Lakeside News Spring 2000

An Endowment for the Waitt Water Quality Laboratory
Friends of Lakeside Lab
Lakeside Reminiscences
Iowa Great Lakes Water Quality
Mike Lannoo and A Plague of Frogs
Experimenting with Scientific Careers
Summer Programs
George Knaphus
Summer 2001 Course Offerings

An Endowment for the Waitt Water Quality Laboratory

By Arnold van der Valk, Director

In the last five years, Lakeside has made great strides toward becoming an Iowa Great Lakes institution. What has made this possible is the Friends of Lakeside Lab, Inc. The Friends’ successful fund raising campaign resulted in the construction of the Waitt Water Quality Laboratory. The Waitt Lab is the home of most new community related programs and activities. These include the new Cooperative Lakes Monitoring Program (CLaMP), two research projects on how to protect the water quality of the Iowa Great Lakes, Wild Wednesday Programs, Guided Nature Tours, and field days for local schools. The last is a major new environmental education program that is just getting started.

This spring Gary Phillips, Iowa Lakes Community College, Barbara Tagami, Dickinson County Conservation Board, and Steve Anderson, Lakeside and Dickinson County Conservation Board, initiated a new program for middle school students in which middle schools in Dickinson and surrounding counties are participating. It enables these schools to bring classes to Lakeside in the spring and fall to do field programs, including water quality programs. Over the next three years, over 2,000 middle school students will get a chance to visit Lakeside.

Much more could be done to develop Lakeside as an environmental education center. We have an ideal location and marvelous facilities for this purpose. What we lack are the financial resources to hire the staff needed to organize and carry out such programs. We would like to extend the new middle school program to grade, middle and high schools all over Iowa. We would also like to develop day, science camps during the summer and Saturday morning nature programs during the entire year for children in NW Iowa.

Friends of Lakeside Lab and the Board of Regents, State of Iowa, invites you to a Special Celebration announcing the Waitt Water Quality Lab Endowment Fund.  Please join us as we share education programs, water quality studies, and community opportunities.

Wednesday, June 14, 2000, 5-7 p.m.
Waitt Water Quality Lab
Iowa Lakeside Laboratory
Millers Bay, Hwy. 86
Refreshments and Hors D’oeuvres
Brief program at 6 p.m.
Family and Friends Welcome
Casual Attire

Current water quality programs focus on documenting nutrient concentrations in the lakes. This is essential, but it is minimal. More attention needs to be paid to identifying the major sources of nutrients entering the lakes. It has been nearly 30 years since a comprehensive study of nutrient inputs into the Iowa Great Lakes was done. At that time, point and non-point agricultural runoff was identified as the major source of nutrients entering the lakes, and appropriate action was taken to reduce these inputs. What are the major sources of nutrients entering the lakes today? No one knows for certain. To protect and enhance the water quality of the lakes, accurate and up-to-date information about the major sources of nutrients is needed. Again, a lack of funds makes it impossible to expand the existing water quality monitoring programs to document the relative importance of different sources of nutrients.

Existing environmental education and water quality monitoring programs face an uncertain future. They have mostly been funded with grant money, which by its very nature is short-term. Funding agencies do not want to support long-term projects. Three years, occasionally five years, is the normal life of most grants.

In order to preserve existing water quality monitoring and environmental education programs and to develop new ones, the Friends of Lakeside Lab, Inc. are launching a fund raising campaign this summer to create an endowment for the Waitt Water Quality Laboratory. The income from this endowment will be used solely to support programs associated with the Waitt Lab. This endowment will ensure that these programs will continue to improve the quality of life of the residents of and visitors to the Iowa Great Lakes. This endowment will ensure that the water quality of the lakes is protected and that more and more people can enjoy and learn about the natural resources of NW Iowa.

The first contribution to the new endowment campaign has already been received from an alumnus of Lakeside, William Danforth. He recalls his times at Lakeside in this issue. Your contribution to the Friends’ endowment campaign is crucial for the continuation of Waitt Lab programs. The Friends’ endowment campaign will be formally initiated with a kickoff event in the Waitt Lab on Wednesday, June 14, 2000, from 5 to 7 p.m. You are invited to this event, and I hope to see you there.

