(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to The Journal, I'm Steve Kendall.

Summer's nearing an end, it's time to take a look at Lake Erie, all the surrounding watersheds, and of course, the global effects of algae around the world.

Our guest today is Dr. George Bullerjahn, Distinguished Research Professor in Biology at Bowling Green State University, and also the Director of the BGSU Great Lakes Center for Fresh Water and Human Health.

Dr. Bullerjahn, thank you for being here.

You've been on before.

It's a topic that we cover a lot.

And I touched on the fact that obviously we wanna talk a little bit about what's going on in our neck of the woods, but this is a global thing, and you've been traveling around the world with other researchers to look at how algae is affecting things around the world with an idea of how does it look compared to what we do and put all those pieces together.

So talk about what your summer's been like and where you've been and the type of research you've been involved in.

- Well, thanks.

What we have, what I'll talk about now is we have some funding from the National Science Foundation in which we took a team of graduate students from all over the country to Lake Victoria, the Kenyan waters of Lake Victoria to study harmful algal blooms as they occur there.

And the reasons why we went there are twofold.

One, as you mentioned, these harmful algal bloom events occur everywhere in the world, and by going to a different place, we could see are there kind of universal factors that contribute to these events, and then by understanding those events, we can then possibly come up with solutions and mitigate them.

That's one reason, and the second is we know these blooms happen there in a country that doesn't have the resources that we do, both analytical and remedial resources.

And so we were able to bring a lot of technologies to bear that I think ultimately will help them make appropriate decisions in water quality.

- Now, were they doing anything to mitigate the issues?

They say, no, because here we're trying different things to manage this.

As you said, though, they may not have the resources to approach it the way they would like to, and we would like them to do.

[George] They really don't.

What we can do, though, is identify what the threats are to protect the people from exposing themselves.

They really don't have the capability of treating the water to the extent that we do, nor limiting the amount of nutrients that come in.

And I know there's efforts in Lake Erie to do that, but that's really not happening yet.

What we need to do, though, is identify what harmful organisms are in the water, what toxins they're making, so that people can make informed decisions as to what to do with the water that they have.

Now, if you're in some of the, if you're in the cities that surround Lake Victoria, like Kisumu, the town that we spent most of our time in, you do have access to better water.

However, if you're in a fisher community way out on the lake, you're drinking water straight out of the lake.

You're letting things settle out.

You might have a filter, but you're drinking whatever's in the water.

And so identifying those threats, I think, is job one.

And then informing the authorities as to what those threats are so they can adequately inform the public is really step two.

- Yeah, because one of the things when you look at, when I go look at your website, and people can do that very easily, the potential dangers are pretty serious.

Some of this stuff is extremely toxic.

We look at it as, oh, it's sort of a, it affects our water supply in terms of drinking water, but actually just, in some cases, contact with the water if you walk into it can create serious health problems.

- It can, and certainly since a lot of the folks there raise livestock, there's, I think, an even bigger threat is to their livestock, that these could be fatal to, the toxins can be fatal if that's their only water source.

And one thing that we found out is that we spend a lot of time everywhere in the world monitoring a particular type of toxin called microcystins, okay?

There are many other kinds of toxins.

What we didn't find is that there's another toxin which is particularly nasty that no one had documented previously in Kenya.

And we saw this in our Kenyan trip in 2022, and my graduate student, Kate Brown, identified this toxin called cylindrospermopsin.

It's a very, very nasty compound.

And so we had evidence that there were cylindrospermopsin producers in the water that had never been seen before.

And then a lot of our trip this past year, when we went in May, June of 2023, was to see, okay, is that toxin present?

And we could detect it there.

And so it's an additional threat we can share with the authorities, and they can, now they know what to look for.

- Yeah, and I know that we've talked in the past, one of the things that you are doing and trying to do is build a much deeper database, because obviously the research doesn't go back as far as we would like.

It goes back quite a ways.

But this is something now that's just new, that's popped up, and you really don't have, at this point, an idea of why or where or what the cause is.

[George] Yeah, and I think for Lake Erie, there have been a number of studies that date back decades, and we have long-term data sets.

Where at Lake Victoria, there really aren't, the data are far more sparse.

So if you document something once, well, that's pretty good, but you gotta be able to go back there and say, okay, this is a recurrent threat.

Our second trip kind of showed that this is a potential recurrent threat.

And we do have enough money on our grant left over to make a brief trip in February on our way to a conference in Zambia.

So we're gonna leave here at the end of January, spend, make it a three-week trip, spend a couple days on the lake once again, and then see if we see these issues.

- Yeah, now, did you see, this time, did you see more or about the same, or is it, I know, I think we're talking a small sample, and I understand that, yeah.

- Actually, that's a good question.

I think we saw more, but we saw more because last year's trip, we took two short cruises in this Gulf region, the Winam Gulf, which kind of extends into Kenya.

