[Stuart Carlton]
Teach me about the Great Lakes. Teach me about the Great Lakes. Welcome back to Teach Me About the Great Lakes, a twice-monthly podcast in which I, a Great Lakes novice, ask people who are smarter and harder working than I am what exactly the intro to the show is. But this, everybody, is an emergency Teach Me About the Great Lakes Ask Dr. Fish crossover episode. So hold on, where's the siren? I know I got it.

Yes, here we go. That's right. We're calling in the Dr. Fishes themselves because this is not just Teach Me About the Great Lakes. We are happy to be joined today by the cast of Ask Dr. Fish, Dr. Catfish, Katie O'Reilly, Aquatic Invasive Species Specialist for Illinois Indiana Sea Grant, I think is actually what that is. What's up, Katie?

[Katie O'Reilly]
What's up, Stuart? I mean, it's an emergency. You gotta pull in the big guns.

[Stuart Carlton]
We pulled in the big guns, the three biggest guns I know. And here with the howitzer, well, we'll be talking about that later, Titus Salheimer, Dr. Fish SG, Wisconsin Sea Grant. Titus, how are things up in Wisconsin? Frozen Lakes?

[Titus Salheimer]
Yeah, Frozen Lakes, Dead Sturgeon. It's a beautiful time of year to be here and it is great to see all of you. I have missed talking to you. So I'm glad that this is happening.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yes. And then also joining us, the heart and soul of Ask Dr. Fish herself. She's been on assignment. We've been without her. We're so glad she's here. Carolyn Foley, Research Coordinator, Illinois Indiana Sea Grant and the finest research coordinator in the whole network. And that includes you, listener. What's up, Carolyn?

[Carolyn Foley]
Not much. I'm also excited about the snow though. Dead Sturgeon. I mean, I think it's well known by now that I really love sturgeon, so I'm excited to talk about them, but not necessarily when they're dead.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah. What is more exciting than a dead sturgeon?

[Carolyn Foley]
A live one.

[Titus Salheimer]
Yes, probably a live one. And even better than that, a baby live sturgeon is the best.

[Stuart Carlton]
No, that's true. I mean, there's a reason that sturgeon are a multiple runner up, multiple time runner up for Great Lakes Animal of the Year. Well, listener, the reason that we have gotten this emergency recording together is we saw new stories that just demanded, demanded to be discussed by Ask Dr. Fish. I was going to discuss them just with myself. And I said, that is insufficient. I was going to discuss them with just Carolyn. And we said, no, this is insufficient. We need the doctors fish. And so today we have three stories, three stories. Does this count as Great Lakes News as well? Nah, it's not Great Lakes News. There's Great Lakes News coming up though. Anyway.

[Titus Salheimer]
It's Great Fish News.

[Stuart Carlton]
Great Fish News. Anyway, the reason we had to call in that, I think I already mentioned that, so I will then move on. What is the emergency? The emergency is sturgeon news. Lots of sturgeon news. Carolyn, what's the first sturgeon story we're talking about today? The SS.

[Carolyn Foley]
Right. So I think we've talked about this a little bit before on this show about the sturgeon fishing season. And so sturgeon are like, it's not very long, right, Katie? Can you tell me a little?

[Stuart Carlton]
No, sturgeon are actually pretty long.

[Katie O'Reilly]
Yeah, sturgeon are very long. Sturgeon fishing season, not so much. And this year in one location in the Great Lakes, northern Michigan, the sturgeon season was even shorter than usual. It set a record being all of 17 minutes long for the total time the season was open. So very, very short in comparison to the very, very long sturgeon setting this record.

[Titus Salheimer]
And the far superior Wisconsin spearing season that I will taunt Michigan with any chance I get.

[Stuart Carlton]
I'm here for your taunting of Michigan, but let's back it up a little bit. So sturgeon, so they're big fish and they're normally not legal to catch, right? But there's a spear fishery. Is that right, Titus? And why is there a spear fishery? Why is that legal when other formats aren't?