Friends of Lakeside Lab

By Mary Jean Montgomery, President

The geese are nesting along the banks of Miller’s Bay, summer residents have removed their cottage shutters and winter cobwebs; and Waitt Water Quality Lab is prepared for Summer 2000. In fact, Waitt Lab never closes! During this past winter Waitt has continued to conduct water quality studies, was the site of the popular nature tours during the Okoboji Winter Games, and recently played host to area middle school teachers preparing environmental education curricula.

The following outlines some of the Friends’ current projects and activities:

Friends of Lakeside Lab Endowment Campaign

On Wednesday evening, June 14, the Iowa Board of Regents will join Friends of Lakeside Lab to kick off the Endowment Campaign with a reception hosted by Friends. This important step recognizes the need to sustain the work of the Waitt Laboratory and the Friends’ commitment to invest in long-term goals of water quality and environmental education. For more information about the Endowment Campaign, contact Barb Mendenhall, Endowment Chair.

Membership Drive

In April and May over 1,200 letters were mailed to invite supporters to join the Friends of Lakeside Lab. Thanks to Membership Chair, Sue Richter, and her army of “friends,” this annual membership drive has become an important source of funding for the endowment, scholarships, and other Friends’ activities.

Middle School at the Waitt Lab

Thanks to Iowa Lakes Community College and a grant from the Kind World Foundation, middle school students and teachers from Estherville, Okoboji, Spencer, Spirit Lake, and Terril are involved in a three-year environmental education project at Waitt Lab. A combination of hands-on activities and curriculum development are key components of this unique pilot project. When complete, over 2,000 middle level students will have participated in science activities at Waitt Lab. For more information contact Gary Phillips.

Old Gates, New Entrance

Beginning this summer, visitors will once again enter the laboratory campus through the historic gate off Highway 86. Constructed in the 1930’s as part of a Civilian Conservation Corps project, these stone pillars greeted many a scholar during much of the 20th Century. Thanks to a generous gift from Harley Whitfield and Lura Mae Johnson in memory of Irma and Allen Whitfield, Friends of Lakeside Lab have restored the original entrance and added visible signage to this historic gate. Landscaping and new paving will complete this gateway to Iowa’s only laboratory campus. Come check it out!

Environmental Education Activities

Friends’ Environmental Education Coordinator, Jane Shuttleworth, is ready for another exciting summer of Wild Wednesdays, Nature Tours, the Sunday lecture series and CLaMP activities. Check out the schedule of public programs at www.lakeside.iastate.edu. Brochures are also available at the Welcome Center, local resorts, and the Iowa Lakeside Lab Office. In addition, Jane will be presenting information about our volunteer monitoring program at an Iowater meeting in Des Moines in early May. CLaMP will likely serve as one model for other lakes volunteer monitoring programs around the state.

Guests of Friends

Members of two state boards will be guests of the Friends of Lakeside Lab this summer. During the week of June 12, the Iowa Board of Regents will visit Lakeside and help kick off the Friends Endowment campaign. On June 21, Friends will share some of their plans for public schools with the Iowa State Board of Education and the Director of Education. Both opportunities will help us better define ways to become a teaching partner in K-16 education in Iowa.

Lakeside Reminiscences

By William F. Danforth

I first attended Lakeside in the summer of 1946, enrolled in field biology--botany under Dr. Henry Conard and zoology under Dr. R. L. King. My most vivid memory of botany is that Dr. Conard, age of about 70, could and sometimes did easily walk the entire class to exhaustion. Of zoology, lying on my stomach counting ants carrying eggs from an old to a new nest, and almost equal numbers carrying them back the other way—democracy in action. But I still know a lot of field biology, which I must have learned that summer. That was also the start of my long friendship with the King family.

June of that year was unusually cold. I slept in one of the CCC-built stone cottages, whose fireplace chimney only drew properly when the front door was open; my bunk was next to the front door. We stored firewood under the bunks and a log under mine housed a large and active colony of carpenter ants.

