[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 to teach me all about the Great Lakes.

My name is Stuart Carlton. I work with Illinois Indiana Sea Grant and I'm joined today by the hose himself, Natty Morrison. Natty, how's it going?

[Natty Morrison]
It's going great. I really don't understand why that is my nickname. I don't remember.

[Stuart Carlton]
I don't either. I just had it written down. Just had it written down.

But it's not a bad nickname. There are worse nicknames.

[Natty Morrison]
It's pretty bad, man.

[Stuart Carlton]
Okay, we can go back to Big Tuna then. That's fine. Anyway, we like start every show with Ask Megan, but Megan the Lake Lover Gun is on assignment today.

She's out. She's out. She's actually teaching at a summer camp that two of my children are at.

And I've told her to say hello and I've told my kids that everybody calls her the Lake Lover. So hopefully the students at the camp or the campers at the camp are responding appropriately. But so this question will go for you.

Natty, if you were teaching at a summer camp, a Sea Grant themed summer camp, what lesson would you like to teach the campers?

[Natty Morrison]
God's Eye.

[Stuart Carlton]
God's Eye? You mean like the little yarn things?

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah, I think I could probably teach that. I mean, but so it's got to be Sea Grant focused, right?

[Stuart Carlton]
I mean, it could be Sea Grant Blue, I guess.

[Natty Morrison]
No, I can do something better. I don't know any science, so that's probably going to be a problem for me. Or I don't know.

I'm not a scientist. Right. To be clear, I'm a communicator.

So I guess it would maybe, oh, maybe like what's communications in science? Like, you know, maybe like telling ghost stories about fish.

[Stuart Carlton]
Sounds good.

[Natty Morrison]
I mean, that sounds pretty scary. A ghost story about a fish? OK, think of any urban legend, any urban legend.

[Stuart Carlton]
OK.

[Natty Morrison]
You're thinking of one?

[Stuart Carlton]
Yep.

[Natty Morrison]
Now, it was a fish.

[Stuart Carlton]
You know what? Not bad. I'm thinking of one where you wake up in a bathtub full of ice.

Oh, that's so good. That's perfect. And your kidney or whatever has been removed and it's like a call 9-1-1 thing, right?

But in the bathtub is one of these fish that have antifreeze in their blood.

[Natty Morrison]
Oh, I was thinking that it's like kind of like a gangster fish that's standing over you.

[Stuart Carlton]
Oh, with a little Tommy gun.

[Natty Morrison]
And it's that's now that right there, that image. That's a New Yorker cartoon, if I've ever heard one. Oh, my God.

It's a guy in a bathtub. He's waking up. Through the window, you can see there's a moon.

So, you know, it's nighttime. Because I assume that organ harvesting happens at night.

[Stuart Carlton]
I mean, it strikes me as an evening activity.

[Natty Morrison]
It's nobody's doing it at, you know, 2 p.m. on a Wednesday. And then there's, you know, a caption. Now, what would that caption be for our listeners?

[Stuart Carlton]
The universal New Yorker caption, which Sandy will now edit out, is a... That's really good. It works on like everyone, including that one.

[Natty Morrison]
Great.

[Stuart Carlton]
I don't know. Listeners, why don't you send us in a caption about the Great Lakes?

[Natty Morrison]
Again, it's a guy in a bathtub waking up. He's got a little scar on his belly where his kidney or whatever organ was. He's looking around.

There's like, imagine a fish in a trench coat with kind of like a, you know, gangster fedora. Gangster pork pie hat, whatever the hat is.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, a little Tommy gun.

[Natty Morrison]
It's nighttime.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yep. And what's the caption?

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah, somebody speaking. What's the caption?

[Stuart Carlton]
What's the caption?

Probably a carp pun. Anyway, let me know. I said I wanted a sturgeon, not a surgeon.

[Natty Morrison]
Damn it! I said sturgeon.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, I said sturgeon. That's pretty solid.

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah, that's pretty good.

