EEOB faculty members and AEL cohorts Roy Stein and Libby Marschall enjoy a brief lull in their hectic routines. (Note wall art: "Fish with Sea Lamprey Firmly Attached.")

Here in the heart of Ohio, we tend to forget that we are not a land-locked state. Researchers in the Aquatic Ecology Laboratory (AEL) never forget. Lake Erie, as well as rivers, streams and reservoirs, beckon Professors Roy Stein and Libby Marschall, their graduate and undergraduate students and postdocs to "sample" the waters.

Spring and early summer are busy times as students and techs grab waders, sign out trucks, boats and sampling equipment and head out on the water. The AEL hosts a fleet of water vehicles, including two electrofishing boats, two Boston Whalers, and five reservoir boats for field research.

The AEL with Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology (EEOB) Professor Roy Stein as its head and EEOB as its administrative home, became an official entity in 1991. Located in the Research Center at 1314 Kinnear Rd., it occupies both indoor and outdoor space on the grounds. In a maze containing virtually every necessity for leading-edge research in aquatic ecology, one wanders through dry and wet labs and a wooded outdoor pool facility with 52 experimental pools, complete with water supply, drains, air and electricity. "Built with Division of Wildlife support and expertise, this outdoor facility allows us to design and fully replicate experiments with fishes at a meaningful scale, even through the winter," Stein points out.

The well-equipped wet laboratory contains multiple rooms within a room, including four walk-in environmental control rooms, three aquarium rooms, three experimental pools, six living streams, and a riffle-pool recirculating stream tank-but no turtle doves. After struggling to service these facilities with treated well water over the years, Stein and Marschall recently made the switch to dechlorinated city water. "Now we have a dependable, stable water source that rarely gives us any headaches-this was a smart move," says Stein..."one we should have made years ago," he comments under his breath.

In the dry laboratory, students and techs analyze samples from a variety of aquatic ecosystems, processing samples for zooplankton, macroinvertebrates, and larval and adult fish. A dizzying array of dissecting scopes and microscopes, computers, drying ovens, bomb calorimeters, electronic balances, and other lab supplies vie for floor, wall and ceiling space. Stein reflects, "As the AEL has grown, we have been forced to more efficiently use every square foot of lab space."

Equipment rooms have everything needed for sampling, from seines to plankton nets to VanDorn bottles, while walk-in freezer and refrigerator provide long-term storage for samples. "This eliminates the need for carcinogenic preservatives such as Formalin," explains Stein. Demonstrating an innovative spirit, the AEL has created extra storage space where none previously existed, building "second-floor" lofts to supplement existing storage and special equipment areas. One such room boasts a wader drying rack-one of Stein's most prized possessions-"Just try drying chest-high waders without it!" he laughs.

More than just a lab, the AEL is a community of students, faculty and staff, committed to educational opportunities for its members and to promoting community involvement in aquatic ecology.

It is not hard to get lost inside the Research Center. In its warren, the AEL occupies 16 offices, including six for faculty and staff, and wherever you go, there are fish-in some form or another. Researchers can hole up in their own small library with journals, books, reprints, dissertations, maps, reports and catalogues, order in a pizza, and forget traffic and parking problems on main campus.

Projects in progress are usually a balance between basic and applied research with one essential goal: to understand community structure and dynamics in aquatic systems, concentrating on fishes. By understanding intra-and inter-specific interactions among species, researchers hope to determine why and how particular species persist in aquatic communities. This helps them begin to answer critical questions in ecology: How do communities of species develop and persist? How can we explain the dynamics of population size and structure? How do actions of humans affect fish populations & communities?

AEL researchers pursue answers to these questions in a variety of settings, from laboratory aquaria to small hatchery ponds to large reservoirs and Lake Erie; from natural lakes, streams and impoundments to the Great Lakes, and even the coral reefs of Hawaii.

The strength of the program revolves around basic ecology e.g., optimal foraging, resource partitioning, and bioenergetics modeling to answer questions in conservation and fishery biology. Through the use of manipulative experiments in the field and laboratory, analysis of long-term agency data sets, surveys of field patterns, and development of mathematical and computer models, AEL researchers hope to contribute to an understanding of how aquatic populations and communities operate and to the development of solid principles upon which fisheries and conservation science can be based.

Libby Marschall with student Geoff Steinhart

Current projects of Stein, Marschall, entomologist Susan Fisher, and their students include population dynamics of coral reef fish; modeling smallmouth bass/ round goby consumption in Lake Erie; food web impacts on PCB bioavailability; exploring ecological mechanisms underlying recruitment of smallmouth bass in Lake Erie; a coupled hydraulic-ecosystem model to evaluate habitat and wildlife restoration in rivers, focusing on dam operations and removal; quantifying predatory interaction between stocked saugeye and prey fishes in Ohio reservoirs; and trophic transfer of heavy metals to top predators.

More than just a lab, the AEL is a community of students, faculty and staff, committed to educational opportunities for its members and to promoting community involvement in aquatic ecology. AEL Education outreach programs hosts school groups from first through 12th grade. Tours and hands-on demonstrations of equipment, aquatic organisms, and laboratory procedures of aquatic sampling introduce young people to aquatic research. Periodically, the AEL hosts high school student interns from Columbus area high schools, who visit the lab weekly to conduct experiments and gain experience in aquatic field work.

AEL research is funded by grants from the Ohio Division of Wildlife (via Federal Aid in Sport Fish Restoration), The Great Lakes Fishery Commission (via Federal Aid in Sport Fish Restoration), NSF, Ohio Sea Grant, and the Lake Erie Protection Fund.

"Without the generous funding from state and federal agencies, as well as EEOB and the College of Biological Sciences, our program would fade into oblivion," states Stein. "Ecological research, critical to resource stewardship, can only be accomplished with the support of these entities."

-S.R.

Surrounded by students-fish on the wall. (l to r) Gene Kim, Roy Stein, LeAnn Southward, Samantha Fedor, John Sieber-Denlinger