One of the best parts of the experience was the close association with a wide variety of people--botanists, zoologists, protozoologists, parasitologists among others, undergraduate and graduate students, high school and college teachers, and interested amateurs. The “moss ladies,” mostly middle-aged to elderly women taking Dr. Conard’s course on mosses and liverworts were notable among the amateurs. The mixture included members of several races and nationalities, fully integrated when that was still unusual. (A year or so later I played a small part in integrating a SUI dormitory for the first time; other dorms followed almost immediately. And SUI was then already a leader in nondiscrimination.) Best of all, this seemed perfectly natural—a matter of shared interests rather than a social gesture. We ate together, swam together, and spent most evenings on the mess hall porch, talking quietly and listening to Dr. King’s large selection of folksong records. We also learned a great deal about what others were studying and researching.

The next summer I took protozoology under T. L. Jahn. That was the start of another long-term friendship, and I followed him to UCLA to do a Ph.D. under his direction. I’d learned to enjoy rowing at Lakeside; at that time they had no motor launch and only one ancient and cranky outboard motor. That summer another student and I rowed through Beck’s Canal (Does it still exist?) and then back on the lake in a violent thunderstorm, two of us rowing as hard as we could and barely making progress.

The year after that I returned to do an individual study under Dr. King, continuing a project I’d started in the field biology course. That resulted in my first scientific publication, “A List of the Iowa Ostracods with Descriptions of Three New Species,” in the Journal of the Iowa Academy of Science. Just a few years ago I learned that one of the “new” species had been long known as a fossil but not as still living.

During one of those years, a coon got into the Lab’s museum and cleverly removed the screw caps from many of the specimen bottles to investigate the contents. Wisely, Dr. King, who had prepared most of them, had included glycerin in the preservative fluid. That prevented them from drying out and allowed most of them to be rescued.

The Anchor Club was a tradition, which may have been lost by now. It began, before my time, when Dr. King dropped anchor from a boat before noticing that the anchor line was just three feet long and unattached at the bitter end. (How many of you know that the “bitter end” is the other end of an anchor line? In wooden ships it was attached to a post called the “bit.”) From time to time membership was awarded to others for equally noteworthy accomplishments.

Some years later, when I was a young assistant professor at Illinois Institute of Technology, no Iowan was available to teach the Protozoology course, and I enthusiastically accepted an invitation to do so. Dr. King had retired as director by that time, and I got to know Dr. Bovbjerg, whom most of you remember. He taught me a lot of limnology, though I’m not sure he knew he was doing it. Using the excuse of collecting protozoa, my students and I went on many field trips set up for other courses, having fun and picking up miscellaneous information as a bonus.

I see that I’ve written a great deal about my personal experiences and impressions and not much about what I gained for my career as a professional biologist. It’s hard to answer that question even to myself. Very little of my teaching and research had any close relation to the content of my studies at Lakeside, but the first-hand experience of all sorts of living organisms in their natural habitats gave me a feel for the meaning of what I learned from textbooks, journals, and laboratory experiments. I think and hope that I passed some of that onto my students. Even more important, I learned from example and experience what it meant to be a real biologist, an understanding that goes beyond the specifics of particular subject matter.

Coming back to the personal, Lakeside left me with a lasting appreciation for natural places. For nearly 30 years I’ve tried to spend every summer weekend in a houseboat in the Mississippi backwaters, doing lazy man’s biology—“studying” whatever life happened to be around.

Iowa Great Lakes Water Quality

By Steve Fisher, Manager, Bovjberg Water Chemistry Laboratory

Is water quality getting better in the Iowa Great Lakes? At the moment, no one knows for sure. In order to answer this question we need to evaluate historical trends in the water quality data for the Iowa Great Lakes. Over the last winter, Iowa Lakeside Laboratory has collected all existing information on nutrient concentrations in all the lakes and inputs from the watershed around these lakes. Water quality data for the Iowa Great Lakes area include historical and contemporary nutrient data for the lakes themselves (Big Spirit Lake, West Okoboji Lake, East Okoboji Lake, Upper Gar Lake, Lake Minnewashta and Lower Gar Lake) and their subwatersheds. This is the first time all these data have been collected in one place.