[Titus Salheimer]
Yeah. I mean, there are actually, like there are different rivers. The Menomonee River, for example, between Michigan and Wisconsin has a hook and line fishery. And, you know, there are places you can catch them. The Chippewa River, rivers mainly. But so we go the kind of long standing tradition here is spear fishing through the ice. And this has been kind of a way to catch sturgeon. I didn't bring any of my sturgeon decoys because I wasn't thinking of that. But you basically cut a big hole in the ice. You drop down a decoy, which might be a fish. It might be a Barbie car. And the sturgeon are curious and they come to look at it. And then you stab them with a spear. And so, you know, it's kind of gruesome. It is. I've been to the check-in station here in Wisconsin, and it is it's both sad and amazing because you're like, oh, you know, that's like a hundred year old fish that was swimming around. And now someone's going to eat it, which, you know, that's that's not terrible. But yeah.

[Carolyn Foley]
At least they eat it. So we don't have the video right now. But the that I actually didn't know that it was you put a decoy and they're curious and it just feels so I was like, oh, no, goodness gracious. But but knowing that people actually eat it helps my brain a little bit. Go ahead, Katie.

[Katie O'Reilly]
No, and I was just going to say, I mean, I think to give some context for those who might not be familiar, the reason these seasons are so limited and why there are limits on sturgeon you can catch outside of the season is because the species was overfished in the Great Lakes. They used to, you know, pre-European settlement of the basin, they were super abundant, you know, used by native peoples in the basin for food, part of like the culture. But with settlement, we started to see, you know, decreases both due to the overfishing, due to loss of their spawning habitat by building dams on rivers that allowed, you know, prevented them from getting to places to spawn.

So it's so we knock their numbers down a lot. And as Titus alluded to, they take a long time to reproduce because they're these old, slow growing fish. So the fact that we're now being able to have these limited harvest is actually a sign of success. So as sad as it seems, it's actually showing that, you know, people have been doing the work to restore them. It takes a long time to see results, but we're starting to see that. And by having these sort of short but heavily managed seasons, we can still, you know, allow people to fish and have these kind of fun experiences with them while also maintaining these populations for the future so that we don't maybe don't have 17 minute seasons in the future. And maybe it's a little bit more of a balanced fishery.

[Stuart Carlton]
And so it's 17 minutes, because it's really limited in terms of number of fish, right? I think it said it was six fish in this article.

[Katie O'Reilly]
Six fish. Yep. And so basically, with Black Lake, at least this year, the DNR required that if you caught a sturgeon, like you had to text in essentially, to the DNR that you caught it so they could keep track and that, you know, because again, 17 minutes is not a super long time when you've got people in sort of ice shanties across the lake. So yeah, so definitely is limited because you only have a certain quote of number of fish that can be caught.

[Carolyn Foley]
So being there at one of these events, is it just kind of like chaos? And like, do they have like an air horn when they hit their final like, stop fishing? Or how do they communicate with the people who are participating in the event?

[Titus Salheimer]
Yeah, so I mean, Wisconsin has the Lake Winnebago system. And so it is, you know, and this is the way ours works, because we have a lot more sturgeon, and they've been protected, you know, like very early on a century ago, it was, you know, there were declines, and everyone was like, hey, we need to do something about this. And, you know, that kind of resulted in, you know, we don't have to have a 17 minute season here because it's been managed so well.

And the way our fishery works is there's like, there are quotas for female, juvenile females, adult females and males. And anytime they hit, when they hit 90% of those quotas, then it like it closes. I think the next day is the last day, just to make sure they don't go over that.

So with Black Lake, I mean, obviously, if you're texting, hey, I got a sturgeon, you know, they're very small numbers, and they're going to, and it's also very, you know, it's a much smaller lake, I assume. I don't like, Lake Winnebago is huge. It's, you know, like you can't, you know, if you're on the north end, you can't see the south end, because it's miles and miles long.

And I think, I mean, there's like 20 different check-in stations. But yeah, it is, you know, it's very important to, you know, I think to make sure that it's a really managed fishery and, you know, like, specifically, like, you know, males and females and like really controlling, you know, which, you know, there's not a lot of fisheries where every single fish that's harvested is like inspected. And, you know, the DNR actually has to see all these.