[Stuart Carlton]
Anyway, but teach me about the Great Lakes, gmail.com. If we go all in with I said sturgeon, what do you got? Anyway, speaking of scary fish, our guest today, our guest today looked at some really old fish samples that probably had a bit of a scary stench to them to find out some really interesting news about PFAS.

And so I'm excited to have this conversation. But before we go to it, you know what she did?

[Natty Morrison]
What?

[Stuart Carlton]
Research. Which means... Researcher feature, a feature in which a researcher gonna teach us about the Great Lakes.

Everybody's favorite. Our guest today is Sarah Balgooyen. She works for PFAS at Mines at the Colorado School of Mines and is lead author on a recent paper that caught my attention called Historical PFAS Trends in the Great Lakes Using Four Decades of Archived Fish.

That's a lot of archived fish. Sarah, welcome to the show.

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Thank you. Great to be here.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, we're so happy to have you. All right, let's talk big picture first. Oh, this is something we started doing.

I should have thought of this in advance. Oh, well, because what we've learned is there's a listenership curve to the show, which is people start listening to the show. And then for every minute, the listenership declines just a little bit because people are commuting.

They park their car. They get out, and then they want to put on NPR Joe Rogan or what have you.

[Natty Morrison]
The NPR Joe Rogan.

[Stuart Carlton]
The NPR Joe Rogan podcast.

[Natty Morrison]
It's the NPR version of Joe Rogan.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, yeah, yeah, or whatever. Anyway, and so for example, I'm so sorry about this, Sarah. I've cost you dozens of listeners right now by explaining what I'm about to ask you to do, which is to, so in one minute or less, give us the big picture version of your paper, and then we'll go from there.

Does that work?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Okay.

[Stuart Carlton]
All right. And if I had a little stopwatch timer, I'd put that on because it'd be like a fun game, but I don't. So just pretend that I have one going.

[Sarah Balgooyen]
All right. All right. So yeah, this paper looked at four decades of archived fish.

So fish that we dug out of a freezer, and we looked for PFAS in them. They hadn't been, you know, PFAS is kind of a newer thing that we weren't looking at it in the 70s and 80s. So we hadn't seen historical trends before.

But what we saw is that PFAS increased until about 2005-ish and then started to decrease. And that's likely a result of the different industrial trends that we have been moving toward. So exciting to see.

[Stuart Carlton]
That is exciting. So let's start with that. So they actually, so you got these fish and you looked at PFAS and found that it was decreasing.

First of all, how did you find that? How did you measure the contaminants in the fish? And then what was your reaction when you saw that it was decreasing?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Yeah. So how we measured it was we actually developed a method for analyzing or extracting PFAS from the fish. But basically they were in a freezer.

We freeze dried them. So took out all the water. So it's just dried up little fish.

Looks like crunchy peanut butter or something. And we extracted using solvents to extract the PFAS away and then analyze them on an LCMS, liquid chromatography mass spectrometry.

[Stuart Carlton]
Sure.

[Natty Morrison]
The old LCMS.

[Stuart Carlton]
The old LCMS, I call it like a jello jiggler.

[Natty Morrison]
It's like jello jigglers.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah. What is an LCMS?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
So an LCMS is an instrument that separates, you can look at a bunch of different chemicals on there. And the first step is it separates them out. So you can kind of look at one at a time.

And then the mass spec part is the one that looks at the exact mass and tells you what compound you're looking at. So if we are looking at PFOS or PFOA, it can take that exact mass and say, yes, this is the compound that you were looking for.

[Stuart Carlton]
I see. And so you can look for different types of these PFAS. We sort of introduced that.

These are the forever chemicals that people are talking about a lot lately. Come from a lot of times things like your fire flame retardant things, water resistant things, nonstick coatings, Gore-Tex, that kind of stuff. And so when you saw that, were you expecting to find that it had decreased or what were you expecting to see?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
So we were expecting somewhat of a decrease because we know that. So first of all, I should also say that we're looking for bioaccumulative PFAS, not just all of them, because we're only going to see the bioaccumulative ones, the ones that build up in the body, the tissue. So some of the ones that don't accumulate, we're not really seen in this study and we're not really talking about those ones.