All of the historical data have been available only in hard copy form, often in hard to find research reports. Many of these reports are not only nearly impossible to locate, but the few remaining copies are literally crumbling away. Some of these data only exist in files in a couple of offices. These important historic data sets include: 1) Roger Bachmann's 1971-1973 study of all the Iowa Great Lakes and their subwatersheds; his 1987, 1988, and 1989 studies of West Okoboji Lake; the 1979 and 1990 Clean Lake Classification Study of Iowa Lakes for Restoration ; Ken Lang's 1993-1998 studies of West Okoboji Lake; and Gary Phillips' 1989-1999 study of East Okoboji Lake and 1993-1999 study of Big Spirit Lake. To date, 75 percent of this historical data has been digitized and entered into a spreadsheet. The remainder will be digitized this summer.

The contemporary data sets are the citizen-monitoring data collected by CLaMP (Cooperative Lakes Monitoring Project) for all the lakes and data on inputs from selected subwatersheds that are being collected as part of an ongoing study funded by the Agriculture Experiment Station at Iowa State University on the effectiveness of various land-use practices (grass waterways, restored wetlands, buffer strips, etc.). CLaMP data collection began in 1999. The subwatershed study has been run for two years.

All of the historical and current water quality data will be available on the Lakeside web page (www.lakeside.iastate.edu) sometime this summer. The raw data for the lakes and subwatersheds will be available in tabular form and averaged yearly lake data will be summarized in tables and graphs that will show the nutrient concentrations in the various lakes over the years. Anyone will be able to download these data. In summary, we will soon be able to tell if the water quality of the Iowa Great Lakes has changed for the better or worse or remained the same over the last 30 years.

Mike Lannoo and A Plague of Frogs

Editor’s NOTE: What follows this excerpted section of the book is a discussion of various theories about the origin of frog deformities and Mike’s evaluation of them, plus a detailed description of an interesting experiment that was done in Mike’s class with a tiger salamander larva and a tadpole that is relevant to one of these theories.

This year Hyperion Press (New York, NY) has published a book, A Plague of Frogs: The Horrifying True Story , by science writer William Souder. This book examines the decline in frogs and increasing reports of malformed frogs, and the reasons postulated for these phenomena. Among the people interviewed for this book was Dr. Mike Lannoo. Mike has been teaching a variety of courses at Lakeside for many years, and this summer he will be teaching a new course on Amphibians and Reptiles at Lakeside. Mr. Souder visited Mike while he was teaching at Lakeside, and in his book he recounts his experiences with Mike and Mike’s class at the Lab. What follows is a brief excerpt from this book. If you would like to read the complete story of Mr. Souder’s visit to Lakeside and learn more about the controversies surrounding amphibian decline, you will need to acquire a copy of this fascinating and important book through your local bookstore. One of Mike’s own books Okoboji Wetlands will be for sale this summer at Lakeside.

“Over that same winter I read a slim, wonderfully evocative book by Mike Lannoo called Okoboji Wetlands . It’s the story of the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory and a naturalist’s view of the environs surrounding the lab, which is located on the western shore of Lake Okoboji in northwestern Iowa. This is one of those remote, forgotten corners of the heartland that you can’t believe exists until you see it for yourself. Here, where the landscape is quite literally only heaven and earth—is the Corn Belt Riviera, a tony retreat consisting of Lake Okoboji, Spirit Lake, and a number of lesser bodies of water that are all known locally as “Iowa’s Great Lakes.” Lake Okoboji, a two-mile-long wedge of water shaped roughly like the outline of Great Britain, is rimmed on all sides by lavish cottages, magnificent waterfront homes, and crisp-looking gated communities of town houses and condos. The lab sits atop the wooded slopes bordering Miller’s Bay. It’s been one of the country’s leading field biology stations since 1909.