And for us, it's like 2pm, like you have to have your fish registered by two. And that's, you know, you don't want to get caught with the sturgeon, an unregistered sturgeon outside of those hours, because you're going to get in trouble.

[Katie O'Reilly]
And just to add to that, too, you know, when they check in the sturgeon, they also often take samples for, you know, scientists to do analysis of age, diet. So in addition to being eaten, you know, we are getting scientific information collected from these, the caught fish as well.

[Carolyn Foley]
That's really, really cool. So I just want to, for the, you know, ice fishing and stuff like that, I've been really excited to see that people actually are able to ice fish this year. Like, every time I go over certain rivers, I'm like, oh my gosh, they're actually able to do it.

So that was exciting. So, Stuart, we have another sturgeon story that we wanted to talk about. Do you want to introduce that one?

[Stuart Carlton]
That actually, the sturgeon fishing season was not the emergency.

[Carolyn Foley]
No, it wasn't. It just was a happy coincidence.

[Stuart Carlton]
But that was a happy coincidence. All right. The real emergency, this is from USA Today, For the Win, which is one of their blogs, I suppose.

Anyway, I'll just read the headline, Giant sturgeon attacks show mermaid in shocking video. And so this, there's some, there's an Instagram post on this, and you can go ahead and click on that and watch it. Oh my God, I've never seen it before.

Holy smokes. So here's what happened. They've got a mermaid.

First of all, it's not clear where they got a mermaid, right? That in and of itself is impressive. I used to visit Tarpon Springs, Florida when I lived down there and they had mermaids there too.

There are not many of these. They're very rare in the wild, but she's just there dancing as a mermaid does. Underwater, of course, because she would like to breathe.

And so she's sitting underwater and then there's a very large sturgeon, like a six, I'm going to call it 100 feet. But it's probably closer to, I don't know, six plus feet. And it's swimming by her.

[Titus Salheimer]
Definitely, definitely over six feet. That's a Chinese sturgeon, Stewart.

[Stuart Carlton]
That is a Chinese sturgeon and it's just swimming over and it opens its mouth and like sucks her head as if it were a crawfish. What is happening here? Tell me about Chinese sturgeon and is this something that happens often?

And how should they have Chinese sturgeons or any sturgeons in a tank with endangered mermaids? Dr. Fish, what is going on here?

[Katie O'Reilly]
So the Chinese sturgeon is a relative of the lake sturgeon that we have here in the Great Lakes. As both you and Titus alluded to, they can get really big, up to about 16 feet long. But they are not like these man-killing machines that the Clickbaity title might make you think.

[Titus Salheimer]
Yeah, we can have a whole discussion about the way they characterize the attack of the sturgeon. Yes, Katie and I both use quotes marks at the same time because, yes.

[Katie O'Reilly]
Well, attack to me, you know, kind of gives off this malicious intent that like, you know, the sturgeon is not going after this mermaid specifically. And the fact that sturgeon don't have teeth kind of, you know, lessens the feel of like attack. So just like our lake sturgeon, Chinese sturgeon basically are vacuum cleaners.

They, you know, swim along the bottom and suck up any kind of small bug, fish hanging out in the benthos. So it's kind of hard to believe that, you know, this was not just a, you know, kind of wrong place, wrong time type of thing. And just to note, the mermaid was okay.

She had a couple of bruises. Her goggles got knocked off. But, you know, we are not mourning the loss of a mermaid here.

[Titus Salheimer]
Yeah, I mean, I would say it's the same, like it's the same as a shark attack. Like it is, you know, like shark, they're not attacking people. They just bite people because they think they're food.

And then they're like, this isn't food. I don't like this. And then, you know, they leave.

And I think it's the same thing with the sturgeon, like sturgeon are curious. And it was like, hey, there's this thing that I can fit that in my mouth. So I'm going to try it.

And, you know, it was, if you watch the video, it's like, you know, right over the head. And then, and she swims out and, you know, gets away. It's not like, you know, this sturgeon was aggressively, like, it is very lackadaisical.