But because industry has phased out a lot of those bioaccumulative compounds, we were expecting to see somewhat of a decrease. I was surprised at how quickly it was decreasing and how fast that response happened. These compounds started getting phased out in about 2002 and it was a stepwise phase out, but it happened almost immediately.

It started decreasing in like 2005. So that part to me was surprising at how quickly the environment was responding.

[Natty Morrison]
Do you think that this seems very significant? Would you say this is like rare, good environmental news? What was your reaction to that?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Yeah, totally. I mean, we don't get a lot of good news these days. So we were really excited to publish this paper because most of the papers I've published are like, well, PFAS is in that too.

Sorry. But this was a good one. There's a few caveats.

These are forever chemicals. They're not necessarily going away. They're kind of just getting diluted out into the oceans.

But to me, the good news was, yeah, what I was saying, the ecosystem is responding readily. And if we make those industrial changes that we've been working toward, the ecosystem will respond. We're not stuck with this forever.

We can make changes. So inspiring in that sense.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. But so that is a good point.

So I've never really thought about this. I call them forever chemicals. And that's a catchy name.

I'm in sort of a terrifying, uninspiring kind of way. But does that mean that they literally don't ever go away? Like forever, is that literal?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
So for many of these, there's no natural degradation process. So if humans were not to intervene, yeah, they would pretty much not go away. Um, that being said, there's many different PFAS compounds.

Some of them do degrade, but they degrade into other PFAS.

[Stuart Carlton]
Oh, that's nice. I see.

[Sarah Balgooyen]
So in that way, they are forever. But luckily, we do have some destructive technologies that can destroy PFAS. It's difficult for something in the Great Lakes that would take forever to try and concentrate the PFAS and then send it to a destructive technology.

But we can do things like for concentrated waste streams, we can definitely treat PFAS. And people are certainly working toward that, as well as, like I was saying, concentration steps to try and from a more dilute source to try and concentrate the PFAS and send it to a destructive technology.

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah, that's something I've always wondered about that concept of forever chemicals is that because a lot of these chemicals probably have only existed maybe over the last, I'm just making a guess here, but maybe a hundred years or something like that. Or so the idea of them being labeled as a forever chemical, like I've always wondered, is there a way to scientifically confirm this is infinite and will never go away? Or is it like, you know, it's like, oh, this is taking forever.

Like they're making a generalization when they say that, right?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Well, I see what you're saying, but there's like, I mean, there have been so many tests to try and destroy these chemicals. And a lot of the techniques that they're trying to use, they don't work. So even when we're trying to get rid of them, they're not going away.

And I think it goes back to, you know, the way that PFAS was invented was when they were trying to research new refrigerants and this white coating coated the canister that they were using. And it was recorded in the person's notes that a white substance was generated that could not be eradicated. So they could not get rid of that and wasn't good for refrigerants, but they then sent it to the Manhattan Project and it was then used in atomic bombs.

Everything else would be corroded. And yet this early development of PTFE Teflon, that was what was used in the atomic bombs as gaskets and yeah, different components that could withstand that kind of that environment.

[Stuart Carlton]
You mean the atomic bomb explosion environment or maybe not the explosion, but the atomic bomb creation environment?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Um, yeah, just, you know, the different things that they're using in these weapons. There's a lot of corrosive material. I had no idea.

[Natty Morrison]
No, no. And it says a lot about mankind that their first thought was like, hey, this white substance won't go away. And they're like, we should use it for a weapon, right?

Like we should use it for the most powerful, terrible weapon that we could come up with. And they're like, ship it off.

[Stuart Carlton]
Totally.

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah, yeah. Stop drilling. You've hit oil.

[Stuart Carlton]
Anyway, it's interesting when I'm the one to return us to center here. It's a different dynamic than I'm used to, but that's fine. So one thing I thought was interesting.