Okoboji Wetlands is at once a celebration of aquatic ecology and a lament over an ecosystem in decline. Like wetlands everywhere, the ponds and swamps and sloughs of Okoboji have been steadily compromised by the impact of human development. These effects are sometimes dramatic. The act of plowing under a wetland to plant corn is both immediate and permanent in its impact on the species living there. So is the poisoning of a wetland with rotenone to kill “trash” fish species in order to rear game fish in it instead. But these kinds of specific, overt, premeditated alterations of the environment are not necessarily the most important considerations in understanding the more general collapse of wetland habitats, according to Lannoo.

Lannoo, by training a neuroanatomist, teaches human medicine at the Muncie Medical Center, part of Ball State University in Indiana. But because of his long-standing interest in amphibians and extensive field experience, he’d also become the U.S. coordinator of the Declining Amphibian Populations Task Force, an international group of field herpetologists that has been studying the puzzling collapse of frog populations around the world for most of the past decade.

Lannoo returned each summer to Okoboji to teach evolution and wetland ecology. These long summer days were divided between the classroom and daily excursions into the field, where Lannoo and his students would drag long seines through wetlands and then identify and examine whatever they dredged up: snails, insect larvae, salamanders, tadpoles, frogs. What interested me most in Okoboji Wetlands , aside from Lannoo’s vivid depictions of the rich interplay of life in aquatic systems, was the way he wrote about the insidious nature of gradual changes over long periods of time—years or even centuries—that are not, in terms of the evolution of life on earth, long periods at all. A change in the environment taking place over a thousand years would have about the same significance on an evolutionary time scale as the impact of a comet with earth. Both are effectively instantaneous.

But we don’t see it that way because we live in only a sliver of Deep Time. We tend to be captivated by phenomenon that appear to have come upon us suddenly. Our brains, Lannoo wrote, “emphasize novelty.” Lannoo noted that the slow but steady winnowing of the pageant of life—the ongoing “biodiversity crisis,” as scientists came to call it during the 1990’s—had taken hold without much notice largely because few of us can imagine, and none of us can remember, what the world looked like even a hundred years ago. Lannoo argued that one way to bring home the accretion of loss that is the biodiversity crisis is to describe the local environment as it appeared to our grandparents when they were children. Among the “major” species of animals once common in the Okoboji area that are now nowhere to be seen were black bears, buffalo, elk, cougars, otters, and bobcats. You could draw up a similar list of missing animals, not to mention plants, for almost any area in the United States. We take these astounding losses for granted. How easy would it be, then, I wondered to accept the extinction of a species or two of amphibians? Or more than that.

If you don’t care whether there are bears in your neighborhood anymore, would you really lose sleep over the fate of a bunch of frogs? Human beings today tend to live in the sealed, modulated environments of cities and suburbs. Our “environment” is steel and stone and glass and asphalt. We have become forgetful of natural history. Most people nowadays are hard-pressed to identify more than a handful of the bird species that might appear at a back yard feeder; many who would give no thought to navigating a tangle of high-speed freeways would be unable to find their way out of a 20-acre woods. Not only do we casually accept our ignorance and our losses, we see all of this as the inevitable result of progress. People have come to believe that the vitality of American life is incompatible with the preservation of the natural environment. We’ve been taught, Lannoo wrote, that environmental concerns are “a drag on the economy. “ We pit wildlife against jobs; most often, it’s the wildlife that lose against the insistent demands of agriculture and industry and urban sprawl. Lannoo didn’t argue that we should turn back the clock a hundred years, only that we needed to see that this approach will not work forever. “We must realize the economic gains that run counter to long-term environmental health cannot be sustained.” Our economy, he added, is “nested inside our environment.”

Thinking about these observations, it seemed to me that there was something regrettably trendy about the investigation of the frog deformities. The grotesque nature of their leg afflictions, plus the attendant worries about a threat to “human health” they might be signaling, gave the outbreak a kind of momentary currency—like the latest killer virus or the newest flavor at Starbuck’s. What, after all, do a few limb deformities mean in the context of a biodiversity crisis enveloping the globe? The evidence so far showed that deformed frogs didn’t survive to adulthood. But then most frogs don’t survive to adulthood. They’re taken out at successive stages of life by predators, disease, bad weather, and unnatural causes of every description. On average, only about one of every 600 fertilized leopard frog eggs will turn into a sexually mature frog. This is why female leopard frogs lay as many as 5,000 eggs at a time. Frogs are cheap.