Just, I'm cruising around.

[Stuart Carlton]
Spoken like a man who's not being bitten by a sturgeon right now.

[Titus Salheimer]
Man, I would love to have that happen.

[Katie O'Reilly]
You've been chosen by the sturgeon. It is an honor.

[Titus Salheimer]
Yeah.

[Katie O'Reilly]
Well, so, okay. And Stuart, getting back to your one question, should we have sturgeon in the aquarium with mermaids? And my thought would be like, get the mermaid out of the aquarium, because the Chinese sturgeon is actually critically endangered.

So these guys are, you know, sort of found in the rivers of, like, Southeastern Asia, China. And they're, because of pollution, their numbers have basically cratered. And a lot of the reproduction that's being maintained is through hatcheries and aquariums.

So they're a species that, without having some kind of human influence in, like, helping keep their numbers up, might not still exist in the wild, were it not for places like hatcheries and aquariums. So my vote is get the mermaid out of the tank. Keep the sturgeon.

[Titus Salheimer]
Yeah. And I really, I don't want to break... Stuart's sitting down.

Stuart, mermaids aren't real. There's no such thing as mermaids. So, yeah.

So, yeah. Keep them out of those tanks. Yeah.

Agree.

[Katie O'Reilly]
Yeah. So...

[Stuart Carlton]
There are like 8 billion people, but only a few Chinese sturgeons.

[Katie O'Reilly]
Only a few Chinese sturgeons.

[Stuart Carlton]
Right.

[Carolyn Foley]
So, okay. So I had a question about, you know, let's bring it back to what's kind of our region, like the Great Lakes kind of stuff.

One of the large aquariums that we all know and love is the Shedd Aquarium. They, like, how common is it in, say, the U.S. to have people who go in with the fish? Like, I want to say I've seen people, like, cleaning the tanks maybe, but not so much, like, performing with the fish now as I did, say, when I was, like, 7 or things like that.

Is that an accurate statement? Do you know? And I know that I'm throwing this at you cold, but do you guys happen to know?

[Titus Salheimer]
I mean, I would say at least in the good freshwater aquariums where you would see a cool sturgeon, you're not going to see that. Although, you know, we do have what I enjoy, the sturgeon touch tanks at Shedd Aquarium and Discovery World in Milwaukee. Like, if you want to kind of lightly pet one, you know, that's okay.

But yeah, I think, you know, sometimes, like, I've seen scuba divers in some of those larger tanks in aquariums, but they're not, you know, it's usually not mermaid scuba divers. It's, you know, people actually doing things. So I think if the focus is more of the science, they're probably less likely to have performers.

[Katie O'Reilly]
Yeah, I would agree with that. And the one time I see, like, performers, it seems like it's more tied with that sort of utility of cleaning or feeding or something. But it does seem like there are a lot of Santa scuba divers around this time throughout zoos and aquariums.

That seems like that's still held on. But as long as Santa's doing science, he's cool. Okay, cool.

[Titus Salheimer]
He's, like, scrubbing the glass or something. Cleaning up algae.

[Katie O'Reilly]
Exactly, cleaning up algae.

[Titus Salheimer]
Putting Santa to work.

[Katie O'Reilly]
Santa needs something to do, you know, the other 364 days.

[Carolyn Foley]
Yeah, put him to work cleaning some tanks. That sounds great. So, okay, so that kind of leads us into another critical story that we needed to talk about. Where I did used to see some performers or, like, people working particularly with the mammal shows, right?

So, like, if you had dolphins or whales, beluga whales or things like that. Go ahead, Stuart.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, they still have that shed, actually. They have dolphin shows and the beluga whale is still a shed. And this is cool.

I mean, this is the challenge. This is a different episode we don't have to get into. But, you know, all these things are really neat, right?

And I used to love going to SeaWorld as a kid. It was a formative experience for me while recognizing that there was a lot that at a minimum needs to be rethought about the way we do that stuff. And probably some of it just shouldn't be done.