So we get some qualified good news, right? One of the qualifications is it's still out in the Gulf or in the oceans rather. But it is diluted, right?

Poison control tells you to dilute, dilute, dilute. That's something. But different lakes had kind of different trajectories, right?

Lake Erie peaked around 2005, but Lake Michigan was a little bit later. Do you have any ideas why that might be?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Yeah, so that part was really interesting to see. There's a few things going on with the different lake dynamics. So the lakes themselves are pretty different in terms of how big they are.

That's a big part of it. So Lake Superior is huge and Lake Erie is the smallest one. And so that affects how quickly the water turns over in those lakes.

Lake Superior turns over, so replaces all its water every 173 years, whereas Erie is about 2.7 years. So that's a big part of it is how quickly that water turns over. Another big part is what kind of industry and human activity are around each of the lakes.

Lake Erie is very historically industrial, whereas Lake Superior doesn't have as much. And so that drives what kind of sources they have. So Lake Superior, actually, a lot of that PFAS comes from atmospheric deposition.

Yeah, and so they're all receiving atmospheric deposition, of course, but the fingerprint of Lake Superior is going to look very different from Erie just because of that source distribution. It looks very different.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, nearly the industry and everything around there. That makes sense. But so then this stuff, when it flows out to the ocean, is it going through the lakes then, right?

So it starts in Superior and works its way through Michigan and Huron and Erie and Ontario and then out into the St. Lawrence Seaway or whatever. Is that how it gets out there? Is it through there?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Yeah, generally through the St. Lawrence Seaway. And, you know, right now we still see way lower PFAS concentrations in the ocean and in marine fish species. But, you know, it's something to think about that.

Yeah, they're not really going away. They are just getting diluted. So it's kind of a short-term solution, maybe.

But that aspect, we shouldn't count on that to always be there for us because, you know, once PFAS is everywhere, then, yeah, it's not going to be the same process.

[Stuart Carlton]
It's everywhere forever.

[Natty Morrison]
Indeed.

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Yeah.

[Stuart Carlton]
Indeed. Hey, when we come back, Sarah's going to tell us about some of the nerdy technical details. All right, let's do it.

How you do this work. First, we're going to take a quick break. Welcome back to Teach Me About the Great Lakes, an exactly twice-monthly podcast in which we get smart people to teach us things that, honestly, we probably should have known.

[Natty Morrison]
Oh, every day I'm like, well, I just revealed myself to be the dumbest person on this call.

[Stuart Carlton]
I think that a lot, too.

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah.

[Stuart Carlton]
About you. All right. Anyway, our guest today is Sarah Bogoyian with PFAS at Mines, the Colorado School of Mines.

It turns out our go-to place for Teach Me About the Great Lakes guests. Home of Hall of Famer. Is he a Hall of Famer?

I can't remember. You know what, Eric, if you were not prior to this to Hall of Famer, you're now a Teach Me About the Great Lakes Hall of Famer.

[Natty Morrison]
Hanging the jersey up in the rafters.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yep, Eric Anderson, a little lab coat up there. Actually, no, these days it's a computer keyboard. Anyway, she's going to tell us about this study she did where they looked at 45 years, I think, of PFAS data in fish.

How did you get samples all the way back from like 1975? That's before I was born. How do you get a 50-year-old piece of lake trout?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Yeah, it's also before I was born. No, it's all from the EPA Great Lakes National Program Office. They have a program called the Great Lakes Fish Monitoring and Surveillance Program.

This program collects fish every year from the Great Lakes. They have two sites per year. It's very standardized, so they collect the same size fish from the same locations every year.

They generally send those to a lab for monitoring, but they also had the foresight to archive all of these fish in case this exact thing happens, where we had a contaminant that we were making, but we didn't realize it was harmful until later. It served us very well in this case.

[Stuart Carlton]
What is this? Hold on. I want to hear more about this fish archive.

