back. We've been doing this for over 10 years now. We can go back to any one of those years for any week of the summer, for any lake that's been sampled, and we can see exactly what the algal community was like at that time in that lake. And that's really helpful because, as Joe's taught me and his students have taught me, the taxonomy of a lot of these algal species changes from time to time. People will learn new things about it and they'll change the name for something, but we have this permanent record we can go back to. Even if taxonomy has changed and a certain cell was called one thing and now it's called a new thing and there's some confusion there, we can actually go back and look at that and identify that afresh and anew years later.

Speaker 3 11:39

Yeah, it's really. It's remarkable to have that library to go back to and kind of. And we see that also like our equipment gets better and better over time, so things that might not have gotten ID'd, you know, five or ten years ago. Now, with newer microscopes, newer optics, we can be able to see things that might have gotten missed five or ten years ago. So it really helps us to hang on to that data and never let it go.

Speaker 1 12:01

Have you found any surprises or anything that you got really excited about?

Speaker 3 12:05

Yeah, all the time, all the time. That's the great thing of studying algae is there's always something different and we see sort of like trends run through. There's sort of ephemeral, where it kind of happens one summer but maybe not the next. There's a few things that stand out. There was a bloom a couple of years ago in Win winona lake. Um, it took us a while to idea because it wasn't an organism we normally see. In fact it's normally associated with a sort of subtropical lakes, uh, bodies of water and um. But it was cool because we identified it was everywhere and in fact I think you guys received reports that this organism was everywhere and uh, we saw it, uh, we id'd it, we confirmed it with one of my mentors up in Michigan and then, as I was driving home one day, I was just kind of it was a windy day and Winona was really kind of wavy and I could just see the blue underneath the waves I was like, oh there it is, and so that's that's our baby.

Speaker 3 12:56

You know, that's what we identified, so and so that was really cool. I love seeing you know these organisms on the microscope and then also out in the environment.

Speaker 1 13:04

So how would algae be transported? If the one that you saw was typically identified subtropical, how could it end up in Midwest?

Speaker 3 13:13

That's a great question. I think it's anybody's guess. But you know people drag their boats all over the country, right? So maybe there was a tournament fishing tournament, maybe somebody was just. You know, they live further south and come on vacation up north.

Speaker 2 13:31

It could be any number of reasons how it ended up there. So, and we also notice, um, that these algal communities change throughout the season. Right, and so there's there. Even though at any one time maybe you'll see 30 or 40 different species there, there's likely many more than that, probably over 100 of species that are actually in that lake. Some of them are in resting stages down in the sediments, some of them are. There's just so few of them that you wouldn't ever happen to actually see that one under the microscope, though it's still there, waiting for just the right conditions where it would what we'd call bloom, where there would be a whole bunch of them, and then we definitely would see it under our microscopes.

Speaker 3 14:04

Yeah, nate raises a really good point. Many of the, or I would say one major class in particular of cyanobacteria. They produce these dormancy structures, these aconite structures, and that allows them to overwinter down in the muck, and so they could hang out there. Maybe they show up one season, maybe they stay quiescent, stay dormant and show up three seasons later.

Speaker 1 14:28

So a freeze doesn't necessarily kill them.

Speaker 3 14:31

No, it's a really hardy structure. If you've heard the term endospore before spore from bacteria, it's a lot like that. They can withstand dozens of years and still come back to life.

Speaker 1 14:41

So I understand. There's another algae that you've been studying, and when I saw the name, it made me hungry for pico de gallo, because the bacteria is called picico.

Speaker 3 14:53

Plankton, yeah, plankton, yeah, and so, so we have to be careful, though. Pico plankton is a size class and so, and so it's. It's. It's includes many, many different types of algae, but, but to be a member of pico plankton, they have to be 0.2 to 2 micrometers, and a micrometer is a, a unit of measurement. It's a millionth of a meter, and so we're talking really small, but they have to be within that range.

Speaker 1 15:19

So what's the width of human hair?

Speaker 3 15:22

Human hair. Oh, I don't know. I would guess somewhere around 0.1 millimeters, so, and there would be a thousand micrometers in one millimeter.