Maybe the deformities were only another small subtraction at the margin—just a mildly alarming way to do in a few more animals that faced the world causing wholesale extinctions among plants and animals. And, from the frogs’ point of view, if we can even try to fathom what that might be, what’s the difference whether you’re dead because somebody builds a shopping mall on your home or because your legs don’t work right?”

Experimenting with Scientific Careers

By Duane Winn
(Reprinted from the Dickinson County News, June 24, 1999) Barbara Tagami of Iowa Lakeside Laboratory looked up to family members.

Lois Tiffany received support from a college professor.

Without such encouragement, perhaps neither woman would have embarked on a successful career in science.

Decades apart in age, the two women are united in the effort to help other females gain a foothold in a profession which was once the exclusive domain of males.

Tagami, a 1979 graduate of San Diego State, vividly remembers her collegiate days. For every female enrolled in a science class, there were 11 males.

But she gained an edge on her male counterparts at an early age because of her interest in the outdoors, which led her to the field of biology, botany and art.

“I was a tomboy,” she admitted.

Science was also a dinner table topic. Her aunt was in the field of electron microscopy and her father is an analytical chemist.

“Science was all around me,” she said, “so it was pretty natural for me to go in that direction.”

In the last two decades, she has witnessed a revolution in perception about women’s abilities in science.

“Women add a different dimension,” she said. We think differently using the scientific approach just because of our nature in general. Men, I think, are maybe more analytical, but women have a tendency to be analytical and also to be intuitive. We have a different way of looking at things.”

Tiffany, a professor of mycology at Iowa State University, was taken under the wing of Professor Joseph Gilman in her collegiate days during the 1940’s.

“There were no women in the department at that time,” she said. He was very supportive, a very open person. He never questioned my ability, and he helped me to try to develop it. I’ve always been eternally grateful to him.”

“The opportunities were there if you persisted. And the opportunities are still there,” added Tiffany. “I won’t say all prejudice is gone, but people are much more open to people no mater what sex they are.”

Programs like “Women in Natural Sciences,” Iowa Lakeside Laboratory’s summer science camp for eighth grade girls, gives young females exposure to science. What they do with it is up to them, said Tiffany.

It’s just like anything else—you try different things. Some of them fit and some of them don’t. But if you didn’t have an opportunity to peek through that window and see that kind of thing was there you might never know about it,” she said.

WINS is a field biology camp. The first half of each camp session includes instruction in techniques for field biological research in aquatic botany, entomology, ecology, limnology and invertebrate zoology.

Participants learn about those areas from resident scientists at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory and middle school specialists.

The teaching staff includes Roxanne Baumgartner and Dr. Lyn Countryman. Baumgartner received her bachelor’s degree in biology and secondary education from Wartburg College and her M.A. in science education from the University of Iowa. She has 10 years of experience teaching science at the middle school and high school level. She currently teaches eighth-grade science at Cedar Rapids. She is the lead instructor at the camp.

Countryman is an associate professor at the Malcolm Price Laboratory, part of the University of Northern Iowa. She teaches seventh-grade science and ninth-grade earth science. She is one of the few teachers in Iowa who have gained national certification as an early adolescence generalist. She serves as the curriculum coordinator for the camp and is also a lead instructor.

At the end of the camp, she will give the camp participants a survey sheet to complete so that she can ascertain how valuable camps like these are in developing scientific interests in girls.

“This is a real critical time,” said Countryman. “We usually talk about how they feel about being in science. In classrooms, for the most part, some of these girls say they play dumb because it’s not cool to be smart. That’s a bad precedent to set.

“When they’re here they say they like this because it’s okay to like science. They aren’t looked on here as weird. So I think it’s important to have more camps like this. I think then we would find more girls in science.”