Is it like a literal freezer filled with dead fish, like whole fish or is it mussel samples or what?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
They are whole fish, but they're ground up. They're homogenized. They actually put five whole fish into a blender, essentially, blend it up, and then they can take different subsamples of that to use.

[Natty Morrison]
The bass-a-matic.

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Yeah, it is bass-a-matic. They can use different subsamples for different projects and different chemicals.

[Stuart Carlton]
How much mass do you get out of five fish? Is it like in Ziploc bags?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
They're in little jars. You can get a lot, for sure, because these are lake trout or walleye. They're big, so it's a lot, but they're very stingy with how much they give to a study.

[Stuart Carlton]
Because they want that for as long as possible.

[Sarah Balgooyen]
It's very valuable to have that level of detail in the historical trends.

[Stuart Carlton]
Interesting. If I were to make jello jigglers, though, could I get just a little slice off of one bit, do you think, to put in there?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Oh, you wouldn't like it. It's not fun to work with.

[Stuart Carlton]
Is there an odor situation?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Oh, how does 40-year-old fish smell? Oh, it doesn't smell good, but once we dry it, it's not so bad.

[Natty Morrison]
Does it still have the fish smell, though?

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah.

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Oh, totally.

[Natty Morrison]
Boy, that sticks around. That's the real forever chemical. It's the fish scent.

[Stuart Carlton]
You could put it in a little tin can and drink the water out of it. That would be good.

[Natty Morrison]
I'll never live that down.

[Stuart Carlton]
No, you won't. Anyway, no, that's amazing. So the real value here, one lesson that I've learned over and over on this show, or this episode, 128, is the value of these really long-term data sets.

And normally, when I'm thinking about that, I'm thinking about numbers. And this is often collected by federal and state government as monitoring programs. Because academics, like me, are very project-oriented, right?

You get some funding, and you go do whatever that funding is for. And about 15 minutes into receiving that funding, you're already looking for the next funding. And other people in your lab are continuing to do that.

And it's just not a very long-term thing. But these federal government data sources are just critical. But I never thought about the actual samples and retaining those and how valuable that is now and, I mean, potentially very far into the future.

But is there concern with using old fish that the chemicals won't get preserved, necessarily? I mean, I know they're forever chemicals, but they need to be in the right place for you to be able to detect them, I would assume.

[Sarah Balgooyen]
No, it's true. We did have this concern also when we were starting this study. Yes, they are forever, but they're not going to forever stay in the same place.

So there's some PFAS that are volatile. So actually, freeze drying, it could lead to some loss of volatile compounds. But really, the ones that we're looking for in fish, that build up in fish, they're not the volatile ones.

We did a study to kind of prove that our whole preservation process didn't introduce anything or lose anything. That is the other concern too, is that now when we collect samples, we don't use Teflon because we know it can impact our PFAS measurements. But before, Teflon was the gold standard.

Teflon's great for looking at metals or different things. So yeah, making sure the lab equipment didn't introduce any new contaminants.

[Stuart Carlton]
I know that's been a problem with microplastics, right? They've been trying to figure out with a lot of the microplastics work. I want to be clear.

Nobody's saying that it means microplastics are not a problem, but it means we need to be thinking about people transmitting accidentally microplastics into their samples and things like that, from things like gloves, other parts of the environment. It makes the analysis really complicated, I think. And so you were concerned about that with PFAS too.

Was that a hum like you were going to chime in?

[Natty Morrison]
No. No.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah.

Anyway.

[Natty Morrison]
Well, actually, I guess I can ask a question. So when you're using these 1970, 50-year-old pieces of lake trout or walleye, can those samples then be reused at a later date?

Or is it like a one-time use thing when you're using it for sampling? Can they be used in other experiments and other studies?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
So the ones that we processed, no. But we tried to get the smallest amount of sample possible. So it was only two grams.

So yeah, we tried to be very conservative with how much fish tissue that we used in this.

[Natty Morrison]
I see. It's like you're cutting off a hunk of it, like a small hunk of it, and then using that. And then that's what you're testing.

I see. Okay.