Speaker 3 15:30

So, yeah, so we're talking really, really small organisms, and so there's only one class smaller than that and that's the femtoplankton, and those are viruses, and so that's even ridiculously small. But these picoplankton are important for a lot of reasons. One of the reasons we started looking at them is one of our partner organizations, idem, indiana Department of Environmental Management. They include picoplanktons in their counts and, of course, they have a lot of authority in the state. They manage all of the state parks and the lakes in those parks and they're the ones who issue closure notices. And they include picoplanktons in their measurements.

Speaker 3 16:11

And we were able to obtain some of their granular data, some of their in-house data, and what we found is that picoplankton sometimes is up to 50% of their total counts. And so we're like, oh, we probably need to include this. And so we started looking at picoplankton in collaboration with them. We started developing methods for assessing them. But picoplankton is a little bit still kind of the Wild West in the phycology world. By the way, phycology is the study of algae. I know it's kind of a weird term, but that's what we call it.

Speaker 1 16:35

You are a phycologist. Yes, yes, okay.

Speaker 3 16:37

I'm a convert, I'm a phycology convert.

Speaker 1 16:39

Yeah, that is neat.

Speaker 3 16:48

Yeah, and so it's kind of the wild west and so right now what we're doing, it is as accurate as possible.

Speaker 1 16:53

So you get to be the Marshall in the Wild West.

Speaker 3 16:55

Yeah, yeah kind of that's the goal. That's the goal and honestly I think it's appropriate too, because I don't know that a lot of people have studied sort of these moderate toxin level lakes like what we have in Northern Indiana. You know a lot of efforts spent on those high toxin producing lakes, especially down in Southern Indiana, Indiana, where it's warmer and there's more nutrients, and so I think it's going to be interesting to kind of see what those picoplankton numbers look like for us.

Speaker 1 17:19

So you talked about nutrients that get in the lake that could feed those algae. How do we prevent the things that make algae grow and multiply and maybe turn toxic?

Speaker 3 17:34

Yeah, so there's a lot of things that lead to nutrition entering into the lakes, and I know Dr Bosch has spent a lot of time kind of exploring that with some of the lake managers and some of the homeowners. But you know, at some point you get to a decision where you have to decide. You know, do I want the greenest yard on the lake or do I want, uh, you know, the clearest water in the lake? You know and, and and the county so, and you have to make these decisions because obviously every time you put nitrogen on your yard, that could enter into the lake and that can lead to things like algae bloom. So it's it's always about where's this nutrition coming from, and then how do we address that? Of course, waterfowl can contribute to that. You know, stream management, particularly around agricultural zones, can lead to nutrition entering into the lake, and so we just we have to monitor the nutrients, we have to monitor where they're coming from, and if we're not feeding the algae, they're not blooming right, they're not growing. So that becomes critical.

Speaker 1 18:29

So when your researchers are out and taking samples, do they look at nutrients? Yeah, so when we're are out and taking samples, do they look at nutrients?

Speaker 2 18:34

Yeah. So when we're going out there and sampling these lakes every week we're taking nutrient samples both in the top water layer we call that the epilimnion, the warm water layer. That's the same layer where we're finding the algae. It's plenty of sunlight, it's good oxygen for fish. But we're also taking nutrient samples of the hypolymnia in that bottom cold water layer.

Speaker 2 18:57

Because, as I was describing before, as things are decaying down in the hypolymnia and there's higher nutrient levels often down in the hypolymnia and we want to be able to see what the source internally. Joe talked about some of the external sources of nutrients coming into our lake, but there's also an internal nutrient source of plants and animals from years ago decomposing down in that bottom sediment or muck sometimes we would call it and that's giving off nutrients as well. So we want to measure those. And then what we do is we analyze that data by comparing nutrient levels Sometimes it's ratios between nitrogen and phosphorus that seems to have some indication for what types of algae we see or whether the algae are producing toxins or not and then comparing that back to those algae identifications that the team makes as well as the quantifications that they make.

Speaker 1 19:52

So you talked about your research. Happens a lot during the summer when lakes turn over. Is there more or less algae produced or more risk that algae gets angry when the lake turns over?

