Monday, August 4, 2008: 5:30 PM-9:30 PM

Discovery World

FT 10 - Lake Michigan Cruise: A Look Beneath the Waves

This cruise aboard the Wisconsin’s flagship, the Denis Sullivan, a 137-foot, three-masted Great Lakes schooner, will provide a view of Lake Michigan’s western nearshore ecosystem. The cruise highlights include live video broadcast from below the water surface from an unmanned submersible (ROV) operated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s R/V Neeskay. Aboard the Denis Sullivan, participants will enjoy the video broadcast, the Milwaukee and Lake Michigan skylines, and can even do their own sampling by operating an ROV! Lake Michigan is the second largest of the Great Lakes and contains about 3% of the world’s surface freshwater. Because of its size, the organisms that inhabit the lake must tolerate physical conditions similar those in oceans. The native organisms are mainly derived from streams that were refugia during glaciation. The Great Lakes ecosystems have been vulnerable to multiple influxes of invasive species, typically of coastal marine origin. Along Lake Michigan’s western coast, this unsettled ensemble interacts on a landscape of rocks and clay left by the glaciers that carved the Laurentian Great Lakes.

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See more of The 93rd ESA Annual Meeting (August 3 -- August 8, 2008)