But that said, as Carolyn said, it's a nice transition into this story, which is more of a science story. These last two are, you know, so we give you some goofy stuff, some silly stuff to try to lure you in so that we can focus on the hardcore science.

[Titus Salheimer]
The real hard science.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah. And so this next story is more on the science side, but we appreciate you sticking with us. And that is this new study out.

River dolphins launch pea streams into the air. This is a write-up at Ars Technica, which we will put in there. And these are some researchers at the Cetacea Research Group in Ontario, Canada, doing some studies on, well, I will quote the article, 36 cases of another human-like behavior.

What appears to be some sort of cetacean pissing contest. Sandy, I don't know if you need to bleep that out or not, but here we go. We got a cetacean peeing contest.

I believe it's a scientific term if it's used in the article. It's in the article. It's not in the journal article, but it is in the write-up.

And so, yeah. O'Reilly, Katie O'Reilly, have you ever been in a cetacean pissing contest?

[Katie O'Reilly]
I cannot say I have. I mean, I think that comes with the territory of the Great Lakes. We don't have any marine mammals.

So, unfortunately, there have not been any cetacean peeing contests in my research. But it is an interesting article because like, you know, as funny of a topic as it is, it's kind of a behavior that has not been observed before in these river dolphins. And there aren't like, okay, so like, you think about things like dogs or cats, they often pee to mark their territory.

And that's a pretty common behavior on in terrestrial or like land dwelling animals. But it's not something we see, or have seen at least very often in the aquatic sphere. So this is kind of a cool, you know, leap forward, I guess, into the study of understanding pee and aquatic creatures.

[Stuart Carlton]
A critical school.

[Katie O'Reilly]
Exactly.

[Stuart Carlton]
No, this was, go ahead.

[Titus Salheimer]
Oh, yeah, I was, I just want to read the actual scientific title of the paper, which is aerial urination, okay, aerial urination suggests undescribed sensory modality and social function in river dolphins, which, you know, great work for the group of Canadian biologists who did this study. And thank you, Canada.

[Stuart Carlton]
No, that's true. But this was something they noticed they were studying the dolphins anyway, right. And they happened to notice this and wrote it up.

Carolyn, you're coming to the defense of the entire nation of Canada, it sounds like.

[Carolyn Foley]
Well, no, it was for the Canada geese. They're just for the record, they're not Canadian geese, they're Canada geese, but we can go back to dolphins for a sec. Something like, I think it's, I appreciated that Katie said that, that, you know, it seems really funny and we anthropomorphize it, which is like at our human, our human characteristics.

[Katie O'Reilly]
We're all eight years old at our core.

[Carolyn Foley]
But it's also, it is kind of a, like, genuinely, I can imagine being like the scientist who like did you see that? Like, did that really just happen? And then they see it repeated and they're like, what the heck is going on? Yeah. And, and I mean, I think that's, you know, the thrill of the scientific discovery, even if it's something goofy like that is, is a lot of fun. So I, I appreciate that we're talking about it.

[Stuart Carlton]
And there's a lot to learn, right? This might be some sort of, like, it might be a peeing contest, ha ha ha, a display of dominance, kind of like Katie was saying, or marking of territory, probably not marking of territory, I guess, in the sense that it flows away like pretty quickly. But, but it also might be some other communication is my understanding based, you know, because dolphins don't have strong smell or taste, but maybe, maybe the, the peeing, the streaming of pee into the air might, might be some other form of communication.

[Titus Salheimer]
Well, and to go to the paper, the receiver individually, individual actually actively seeks the urine stream with its rostrum. So that's what it's nose. I mean, yeah, they're, you know, they're really, I don't know, you know, guy dolphins are just like human guys, I guess.

You know, we do dumb stuff and I don't think we do this, but, uh.

[Carolyn Foley]
I was going to say, back up. back.

[Titus Salheimer]
yeah, yeah. Edit that out. Um, in fact, we'll never, we'll never do this show again.

[Stuart Carlton]
Nothing turns you into a gender essentialist.