Speaker 2 20:10

That's interesting.

Speaker 2 20:11

So we don't do a lot of algae sampling during those turnover times, but what we do know about it is when you get full lake turnover.

Speaker 2 20:19

For Winona Lake, for example, which is one of the lakes here in Kosciuszko County, indiana, it's 80 feet deep and so you're talking about water going all the way from the surface down 80 feet and then back again, the way from the surface down 80 feet and then back again, and it's going to go faster if the wind is is is blowing uh faster and stronger on the surface of the lake, and so if you think of those algal cells, they're going to be up near the surface getting just a little bit of sunlight, which which they can do photosynthesis, and then a long dark period as they go down and then come back up, and then a little bit of sunlight, and so algae can't can't increase their populations very efficiently when they're when it's being turned over.

Speaker 2 21:01

If it's a shallower lake and they can get sunlight more of the cycle as they go from top to the bottom, then they might be able to grow a little bit more. So usually at turnover there's lots of nutrients because you're stirring up the bottom and bringing those nutrients up to the top. So nutrients isn't the problem that's limiting algal growth, it's more sunlight when you're doing turnover, because they're just getting those little doses of sunlight as they get up near the surface.

Speaker 1 21:29

Okay, so I've got a goofy question for you. Algae, is that plural or singular? Algae that you use and like what is one and what is many.

Speaker 3 21:40

So algae is plural. Algal, like for instance algal cell, would be a single unit. So Okay, interesting it's the subtleties, it's the subtleties.

Speaker 1 21:51

So why should we study algae? Why is this important?

Speaker 3 21:57

Prior to us leading into this discussion, you had mentioned homeowner property and value, and so I don't know of many people who would want to invest in a property that might be prone the lake might be prone to algal blooms and toxin production. I think that would be a cause for concern, and so it certainly has an economic impact if you have lots of algae bloom, and so we need to be mindful of that as we manage these lakes and offer advice on how to manage these lakes, and so that's important.

Speaker 2 22:27

But also, in a broader sense, if you think about it, algae produce a lot of oxygen, and so they're important as sort of this foundational primary producer, and so I think we need to understand them so that we help support the biology that they're responsible for, yeah, algae on the flip side also pull in a lot of carbon dioxide and we hear a lot about carbon dioxide in the news as a greenhouse gas and climate change and those sorts of issues, and so algae are important on the other side of that balance as well.

Speaker 2 23:01

And just to pick up a little bit more from where Joe left off there on the economics, so we did an economic impact study a few years back and found over $300 million comes into our county just Kosciuszko County here, a fairly rural county in Northern Indiana every year because of our lakes.

Speaker 2 23:19

And you start multiplying that out by all of the counties and all the lakes throughout the Midwestern United States and then you think about all the lakes around the world. This is a huge economic benefit for these lakes, bringing in tourism and industry and people living and having great family memories around these lakes, and so we want to protect that. Undermine that economic value, start to undermine the recreational value, the family memories that could happen in one of those lakes. And so we study those toxins really carefully and we want to understand why toxins are coming at certain times in certain lakes and why not in other lakes and what's the pattern of that, if there is one, and eventually, how can we prevent it and not have those issues in our lakes going forward in the future? And we've been talking a lot about toxins. Maybe we should name the different toxins that we've looked for in our lakes.

Algae Toxins and Lake Safety

Speaker 2 24:28

Yes, please so you like learning new words, susie? So the most common one is microcystin. That's the one that lots of folks all around the world are testing for in different lakes and we find that as the most common toxin. And maybe Joe can talk a little bit about it after I go through this list of toxins different types of algae that produce different ones, but we have microcystin, which is a common one. We've been testing for that. We follow the IDEM's recommendations for when people or pets should stay out of the water based on different microcystin levels. Newer toxin that we've been testing just this summer we did some pilots before, but this summer we've been regularly testing for saxotoxin, which is another.