This year, we wanted to take one longer cruise, which went through the Gulf, doing our sites we saw last year, but then also heading out into the open lake, which is the second largest, most expansive lake in the world, and ask, okay, what happens, make a comparative study of the Gulf region, which has really got problems with these blooms, and then the open lake, which is less affected.

And what was surprising to us is that when we left the Gulf and went south, we went into these pristine waters, which you would look at them and say were gorgeous.

We went north, and there was a bloom all the way up the north, heading north toward Uganda.

And so that was a surprise to the captain, it was a surprise to us, and so maybe these events are spreading, and then perhaps what that warrants is paying attention to satellite data, which would then be able to map these blooms and see where they're going, and is really heading north into the open lake a recurrent issue.

- Now we come back, we can talk more about that, because obviously, I know we talked about Lake Victoria before, as you said, it's the largest freshwater body, or one of the largest, and then taking that information and comparing it to what goes on in Lake Erie, because most people would say, as I know we talked before, that Lake Victoria would say, oh, that's not like Lake Erie at all, but it has a lot of similarities you've just talked about, so we can cover some of that when we come back.

Back in just a moment with Dr. George Bullerjahn, Director of the BGSU Great Lakes Center for Fresh Water and Human Health.

Back in just a moment on The Journal.

Thank you for staying with us on The Journal.

Our guest is Dr. George Bullerjahn, Director of the BGSU Great Lakes Center for Fresh Waters and Human Health.

We're talking about Lake Victoria, because obviously your research there has impact on research here as well.

One of the things you talked about is this obvious bloom out in what appear to be these perfectly clean, pristine waters, and people who are looking, if they see behind me, you look at that, and as we said, look, it's a lake paradise, and yet you get out in the open waters of the lake and find out that that isn't necessarily the case.

- Well, I have to say, it is a very beautiful area, but there are blooms that occur, and so one of the reasons we're interested in Lake Victoria is that looking at the different bloom-forming organisms, there are two different cyanobacteria that we care about, well, three different that we care about in Erie, Microcystis, which is a big one, Planktothrix, and then Dolichospermum, and so what are the environmental factors which drive these different bloom events that would cause one organism to dominate over another?

When you're looking at Lake Victoria, the dominant organism is Dolichospermum, which is a nitrogen-fixing toxin producer, and it's something you definitely don't want in your water supply.

We're seeing Dolichospermum more and more in Lake Erie, so what are the factors which drive Dolichospermum's success?

Additionally, the different cyanobacteria make different toxins, and so we can assess the populations and ask, okay, and look for the genes that are genes that direct the synthesis of the toxins, and then we can ask, okay, do we see them in Lake Erie, or do we see different, what genes do we see in Lake Erie versus Lake Victoria, and why might that be?

Why are we seeing certain toxins caused by the same organism in a different lake?

And the last thing that I think is interesting when we're comparing the two lakes is that could Lake Victoria be a kind of a harbinger of what Lake Erie might be 20 years from now, because Lake Victoria, the big thing is Lake Victoria doesn't freeze.

Even though it's on the equator, it's not terribly hot there.

- I remember you talked about that, because our assumption is that, oh, it's like tropical there, but it really isn't.

It is, but it's not to the extreme that we think it is.

- Right, it's not 100 degrees.

The high is about 85, the low is about 63 every day.

It's actually gorgeous, because we're up at 3,800 feet altitude, and so this is perhaps a glimpse of what Lake Erie might be when climate change really affects life around here.

Right now, we've seen an 80% decline in massive wintertime ice since 1980, and I think we're soon gonna reach a period where Lake Erie doesn't freeze at all.

It barely froze last year.

So could Lake Victoria be a nice study of what happens in a bloom-affected lake that doesn't freeze?

- And you anticipated my question, because I was gonna ask you about the fact that I can remember when I grew up around here that the lake froze hard every winter.

The rivers froze hard every winter, and you see less and less of that, it seems, every year.

You'll have maybe one freeze on the Maumee River, and then, because I can remember it used to freeze so hard, it was a big spring event when the ice went out.

And now, it doesn't do that anymore.

And that, obviously, as you said, are we looking at the future of Lake Erie when you look at Lake Victoria?

It's a good point.

- Right, and if you encounter any climate change deniers, all you have to do, they shouldn't listen to me, because they're not gonna trust me, but talk to an ice fishing guide in Put-In-Bay.

They'll tell you they haven't worked in years.

[Steve] It's not like it used to be.

And that's borne out, too, because when you look at your website, it shows the economic impact, and the dollar amounts are just incredible.

I think people understand, yeah, it's affected it somewhat, but as you just said, it affects the entire summer, the spring, the winter, all of that, and it's a significant amount of money.