Nationwide, only 16 percent of scientists, six percent of engineers and four percent of computer scientists are women. Other research shows that women leave science and engineering careers twice as frequently as men. One reason could be that women’s salaries in science and engineering lag behind men’s by 12 to 15 percent.

Countryman said educators and school administrators could do a better job of involving girls in science.

“Most of the research shows that teachers ask girls lower-level questions and they spend less time on girls,” she said. “If you don’t make a concerted effort in the classroom and make sure that all students are using the equipment, you’ll find the boys will gravitate toward doing the science and the girls will be record keepers because they have better handwriting and they acquiesce sooner. And in the seventh grade, girls start developing an interest in boys so they don’t want to appear unfeminine.”

Tagami said women like Soninkhishig Nergui give her hope. Nergui is a doctoral student at Mongolia State University. With grants from the National Science Foundation and Friends of Iowa Lakeside Lab, she is studying diatoms with Dr. Eugene Stoermer of the University of Michigan, who is offering courses in that field at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory this summer.

Nergui is doing her doctoral research on diatoms, which can be used as indicators of environmental conditions and water quality. These microscopic algae are a tool in monitoring changes in the environment. Currently there isn’t a diatom specialist in Mongolia, said Tagami.

“That’s fantastic,” she said, of Nergui’s trailblazing role.

And to any girl who is considering a career in science, Tagami has some advice.

“Go, girl!”

Summer Programs

Besides the usual complement of summer courses for university students (see our Web site, www.lakeside.iastate.edu, for details), we are offering a variety of short courses that are designed for educators (Techniques in Biology Teaching) and residents and visitors to the Iowa Great Lakes (Natural History Workshops) who would like to experience Iowa's natural heritage first-hand. These courses have no prerequisites, other than a curiosity about the world around you. Again, this summer there will also be four different programs for people in the Iowa Great Lakes that enable them to participate in activities at Lakeside. These are our popular Wild Wednesday nature programs, Sunday Seminar series, new Guided Nature Tours, and Adult Nature Weekend.

This year the Adult Nature Weekend will be dedicated to the memory of Dr. George Knaphus (see his obituary in this issue) who, with Dr. Lois Tiffany, organized and ran this program each year. Although George will be sorely missed by his many friends and colleagues at Lakeside and around Iowa, the Adult Nature Weekend will continue in his honor and memory.

Courses for Teachers

Techniques for Biology Teaching:
Animal Behavior (July 30-August 4)
Prairie Ecology (August 6-11)

Natural History Week

Four natural history workshops are being offered this summer, Amphibians and Reptiles, Nature Photography, Mushrooms and Other Fungi, Prairies and Prairie Restoration. The workshops are offered August 14-18 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. There are no prerequisites. Participants can take the workshops for credit through Iowa State University, the University of Iowa, the University of Northern Iowa, or Iowa Lakes Community College, or for non-credit. The cost for non-credit is $150.

Guided Nature Tours

Environmental education coordinator, Jane Shuttleworth, will be leading guided nature tours June 1-August 25. You can explore the ecology of prairies, wetlands or lakes via foot, kayak or pontoon boat.

Below is a list of activities:

Prairie Hikes
Tuesdays, 9-noon
Fee: $18; ½ price for children under 12

Lake Pontoon Tours
Thursdays, 8-noon
$18; ½ price for children under 12

Wetland Kayak Tours
Fridays, 8-noon
Fee: $45; ½ price for children under 12

Reservations are required for the above activities. Call 712-337-3669, Ext. 305.

Wild Wednesdays

Wild Wednesdays is a program designed for school age and adult audiences to learn about the natural and cultural history of the Iowa Great Lakes area. These programs are free and open to the public and are held in the Waitt Water Quality Lab at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory every Wednesday at 7 p.m.

This summer’s schedule is as follows:

June 14
Looking Back—Native Americans and the Iowa Great Lakes

June 21
Bottom Feeders: Life in the Mud

June 28
Staying in Touch—Life On and Under Rocks

July 5
The Secret Life of Fish

July 12
Born Free-Floating—Life as a Plankter

July 19
Alien Invaders in the Iowa Great Lakes!