Speaker 1 25:18

So every time you say that word, I think of algae playing a saxophone. Well, if that helps you remember it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 25:25

So saxotoxin that actually is the same toxin produced by red tide, that type of algae down in Florida, and so it's kind of interesting. There's freshwater algae that can produce that toxin, as well as marine algae that can produce that toxin. We've also looked at cylindrospermopsin.

Speaker 1 25:45

I'm not going to tell you that one Cylindro Spermopsin, spermopsin, okay.

Speaker 2 25:51

And anatoxin A, as well as BMAA, which is an amino acid which can be produced by some algae as well, and so we've found microcystin and saxotoxin as being the two most important toxins in our area that we've been testing for and wanting to keep people and pets safe about those. But we've tested different times those other three as well, and new ones keep popping up as we learn more about different types of algae. But maybe, if you want to mention, joe, what do we know about different algae producing different types of toxins?

Speaker 3 26:27

So probably the two most common algae that we see that are toxin producers are microcystin, which is the toxin. Microcystin is the organism that produces it, and then anabana is an organism that also produces it In the planktonic phase, when it's in the water column. It's known as the lichospermum, and so that's another major toxin producer, and so we see these organisms pretty commonly under the microscope and we're currently doing a study, drafting a manuscript that's looking at correlating the microcystin levels with the microcystis cell population.

Speaker 1 27:11

So if I were exposed to this, like we're talking that toxins are bad for humans and animals, like how bad. What would if I were exposed? If I went swimming and there was a blue-green algae bloom, what would that do to me?

Speaker 3 27:25

It could be as minor as skin irritation. In some cases it can cause respiratory distress. We're seeing more and more reports come out where long-term exposure can be particularly problematic. I've even seen studies that looked at aerosolization. So even if you're not in the water, but the water is constantly beating against the seawalls, that can lead to aerosolization and that can lead to being incorporated in the body.

Speaker 2 27:52

And some chronic exposure, even some neurological disorders. There's starting to be some research there, not probably definitive yet, but looking at some things like ALS and Parkinson's and those sorts of things.

Speaker 1 28:04

Sounds like a really really good reason to be studying algae guys. Yeah.

Speaker 2 28:09

Yeah.

Speaker 1 28:11

So how can lake residents be involved in keeping our lakes safe from toxic blooms?

Speaker 2 28:20

Well, probably the first step. If you live here in our area, we have a notification system, and so people can sign up for that and they get weekly updates with what the levels are in all of our lakes and our public swimming beaches, and then, when they're out there recreating during the summer months, they can make sure that themselves and their pets and the people that they love can stay safe.

Speaker 1 28:44

So, nate, I know that there's an alert that can go out when there is a toxic bloom, but what do I look for? What levels are important to be paying attention?

Speaker 2 28:55

Yeah, so IDEM recommends that anything less than 0.8 parts per billion is not of concern. So we still track that and we want to see what trends are looking like and if we're trending towards higher levels. So we still pay attention to that. But it doesn't warrant people changing how they're interacting with the lake or or their loved ones.

Speaker 1 29:18

So parts per billion, what in a gallon, in a cup, in a aquarium like parts per billion? Yeah, tell me, what that means.

Speaker 2 29:27

So one part in a billion parts, okay. And so that would be, joe, like micrograms per liter.

Speaker 3 29:36

I believe.

Speaker 2 29:37

so, yeah, yeah would be, and I don't have an analogy off the top of my head of if it's a drop in an Olympic swimming pool or something like that. I'm not exactly sure. I'm not exactly sure, but yeah, so I do know that Winona Lake, one of our lakes here in Kosciuszko County that's closest to Grace College, is about 5 billion gallons, and so it would be like a five gallon bucket and that entire lake would be one part per billion.

Speaker 3 30:07

So I guess I did just come up with one on the fly.

Speaker 2 30:10

So yeah, so that would be an example per billion. So I guess I did just come up with one on the fly. So yeah, so that would be an example of that. So 0 to 0.8, no concern, 0.8 is where we hit our dog threshold, according to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, and they would then recommend to keep dogs out of the lake, out of that water body, when it would surpass 0.8 parts per billion. And then when we get to 8.0 parts per billion, that's the human threshold for reducing recreational contact with the water. So maybe you're out skiing and make sure you close your mouth if you fall in, or you're swimming, probably don't want to be drinking the water as you're swimming and then when we get over 20 parts per billion, that's where they would recommend no contact, that that people would stay out of the water altogether.