Now, I suppose if you're shipping, it's a lot easier, because you don't have to have an icebreaker out in front and all of that, but the reality is that's abnormal compared to what we've experienced over the last, well, I would say a few hundred years.

Bob, this goes back a lot farther than that.

When you look at Lake Victoria, do they, I mean, they're obviously concerned about the issue.

Is their concern more fresh drinking water, or the ability to use the lake for things like fishing, and that sort of thing?

Livelihood for them, not necessarily recreational, but yeah.

- It's both, it's drinking water, and also they want to know more about contaminants of fish, and that was another aspect of the trip that I was less involved with.

I sort of, you know, I was involved in, and my colleague here, Kefa Otiso, were involved in the logistics of the trip.

Kefa was terrific in his arrangements, but there was another project led by Ken Drouillard of the University of Windsor looking at contaminants in fish, and there are two aspects of fishing which I think are kind of interesting.

First of all, the Nile perch is an invasive, which has really taken out all the cichlids, and the tilapia in the lake, which were native.

So a lot of naturalists might think that's a bad thing.

You know, we have an invasive species that's taking over the lake.

Well, it's a great source of protein for the folks there, so, you know, so you don't want to tell them that this is an ecological and economic disaster, because it's an ecological collapse of the fishery, but it's good for their food source.

So that's kind of an interesting thing culturally that we learned, and then the other thing is that Ken, Ken with a student that, from Kenya, that's now working for him at Windsor, did a very nice study on contaminants of fish like mercury and persistent organic pollutants, and actually the fish are in better shape than they are in Erie.

So, which was very, which was, again, we went there and told them some bad news about emerging toxins that we were detecting produced by cyanobacteria, but if you look at what's in the fish, what people are eating, the fish are actually in pretty good shape.

So that was, so, you know, it was nice to be able to provide that kind of information to the general public, to the authorities that would then inform the general public.

- Yeah, because obviously it's not all bad news, which is when you look at these things, obviously we deal with an issue with regard to the contamination of the fish, not just in the lake, but in the rivers and all the tributaries that feed into it.

And it's interesting too that you say that it's actually, in one way, the food supply is better, the recreational fishing or the, whatever, tilapia fishing industry collapsed.

- Well, yeah, the natural community is gone.

[Steve] It's gone, but they're eating better.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, you, the size of some of these Nile perch are colossal.

You know, I'm not sure I'd want to eat a 42 kilogram Nile perch, but they're impressive to look at.

[Steve] Yeah, yeah.

So they're being, they're healthy.

Well, we come back, we can talk a little more about Lake Victoria then, and then maybe some of your research here, more local to us as well, because that's obviously extremely important too.

Back in just a moment with the director of the BGSU Great Lakes Center for Fresh Waters and Human Health, Dr. George Bullerjahn here on The Journal.

Thank you for staying with us on The Journal.

Our guest is Dr. George Bullerjahn.

Talked about Lake Victoria, and obviously the gathering more research data there.

And as we talked about worldwide, global issue with regard to this.

Closer to home, you hear things periodically.

For instance, I know earlier in the spring, the, you know, one of the agencies said, oh, it's going to be a light bloom in Lake Erie this year.

Things are looking pretty good.

It turned out that it was higher than they thought, but not a major disaster.

It was a significantly, not significantly higher than a normal bloom.

And one of the things that you talked about the last time around the show is that you do a lot of work in Sandusky Bay.

And that a year or so ago, when you were doing that research, you talked to us about the fact that the blooms had kind of, that the algae had sort of disappeared from Sandusky Bay.

So what's the story on that a year downstream?

And why do you think it happened?

That sort of thing.

- Yeah, it's kind of, it was a real surprise to us.

And this is work which we've been doing for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

They've been funding us for several years because out in the open lake, there's a nasty bloom that appears that everybody talks about that's caused by this organism, microcystis.

Now, and it produces microcystin toxin.

In Sandusky Bay, there has been another bloom caused by a different organism called planktothrix, which also makes the same toxin.

And so it's a nasty situation.

Toxin levels were really, really high back in the 2015, 2016 when we started working there.

And then, so ODNR kind of tasked us to do a long-term monitoring of this area.

And so starting in 2019, the bloom started being less intense and then it completely went away in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

And it's back a little bit in 2023, but still not anywhere near this large as it was, its peak back in the teens.

And so the big question is, why did this happen?

It was like really a dramatic change over the course of a year.

- Yeah, really short period of time for this kind of situation, yeah.

[George] And so the water had gone from very, very green to actually less green and the water quality is much improved.

And it's to the point where the EPA is unlikely to declare it an impaired waterway using the criteria that our lab developed with them.

So, okay, why?

So we looked at anything that could have happened around 2018 and said, okay, what was different between 2018 and 2019 that yield these changes?

Well, the only thing we could come up was they removed the Ballville Dam and the Sandusky River.