July 28
Too Much of a Good Thing—Algal Blooms

August 2
Hopping Mad—Frogs and Toads in NW Iowa

Sunday Seminars

Sunday Seminars are held each Sunday in the Waitt Quality Lab at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory at 7 p.m. Although these seminars are intended for an academic audience, the general public is always welcome to attend.

These seminars are presented by faculty members from various universities and colleges.

June 4
Recovery of Prairie Wetland Ecosystems After Restoration
By Dr. Susan Galatowitsch,
University of Minnesota

June 11
The Importance of Small Mammals in Grassland Ecosystems
By Dr. Brent Danielson,
Iowa State University

June 25
Long Term Drought History of the Great Plains
By Jasmine Saros,
University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse

July 9
Water Quality in Streams: Insects as Bio-Indicators
By Kurt Pontasch,
University of Northern Iowa

July 23
Predators, Pollywogs and Plasticity: Predator Induced Defenses in Tadpoles
By Dr. Andy McCollum,
Cornell College

July 30
Reconstructing Iowa’s Prairies
By Dr. Tom Jurik,
Iowa State University

Adult Nature Weekend

Adult Nature Weekend will be held from August 18-20. This is an opportunity to participate in field trips to various natural areas in the Iowa Great Lakes region supplemented by evening interpretive programs. Learn about Iowa’s natural history from some of the leading naturalists in the state in a relaxed and congenial setting.

George Knaphus

George Knaphus, 75, died Saturday, May 20, of cancer. He and Lois Tiffany were initiators of the Adult Nature Weekends at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory.

George Knaphus was born on August 31, 1924, in McCallsburg, IA. George grew up and lived on the same farm south of McCallsburg for 70 years until moving to Ames October, 1998. He loved the outdoors and spent much time playing ball and hunting, often sharing the pheasants he shot with nearby neighbors. He graduated from McCallsburg High in 1942 and entered the Army early the following year, serving in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany during World War II.

It was a terrible time, but despite the scars he carried with him throughout his life, he held no bitterness toward the German soldiers or German people. He received the Bronze Star. The citation states, “the initiative and devotion displayed by this soldier reflect the highest credit on himself and the Armed Forces of the United States.”

After the war George enrolled at Iowa State Teacher’s College, graduating in 1949. While in Cedar Falls, he married Marie Gjenvick after proposing to her on their first date. (She worried him for several months before saying yes.) He earned a Master’s Degree from Iowa State College in 1951. In the years that followed he returned to McCallsburg where he was a farmer with many outside interests. He served on the school board, was a Warren Township trustee for 50 years, an active member of the American Legion, and held various leadership positions in Bethany Lutheran Church. He became principal and teacher in the McCallsburg High School in 1958 and taught science classes at Nesco High School until 1962 when he returned to Iowa State University to complete his Ph.D. program. Since that time he has been a professor of Botany and Teacher Education. Affectionately known as Dr. K, he loved his students and his students loved him.

In addition to academic pursuits he was a driving force in the Iowa State intramural softball program. One of his proudest achievements in life was pitching 506 winning games after his 60 th birthday. Among the many awards George received were the Governor’s Science Medal, the Distinguished Science Award by the Iowa Academy of Science, and the student’s choice for Professor of the Year in 1995.
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Summer 2001 Course Offerings

Some courses at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory are taught only in alternate years. The following courses are scheduled to be taught next summer:

Aquatic Ecology
Archaeology
Conservation Biology
Diatom Clinic
Ecology
Ecology and Systematics of
Diatoms
Freshwater Algae
Illustrating Nature: Sketching
Illustrating Nature: Photography
Natural History Workshop
Ornithology
Plant Ecology
Plant Taxonomy
Restoration Ecology
Statistical Methods for Field Biologists
Techniques in Biology Teaching
Watershed Hydrology and Surficial Processes
Watershed Modeling and GIS