Speaker 2 31:02

So we might wonder why do we have those different levels for dogs and people? Well, dogs and people typically act differently when they're in the water. Dogs are in the water, constantly lapping up the water. They get out of the water, they're then licking their fur and so if there's toxin in the water, they're ingesting it while they're in the water and then they get out of the water and they're ingesting it as they're licking their fur, where people typically don't act like that in the water. We're typically not lapping it up and then licking our skin when we get out of the water, and so that's why there's a different threshold level for people and dogs.

Speaker 1 31:38

So, dr Joe, as somebody who's studying algae, what would be your climbing Mount Everest as an algae studier?

Speaker 3 31:51

What would be the wow thing, I think for us correlating conditions of the lake whether it's a nutrient composition, or you know certain temperature profile, or you know certain depth characteristics with the species that are most problematic. And then, once we have that correlation, then that offers a point for intervention, right? So if we can draw those two events, when they kind of co-occur, together, then we can say, hey, you know what? This is what led to that algae bloom. Here's how we can potentially reduce the chance of it happening again.

Speaker 1 32:30

Excellent. Anything else that you want to add to help our listeners understand algae.

Speaker 3 32:38

Just one more thing. This is more anecdotal. I do periodic training, sort of like a doctor would do continuing medical ed. I'll do algae training opportunities and I recently trained under one of the country's leading psychologists training opportunities. And I recently trained under one of the country's leading psychologists and we happen to have, strangely enough, a pathologist from San Francisco in our class, if you will. And I don't know if you know much about pathologists, but all they do all day is look at slides under a microscope, right? So they're probably the most first person in a microscope specimen. And he made this comment and it just really struck me. He said you know, I look at slides for a living, but algae are some of the most beautiful things I've ever seen, and so that was very touching to me and it kind of just reaffirmed some of the things that we do in the lab.

Speaker 1 33:25

Dr Joe, when you talked about the beauty of algae your eyes just lit up, and I know algae is needed for the biodiversity of the lake. But tell us about the wonderful creation of algae and how that? What is the beauty of it?

Speaker 3 33:42

So it's really neat to see our students in the lab spiritually mature lab spiritually mature and I think we're able to see gather a glimpse of God's ingenuity by looking at the complexities of these algae. Some of the cells are really just very simple circular cells. Some of them are very ornate, have almost like decorations on them, and when I hear students describe the work that they're doing to folks who are touring through the lab, they often talk about how they can you, they can see evidence of a creator through just the diversity and the different forms of algae, and so it's just really cool for them to connect biology with faith through their microscope work.

Speaker 1 34:21

Do you have a favorite pretty algae? Yeah, so.

Speaker 3 34:25

I'm kind of partial to like a star astrum. I think they're quite beautiful. In terms of cyanos, I like anabana because I think it's got some neat physiological complexities, because it's got this intermingling of what we call heterocytes, where they can do nitrogen fixation, and aconites, where they can kind of store themselves in the muck, so yeah, and they look like beads on a string, which I think is kind of cool. So yeah, I have lots of favorites.

Speaker 1 34:51

Simple creation, but very complex in nature.

Speaker 2 34:57

Yeah, and I think it teaches us about God as well. Through his creation. He loves diversity, he loves how things are interrelated and he values relationship with us and us with each other. And one of the the beauty of it as well. I mean, we, we don't need to have. You know all of these, these different you know, um, shapes and and uh, all all of these different species, necessarily, but he made them all and it's really fun to be able to unpack some of that under the microscope. Favorite for me would be diatoms. So they've got a glass, what would you call it? A glass cell wall?

Speaker 3 35:42

Yeah, we call it a frustral in psychology.

Speaker 2 35:45

Okay, a glass frustral around it, and so they literally live in a glass house and when you shine the light in the microscope, so there's always light, a light source with the microscope, and so as light refracts through those glass frustrals, you get just beautiful colorations and just rainbows of colors that kind of come off of there and I think that's it's just beautiful. I mean, if you could just snap a photo and blow that up on your wall, it would be just some beautiful artwork.