[Katie O'Reilly]
Speaking of like kind of the, the gender, you know, in some animals, like it's used as a form of chemical communication because like, it can help a female or male understand, like if, you know, another species or another individual is getting ready to, to breed, um, it can be a display of dominance, like, you know, just in terms of the chemical, like knowing where you're at in the social hierarchy. So there's a lot of like things that again, as humans, we don't necessarily have that.

So it can be tough to understand sort of the social aspect of, um, why these behaviors like are done in order to, you know, keep a population of animals functioning together.

[Titus Salheimer]
You know, and thinking of, I guess, because they're dolphins, like, you know, there's only so it's hard to pee on somebody underwater. Right. So, uh, they really have to flip on their backs and, uh, you know, do that.

Like I just thinking about other mammals that might use urine to mark, you know, leave messages. Like you can just, you know, you're, you're a wolf or something and you, you know, leave that tag over there basically. And everyone can check it out and they know who you are and what you're doing, but yeah, it would be harder if you're in the Amazon.

So, um, just the, it's amazing what these, uh, dolphins do.

[Katie O'Reilly]
Well, and I think one of the things that was interesting, at least in the write-up was talking a little bit about how this behavior hasn't been seen in many aquatic species, but there are some fish like African cichlids that appear to use, you know, urine as a chemical, uh, communication, uh, even some, some crayfish use it, uh, to display dominance. But I wonder if it's one of those things that we just, you know, if those scientists hadn't been observing the dolphins and seeing like, oh, there's this weird thing happening. Like if we're not actively looking for it, it could be a behavior that's happening that we just haven't observed yet as scientists.

[Titus Salheimer]
I mean, what if the, what if the scientists like we're feeding the dolphins asparagus and, uh, then they're like, whoa, this is so weird. Check it out. So that could be the whole reason.

[Katie O'Reilly]
I'd like to see that in the methods section of the paper.

[Stuart Carlton]
And if indeed we do, I can promise you right now, we'll have an emergency episode of Ask Dr. Fish. Dr. Catfish, Katie O'Reilly, Dr. Fish SG, Titus Seilheimer. Where can people find you these days?

If they want to ask you about dolphin pee, killer sturgeon, or, uh.

[Katie O'Reilly]
What's spawning now?

[Stuart Carlton]
Yes.

Wait a minute. We have Dr. Fish on, we have Titus on, and we didn't ask the key question. Hold tight. Tell me Titus, who is spawning now? Tell me Titus, who is spawning now?

Titus, Dr. Fish, tracker of spawn. Tell me Titus, who is spawning now? So we are recording this in February 10th.

It's kind of cold. This will probably be released in first week of March, third week of March, something like that. I can't remember how far ahead or behind we are.

A listener inside baseball. We're starting to record more in advance. It enables us to get these done and hopefully have the podcast be regular, which it was not for the last year.

But the point is this, who's spawning now?

[Titus Salheimer]
Yeah. You know, I would, uh, I was going to throw up my, uh, my favorite, the burbot, which does spawn right now in February. But, uh, and I just ate burbot like, uh, two weeks ago.

So check it out, go to Freshwater Feasts, which is the Michigan Sea Grant blog with recipes and, and my simple, delicious burbot recipes on there. Um, but you know what I'm going to do? I am going to switch it up.

I'm going to say the bloaters, uh, bloater chubs. Um, you might know them as smoke chubs. If you've gone to a fish market, you've seen them there.

Um, bloaters, they are spawning right now. This is the time when, uh, you know, some folks will go out, the commercial fishery for them. Uh, it's a lot smaller in Lake Michigan these days, but, uh, when they do target them, uh, right now is a good time because you can get those ripe fish with the eggs.

Um, and, uh, that is actually harvested, used and sent overseas for caviar, uh, in places like Scandinavia. So, uh, the, the chub it's, uh, it's basically, you know, take a whitefish or take a Cisco, shrink it down to, you know, just like, I don't know, eight or 10 inches and, uh, you know, much smaller, but also in the Corygonus genus, uh, Hoyi is the Hoyi, Hoyi, um, is the, the scientific name Corygonus Hoyi, Hoyi. Um, and yeah, so, uh, it is, uh, they are spawning now.

