Trout Lake Station is a lake ecology research station in the Northwoods of Wisconsin operated by the University of Wisconsin Madison’s Center for Limnology. Limnology is the study of lakes and inland waters. I’m working up here this summer as a science communications intern and am surrounded by scientists, so what better place to do an episode than under my bed?!

Gretchen Gerrish is the director of Trout Lake Station. She also researches Zooplankton, tiny ocean floaters, among many other projects.

Carol Warden is a scientist who works on the Long Term Ecological Research project (LTER). This program has been monitoring various ecosystems around the world for more than forty years, including lakes in Wisconsin.

For more information on the LTER project, visit their website here.

For more on Trout Lake Station, visit their homepage.

Rob Anex is an environmental engineer and the co-founder of a startup that traps carbon into cement, a major source of global CO2 emissions. The resulting product not only captures carbon, but also is stronger than regular cement. Rob’s curiosity didn’t start or end with saving the planet; he’s built bombs, written pieces on recycling, and currently teaches a rotating carousel of classes at UW Madison.

To see Rob's startup website and other sources that were used to research the episode, click here.

Trina McMahon is a civic engineer and microbiologist. She studies microbial communities in lake water and wastewater treatment plants and tends to approach problems from an engineering perspective.

There is some discussion in this episode about the “Super Bowl Halftime Flush,” the phenomenon of thousands of Americans flushing the toilet during halftime, with the potential to damage municipal water pipes with the sheer volume of sudden water consumption. Though the halftime does incur significant peaks of water usage, the damage is unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) an urban legend. Water treatment plants generally have bigger fish to fry than the Super Flush. Like morning showers and flooding.

Click here to read more about Trina’s work.