[Stuart Carlton]
Gotcha. Yeah. So they still have all the other grams.

If it's two, they probably have a hundred. They have several hundred grams, I hope. Maybe a couple of these old fish.

So that when we can find out what the future PFAS 2000, or whatever they call the next round of these.

[Natty Morrison]
PFAS 2K.

[Stuart Carlton]
2K.

[Natty Morrison]
3K.

[Stuart Carlton]
3K. They'll be able to study that too.

Super. But so then the big picture then from what I'm hearing is, first of all, what an amazing data source. It's not a data set because you have to find...

Well, now you have a data set. And you're able to publish like a verification of your study methods, which hopefully people will use. Because I imagine it's not just at the Glenpo office where they have a bunch of fish in a freezer, right?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Totally. Hoping museums and other places can use this as well, knowing that that preservation method works for PFAS anyway.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah. Is it just... All right.

Side note. Sorry. Is it just the freeze drying?

So back in my senior honors thesis and my master's degree a long time ago, I worked with fish that had preserved in alcohol or formalin or something like that. Which is a lot of... Oh, I'd forgotten about that odor.

Anyway, formalin has a real particular odor. It's good. You feel the cancer growing in you as you sniff it.

It's kind of nice though. But anyway, would you expect stuff like that to be usable way down the line as well? Or is there something about those that make it less suitable?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
So I just talked to someone from a museum who asked me the same thing. And I asked her what solvent it was stored in. And she said, I don't know what it's called, but if I smelled it, I could identify.

But no, I was wondering the same thing because I'm thinking also like the solvent, that's what we use to extract PFAS. So at this point, if it was stored in some sort of solvent, the PFAS may have already come out of the fish and be in that liquid. But I'm like, well, we can maybe use the liquid in the fish.

So I really would love to work with her and see if that's possible.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, but there's some cool basic research that needs to be done right before you do the contaminants related research. What a cool thing. All right.

So I'm going to try to summarize your paper and you're going to tell me what I got wrong. All right, here we go. So number one, we have this cool data set or data that we're able to gather from fish from 1975, which is alarmingly close to when I was born, but before I was born.

I don't think that made it into your particular paper. But anyway, and so from that, you're able to chop off little bits and then grind it up or they're already ground up in the bass-a-matic. We are going to chop up little bits and do some LCMS, your Lickham's protocol, to look in there and analyze it for PFAS.

And what you found was that when we started regulating PFAS, very shortly thereafter, just a few years, which was surprisingly quick in your mind, that PFAS had flushed out of the fish supply into the greater ocean where it's not gone, but it is diluted. And so this shows a few things. One, that policy can work on a surprisingly short scale.

Now, from a human perspective, it's, you know, you're still talking years and years and years and years. But future generations maybe won't have to worry as much about this particular set of PFAS. One, it started to disappear over a number of years.

And yeah, so it started to disappear more quickly than you thought it would, which is good. It means the policy works. It means that the water is getting cleaner, at least for those contaminants.

And all of which is good. Now, that said, there are some caveats. Caveat number one, there's only so many things you can measure for.

There are many other forever chemicals that we don't necessarily know. We might be able to assume that they're also being flushed out, but we don't know. And two, whenever PFAS 3000 comes out, we find new things we don't know about them as well.

But a little bit of qualified good news. It tells you maybe policy stuff and technological changes can work. Is that a fair summary?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Yeah, totally. Can I add something?

[Stuart Carlton]
Please.

[Sarah Balgooyen]
So as you were talking, I just remembered that I hadn't really talked about this yet.

But yeah, so you're saying the water cycles through. And so we know PFAS is not in the water as much anymore. And the surprising thing to me was like, PFAS stays in the human body for a long time.

I don't know how long it is, but it's years. And for fish, we know that the depuration rate, so the rate at which they can excrete the PFAS is much faster. And so I think that's part of what leads to that.