So they're, you know, deep, deep cold water, 400, 400 feet deep, and they're just kind of hanging out on the bottom spawning. Um, and yeah, uh, so, uh, a pretty neat species has been important as a commercial species, uh, over the years. And actually, um, where I'm at, they've actually, uh, the local commercial fishermen with their trawl boats have actually harvested them this time of year.

And then the, uh, US Fish and Wildlife Service took those, uh, the eggs and the milt, and they, they actually did this like mini spawning. Uh, yes. Uh, and, uh, they grew those in a hatchery and they have stocked those into Lake Ontario as, uh, trying to restore these, uh, the species back to Lake Ontario.

So, uh, yeah, so, you know, important kind of winter, winter things happening, um, with the bloaters.

[Katie O'Reilly]
There we go. Yeah. And hopefully too, especially, you know, some of the species like the bloaters rely on having ice, uh, cover to help, you know, protect them as the eggs are developing.

Um, so this year has been better in the Great Lakes than we have had in the last couple of years with, with keeping, having some ice coverage. So hopefully those eggs keep nice and safe, uh, before the hatching.

[Stuart Carlton]
Perfect. And for more observations on bloater, milt or whatever, Titus, where can people go to find you these days?

[Titus Salheimer]
Uh, yeah, so I'm on blue sky at, uh, drfishsg as usual, my usual, uh, handle, or, you know, look me up at Wisconsin Sea Grant, send me an email, don't call me. I probably won't answer the phone, but I'll, you know, potentially read your email someday. And if it's something interesting and fun, I'll, I'll respond right away.

[Stuart Carlton]
There you go. So instant judgment. If you don't get a reply within about a day, your email was neither interesting nor fun.

I guess it could be either interesting or fun, but not fun.

[Katie O'Reilly]
Or spam. It could have gone to spam.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah. Or at least that's what Titus would. It could have.

[Titus Salheimer]
Yeah.

[Stuart Carlton]
Or Titus could tell.

[Titus Salheimer]
All of Stuart's emails go to spam.

[Katie O'Reilly]
So I was going to say, you have like a rule in your inbox, you know, from Stuart Carlton.

[Titus Salheimer]
I actually have a spam filter and a Stuart filter.

[Stuart Carlton]
Dr. Katie O'Reilly, where can people find you these days?

[Katie O'Reilly]
Uh, similar. So you can find me on blue sky at drcatfish, uh, and also emails, but I will probably, you know, I'll, I'll go one further than Titus and say, it probably will be, even if your email is interesting, it probably will be a while before I can get to you, but I will try.

[Stuart Carlton]
Just hit the social. That's what it's for these little interactions.

[Katie O'Reilly]
Just hit the social. It's that instant serotonin.

[Stuart Carlton]
Or don't actually write more to the point. Anyway, we'll be back soon. Probably this, I don't want to promise anything, but we want to get Ask Dr. Fish going again. Uh, it's just been a heck of a year and, uh, it's only getting heckier. Um, but in the interim, thank you so much for helping us in this emergency. It's good to know that when emergencies happen, we can still count on our two doctors fish.

[Carolyn Foley]
Teach me about the great lakes is brought to you by the fine people at Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant. We encourage you to check out the cool stuff we do at IICGrant.org and at ILINSeagrant on Facebook, Blue Sky, and other social media.

[Stuart Carlton]
Our senior producer is Carolyn the Foal Dog Foley and Teach Me About the Great Lakes is produced by Megan Lakelover-Gunn and Renie Miles. Ethan Chitty is our associate producer and our fixer. Riley Ramsey is taking care of business and our super fun podcast artwork is by Joel Davenport.

The show is edited. Unfortunately for her, it's her job, but she doesn't get paid. Not enough by Sandra Swoboda.

[Carolyn Foley]
If you have a question or comment about the show, please email it to Teach Me About the Great Lakes at gmail.com or leave a message on our smoking hot hotline at 765-496-IISG or 765-496-4474. Either way, thanks for listening and keep creating those lakes.