Speaker 1 36:15

So, nate, can I see pictures of these beautiful algae on your website?

Speaker 2 36:20

Yeah, so various areas of our website has pictures of some of the algae that we've seen with our algae team under Joe's leadership. Also, if you stay tuned, there's going to be another segment, for those of you who are viewing this podcast, where we're going to show some pictures of some algae and talk about some of the different characteristics of them as well.

Speaker 1 36:40

So if somebody's listening and then wants to see this, they can look at the YouTube channel and see the good things we're talking about.

Speaker 2 36:48

Yeah, watch the episode rather than just listen to it.

Speaker 1 36:51

Well, you gave me a new perspective in thinking about blue-green algae. I always thought of them as the enemy when they produce a toxin, and you helped me understand that they're just trying to survive. We just need to make sure we're not feeding them too much.

Speaker 2 37:08

That's a good way to say it. Put them on a diet.

Speaker 1 37:11

Put them on a diet.

Speaker 3 37:12

And don't take it personal.

Speaker 1 37:14

Well, thank you so much for joining us today, dr Joe, and I hope you achieve your Mount Everest.

Speaker 3 37:21

Yes, me too.

Speaker 2 37:30

Hi, I'm Dr Nate Bosch, Director of the Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams. We've got a fun segment here for you today called Name that Algae, and I'm joined by a very special guest.

Speaker 4 37:40

Hi, my name is Anna Crawford. I'm going to be a senior this year at Grace. I am an environmental science major and I'm originally from Cleveland, ohio, and I'm loving my time here in Kosciuszko County.

Speaker 2 37:52

And you are our team leader of the algae team.

Speaker 4 37:54

I am All right. It's been an adventure for sure.

Speaker 2 37:57

All right, and you know all of the species of algae in these three volumes here.

Speaker 4 38:01

Not quite.

Speaker 2 38:02

Okay, and you told me back in the lab we actually have several more.

Exploring Lake Algae Diversity

Speaker 4 38:06

Yes, I think we have probably about five or six more books that we reference to. Wow, couldn't fit all those in my bag, though.

Speaker 2 38:13

So every week during the summer, our Lilly Center sampling team goes out to a number of our lakes and takes samples, including algae samples. They bring them back to the lab. And then what does your team do with those?

Speaker 4 38:27

Yeah, so once those samples come back to our lab, we preserve them and then we we make algae slides out of them. So each one bottle that they bring back, so one bottle from each lake that they sample throughout the week during the summertime, we use that one bottle and make three different microscope slides out of them and then that way we can vary our counts throughout those three Right and so we've got a backup then and then a backup to the backup as well as we get a good representative sample.

Speaker 2 38:53

Okay, so what we want to do is we want to talk about some of the major types of algae. So we have five major types of algae in our lake and we're going to give an example of each one of those and our name that algae segment here.

Speaker 4 39:06

Sounds good.

Speaker 2 39:06

Okay, so tell us about this first one that we have pictured here in front of us, yeah, so right here.

Speaker 4 39:12

this is considered a serratium, which is its genus name. It is a dinoflagellate, which a lot of the times you'll hear about dinoflagellates in the news red tide. I'm sure a lot of people have heard about that, especially over this past summer.

Speaker 2 39:25

Yeah.

Speaker 4 39:26

In freshwater lakes, like what we find here in Kosciuszko County, we see these types of dinoflagellates, but they don't release toxins, Whereas their marine water cousins they do. So these aren't very much of a concern to us, but they do look very cool. We like to think of them as an Eiffel Tower, as they sort of look like that. Its tip is here and its legs.

Speaker 2 39:49

Yeah, so if we turn this on its side then we can see that Eiffel Tower sort of look.

Speaker 4 39:53

We see these types of dinoflagellates a couple of times in each one of our samples. I would say they're pretty prevalent in our lakes.

Speaker 2 40:01

All right, so that's our dinoflagellate category. Now we're going to move on to another category of algae. So, anna, name that algae.