It can be on the order of days to weeks, which is really great because fish is a major source of human exposure to PFAS. So consuming fish can, you know, fish have a lot of PFAS in them. So this is also really good for anglers knowing that we can kind of recoup the fish population.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, yeah. Well, this is fascinating, Sarah. It's so interesting to hear about the work that you're doing or the work that you did do and now what you're doing at Mines.

But that's actually not why we invited you here on Teach Me About the Great Lakes this week. The reason that we invited you to teach me about the Great Lakes is to ask you two questions. The first one is this, if you could choose to have a great donut for breakfast or a great sandwich for lunch, which one would you choose?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
That's so hard because I love donuts, but I think all donuts are good. And so I think I'm going to say having a really great sandwich because there's a bigger difference in like a good sandwich versus a bad sandwich.

[Stuart Carlton]
You know what?

[Natty Morrison]
That's a very, very, very astute answer.

[Stuart Carlton]
We've gotten like well over 100 of those answers. And I don't think the relative value of that's, well, that's smart. That's smart.

Love it. All right. Well, I'm going to come to the Colorado School of Mines to talk with you and Eric Anderson about Lake Ice and PFAS and stuff.

And then when I do that, I'm going to want to get a sandwich in the city where the Colorado School of Mines is.

[Natty Morrison]
Golden.

[Stuart Carlton]
Is it in Golden?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
It is in Golden.

[Stuart Carlton]
There we go.

Nathaniel Morrison.

[Natty Morrison]
I used to live in Colorado.

[Stuart Carlton]
There we go.

Well, so did I for one summer. But I didn't go to Golden.

[Natty Morrison]
I lived there for two summers.

[Stuart Carlton]
Well, it's that second summer where they teach you about Golden. Anyway, so where am I going to go in Golden? I feel like I was just making the same stupid comment with Eric a few months ago.

I'm going to go to Coors Beer, right? At Golden, Colorado. And I'm going to want to drink that beer with a delicious sandwich.

Where should I go for this delicious sandwich?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Okay. It depends on if you consider a burger a sandwich or not. But I want to tell you about like probably the best place in Golden.

It's Bob's Atomic Burgers. And it's right across from the Coors Factory Brewery.

[Stuart Carlton]
Very convenient for Stewart.

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Very convenient. Yeah.

[Stuart Carlton]
All right. And so when I go to Bob's Atomic Burger, do I just get a normal burger there?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Yeah. I mean, you can do anything. It's like the one where you fill out the whole sheet with what you want.

[Stuart Carlton]
Oh, yeah. And take a little quiz.

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Yeah, yeah. Totally. You got to pass.

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah. It's like a Scantron.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yes.

You got a Scantron in your burger.

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah.

[Stuart Carlton]
That's not bad.

Not bad. Last time I was in Colorado, I had Elk Burger, which was pretty good. But the orange tasted a little crunchy.

Anyway.

[Natty Morrison]
Great. I mean, I'm not giving you a pity laugh for that at all. I did a pity laugh.

[Stuart Carlton]
Would you like to ask?

[Natty Morrison]
Actually, I'll give it to you anyway.

[Stuart Carlton]
Sorry. The reason I pointed it to you is so you could ask the second question.

[Natty Morrison]
Oh, my bad. Okay. Question number two.

What is a special place in the Great Lakes that you'd like to share with our audience? And what makes it so special?

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Okay. Well, to me, when I think of the Great Lakes, the place that I think of is Warren Dunes in Michigan.

[Natty Morrison]
That's a good answer.

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Yeah. Just that southwest little tip of Michigan. I went there growing up, and it was just like such a fun time when I was young.

And then once I moved, I'm from Michigan, but once I moved to Wisconsin, that was Warren Dunes was my breaking point. It was halfway through my way driving back home.

[Stuart Carlton]
Oh, nice.

[Sarah Balgooyen]
So it's like the Michigan rest stops are the best stops.

[Stuart Carlton]
I had no idea.

[Natty Morrison]
Pure Michigan.

[Stuart Carlton]
Pure Michigan.

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Yeah, pure Michigan.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yes.