And so I was talking to Scudder Mackey of Coastal Management in DNR, and we said, "Okay, maybe that was holding back, maybe the Ballville Reservoir was a incubator for planktothrix that was slowly feeding the bay downstream."

We remove that barrier and then we improve water flow and then we don't see a bloom.

And so we had never thought of actually checking the Ballville Reservoir before they took the dam out.

We never thought of doing that.

So we were just monitoring downstream from that.

And so what we've done in the meantime is that we've sampled what was the bottom of that reservoir.

Now it's just floodplain.

And we've tested that for microcystin toxins.

And we can detect high levels of toxin in that soil, which tells us, it's good evidence that the reservoir was holding back a very large bloom that just sort of kept feeding the bay and sustaining a bloom downstream.

And so we need to do a little more work, but we think that the dam really had, was the driving factor in reducing the bloom, which is actually, I think a very good lesson for other areas to learn, because if you can improve water movement and there's plenty of reasons why you want to remove a dam for fish habitat and so forth, but if you can take a dam out, you're gonna see perhaps benefits you weren't expecting.

- Yeah, that's interesting, because you wouldn't think that that one particular element would create that much impact and change that much.

- Yeah, I was surprised.

And really the difference between 2019, which is a transitional year, and 2020 is day and night.

And the communities are completely different where we were just submitting a paper which shows these dramatic changes that I'm kind of excited to share with the world.

- Now, when you look at, and you mentioned reservoirs, obviously, and that was a river that had been dammed.

Is there any discussion when you're looking at it, we're going completely off what we've been talking about, but obviously a lot of places around here bank water in reservoirs to then treat and provide public water.

Is there, and I know we're making a big leap here, would there be any concern that you might sample, for instance, like a municipal reservoir, which is a banking place for water, for public, for fresh water or for public water, that you might see issues like that in that water or not?

I don't know why there's a leap of- [George] Oh, you do all the time.

Okay, all right.

But water treatment plants do a very good job of- [Steve] Taking care of that, sure.

[George] You have to go to Grand Lake St. Mary's, which has a fairly intense bloom, we've talked about in the past.

It's the water source for the city of Salina, and there's an excellent water treatment plant, which generates excellent water for its residents, but it costs money.

That's the big thing.

- I can remember Grand Lake St. Mary's, we talked about them on the show back in 2010, 2011.

[George] Yeah, it's been a while.

- And obviously there's still an issue there, and that had been a situation, much as you talked about Lake Victoria, where it destroyed sort of the tourism and the recreational fishing.

That's what had happened in Grand Lake St. Mary's, and that was 10, 12, 13 years ago now.

Do you expect then, and it's interesting, so has there been any discussion of other places where there are dams on rivers that you might want to look at?

- I'm going to leave that to policy folks.

I'm not going to get on it.

I'm not going to get on a pedestal and say we got to get rid of all the dams.

I'm not going to, certainly dams serve a purpose, but there are plenty of good reasons to remove a dam, but it's up to the local authorities to decide the cost and the improvements that one might expect.

- But it is interesting, because I'm surprised that, as you were too to some degree, that the effect that would have, and obviously there are environmental benefits beyond just the discussion with regard to algae, but it is curious that, of course, now that dam had been there for what, a hundred and some years?

[George] That's a very old dam.

[Steve] And so therefore it's been stocking for a long time, this sort of situation.

Now, what's up next for you guys?

And obviously you'll be out on the lake for some time yet as we get into the fall and into the winter and that sort of thing.

So what's next on your research agenda?

- Well, we're looking at, we also look at wintertime communities, certainly as the lake is changing because we're losing ice.

And so in collaboration with my friend, Mike McKay, who you've had on the show, and then Steve Wilhelm, which I believe was on a show on the Grand Lake St. Mary's show years ago.

[Steve] Quite some time ago, yeah.

- We're looking at wintertime algae and how they change between high ice and low ice years, because that's another glimpse as to how the lake is changing with climate change.

So that's a- - Well, obviously as this progresses, we always want you to come back on and talk of this because it's extremely important, not just to this region, but obviously the entire world, what happens with this, all these sources of fresh water that we're so reliant on.

So we appreciate you coming on to talk about this.

- No, I enjoy talking about it and I wanna acknowledge my graduate student, Kate Brown, who's done some remarkable work and also my technician, Ryan Wagner.

- Yeah, and the other thing is too, if people look at your website and all the social media things that are out there too, the number of universities and other agencies are involved.

This is a very collaborative effort, not just about Lake Erie, but about the United States and everything as well.

So that's good to see as well.

Well, appreciate you being on, George.

- Thank you again.

[George] My pleasure.

- You can check us out at wbgu.org.

You can see us every Thursday night at 8:00 p.m. on WBGU-PBS.

We'll see you again next time.

Good night and good luck.

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