Speaker 4 40:09

So this is a diatom. It's beautiful, as you can see, and it's my personal favorite kind of algae.

Speaker 2 40:15

You have a favorite type of algae? I do.

Speaker 4 40:18

You're really that nerdy huh, yes, I am, and I'm proud of it. This type of algae, as I said, it's called a diatom. Its genus name is fragillaria. This algae is really special in that it takes silica and the water around it and it creates like this glass cell wall, like a glass house. So under the microscope, when the light is shining through, all of that light is being refracted into this cell, the silica cell wall, and it turns rainbow-y.

Speaker 2 40:47

So those of you who are listening, you're not able to see what we're seeing, but we've got rainbow colors sort of going across these algal cells. Yeah, really cool. Yeah, beautiful and fragile area, so I'm guessing it's fragile.

Speaker 4 40:58

I'm sure it is yes.

Speaker 2 41:00

All right, good. So we've gone through dinoflagellates, diatoms, and now we're moving to the next major category. Name that algae.

Speaker 4 41:09

So this type of algae is considered a golden algae. Its genus name is a dino-bryan. This algae right here, we took a picture of it on one of our preserved slides, so it's actually not living which a lot of the times on our preserved slides. These types of algae do not last our slide-making process and usually they'll break apart. So when I found this algae on our slides I was very impressed with how well this was put together. So you can see, almost like these distinctive little leaves I'd like to call it almost looks like a tree branch to me.

Speaker 2 41:40

Yeah, or like little fancy little glasses or something. And from what I understand with this genus of algae, you can tell the species based on sort of the shapes of those little cups or glasses.

Speaker 4 41:52

Yeah, it's interesting in that the shapes of these glasses that depend on the genus. The differences are just ever so slight, so you have to really pay attention to that when you're counting.

Speaker 2 42:03

That's why you need all these books.

Speaker 4 42:04

Exactly.

Speaker 2 42:05

Okay, so we've got dinoflagellates, diatoms, golden algae. What about this one, Anna?

Speaker 4 42:11

Okay, this is another one of my favorites. This is called a fulvox. It is really cool. You can see there is this giant circular colony and then in the middle of that circular colony are smaller circular colonies, and the larger colonies are considered mother colonies and then the smaller colonies in the middle are daughter colonies. And as these colonies age and mature, then the mother colony will break and the daughter colonies will be released into the water around it. So a lot of times we'll see these in our live samples, which are really cool. We don't have a live sample here, but you can see them just spinning ever so slightly.

Speaker 2 42:53

That's really cool. So just a slow sort of spin that you can see. Okay, now volvox is a type of green algae. So we've got dinoflagellates, diatoms, golden and green algae and then final type of algae category we're talking about today. What's this one?

Speaker 4 43:11

Yeah, so this is a cyanobacteria and its genus name is microcystis, which. This is a type of algae that we see a lot in our lakes and we're trying really hard to understand how it releases toxins and if it's releasing toxins and I'm sure you guys will talk about that in later segments but these algae, we're really trying hard to understand the species. So the genus name, like I said, is Microsystis, but there are different species of that genus and understanding the species and studying the species is really our goal, especially this summer, and that's where these books come in handy.

Speaker 2 43:44

Yeah, and these are just specific to cyanobacteria.

Speaker 4 43:53

Yeah, yeah, so these three books are all cyanobacteria.

Speaker 2 43:54

So the other four that we just talked about, we have other books for those ones.

Speaker 4 43:57

but yeah, it just gives you an idea of how diverse and really beautiful that these algae are, especially going back to our diatoms and our vulvox. It's just really cool to see God's creation, these microscopic things. That's something I wasn't expecting going into this job as a freshman in college, so I've really come to love this microscopic world that God's made for all of us. Enjoy.

Speaker 1 44:21

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Lake Doctor podcast. Join us next time. It's bound to be fun.

Speaker 2 44:27

Listening to this podcast is just the first step in making your lake cleaner and healthier. Visit lakesgraceedu for more information about our applied research and discover some tangible ways that you can make a difference on your lake.

Speaker 1 44:41

We'll see you next time. The doctor is in, thank you.