Excellent. Well, Sarah Balgoyan with PFAS at Mines, thank you so much for coming on and teaching us about this cool paper and really all about the Great Lakes.

[Sarah Balgooyen]
Yeah. Thank you for having me. It was fun.

[Stuart Carlton]
What a fascinating study.

[Natty Morrison]
Unbelievable. I mean, believable.

I'm sorry. You shouldn't say unbelievable about science. I realize that.

Fantastic.

[Stuart Carlton]
There we go.

[Natty Morrison]
That's a better adjective.

[Stuart Carlton]
It was a nice study. So we'd like to wrap this up. What is one thing you learned about the Great Lakes this week, Natty?

[Natty Morrison]
Well, I learned all about freeze dried fish. It's interesting that they've, you know, the Great Lakes Fish Monitoring and Surveillance Program is something that has been around since 1975.

[Stuart Carlton]
Longer.

[Natty Morrison]
Longer even than that.

[Stuart Carlton]
I don't know. Well, probably not because that's when the earliest fish were.

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah. Yeah. And the fact that they were, when the earliest fish were, is that what you said?

Yeah, it was Ford. Ford was the one who came to the Ford administration and debuted fish.

[Stuart Carlton]
No, I meant the fish they had in their collection.

[Natty Morrison]
Ah, I see.

[Stuart Carlton]
No, no, I got that.

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah, but that...

[Stuart Carlton]
It was Henry Ford who debuted fish.

[Natty Morrison]
Yeah, he's like, eat this and build my cars.

[Stuart Carlton]
Yeah, an assembly line. One person put on the eyes.

[Natty Morrison]
Well, they made the... That was when the Ford plant originally, before cars, made those billy mouth basses. Bass that would come off the wall and sing like...

[Stuart Carlton]
Take me to the river.

[Natty Morrison]
Take me to the river. Or sometimes I feel like it would also sing like a Huey Lewis in the News song.

[Stuart Carlton]
Maybe.

[Natty Morrison]
I may have dreamed that. Anyway, the historical preservation of these fish and what they can do with them. I think that's great.

[Stuart Carlton]
That is cool. The thing I learned is a headline that the PFAS levels was declining for those fish. Now, just a few fish I looked at, these piscivores (pie-scevores), or as Titus says, piscivores (piss-scevores), which sounds a little dirty to me.

But regardless, interesting to see that it's declining so quickly. Although quickly still means the rest of my lifetime. But I got kids.

Maybe they'll have kids someday too.

[Natty Morrison]
That's true.

[Stuart Carlton]
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 work that we do at iiseagrant.org and at ILIN Sea Grant on Facebook, Blue Sky, YouTube, and other social media. You want to do the second paragraph?

[Natty Morrison]
Our senior producer is Carolyn Foley. And Teach Me About the Great Lakes is produced by Megan, Lake Lever Gunn, Rene Miles, and Natty the Hose Morrison.

[Stuart Carlton]
Why does it say that?

[Natty Morrison]
I don't know. Ethan Chitty is our associate producer and fixer. And our coordinating producer is Ava Hale.

Our super fun podcast artwork is by Joel Davenport. The show is edited by Sandra Svoboda.

[Stuart Carlton]
If you have a question or comment about the show, send us an email. teachmeaboutthegreatlakes at gmail.com, gmail.com. Leave us a message on our hotline.

76-5496-IISG. That's 765-496-4474. Maybe go ahead and send us a postcard.

That's 195 Marsteller Street, West Lafayette, Indiana, 47907. Go ahead and send us a postcard. We do get those periodically.

[Natty Morrison]
We love postcards.

[Stuart Carlton]
We do love postcards. Anyway, thank you so much for listening. And keep grating those lakes.

So when you make a jello, you can make it whatever it takes the shape of your painting.

[Natty Morrison]
Okay, so this is just a more jiggly jello.

[Stuart Carlton]
I guess.

[Natty Morrison]
Jello jigglers sounds like it's like there's jello and then this is a jiggler.