[Tom Zinnen, Outreach Specialist, Biotechnology Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen. I work here at the U.W.-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for U.W-Extension Cooperative Extension. Tonight, I’m delighted to introduce to you Tim Campbell of U.W.-Extension.

He was born in Iowa City, Iowa, grew up in West Liberty, Iowa, went to Notre Dame University and got his master’s degree at Oakland University in Michigan. He came here to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then to U.W.-Extension about five years ago. He’s going to talk to us about 26 years on, how – how Wisconsin manages the impacts of the zebra mussel.

I first heard about invasive species from my high school ag teacher, Al Tieken. He also introduced me to the land grant university of the state I grew up in, which is Illinois. And he took to the University of Illinois in October of 1971. I basically have a job or the job – the reason I like this job so much is because it’s a public land grant research university and I first got a whiff of that at the University of Illinois long ago.

Mr. Tieken was also my F.F.A. advisor and took me up to the Boundary Waters in July 1975. That was the first time I ever saw a Salty, a Salt, an ocean-going ship. This was in the port at Superior, and it was in the ballast waters of those types of ships that zebra mussels and quagga mussels first came in.

The irony is, and the sad news is, Mr. Tieken died this morning. And so, I would like to acknowledge his influence, not only on me but one of the reasons we have Wednesday Nite @ the Lab is because of ag teachers like my ag teacher, Mr. Tieken. There are about 300 ag teachers in Wisconsin. They’re jewels and gems of their communities, and they carry on the work of teaching stewardship of lands and our soils and our waters. They help advance the mission of the land grant and the sea grant universities, including this one. And, tonight, we get to hear how that kind of work and stewardship continues to go and grow. Please join me in welcoming Tim Campbell to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.

[applause]

[Tim Campbell, Aquatic Invasive Species Specialist, Environmental Resource Center, University of Wisconsin-Extension]

Awesome. Thanks, everyone, for coming out tonight. I can’t think of a better way to spend a Wednesday night. I’ve always seen Wednesday Nite @ the Lab, popped in once or twice, and I was like it’d be cool to speak at Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. Here I am. So, hopefully my presentation is interesting, informative, but hopefully entertaining. Sometimes I think we talk a lot about invasive species, and it can be kind of depressing and a bummer. But we’re doing a lot of really interesting work. It’s an interesting story, and I hope to convey that to you guys. And if you came here tonight hoping to get profiles of all the different invasive species, I’d be happy to do that afterward.

[laughter]

But that’s all information very readily available in fact sheets on the internet, and I have a little bit of that here, but hopefully I’m telling more of the story and what we’re doing here at the University of Wisconsin and across the region to manage the impacts of aquatic invasive species. I’ll get into the logo farm here in a second. But, you know, in addition to everything I just talked about, I think, you know, beginning of the presentation I’d like to talk a little bit about, you know, where we’ve been and what happened to get us, you know, –

[side titled – Where Have We Been? What Happened to Get Us Here? – featuring the title of the talk – Life in the Year 26 A.Z., How Wisconsin is Managing A.I.S. After 26 Years of the Zebra Mussels. The slide also includes the logos of all the agencies that are involved in aquatic invasive species management as well as a photo of a group of zebra mussels]

– to where we are today in terms of invasive species management. I’d always think about it – you know, it’s kind of been 26 years of invasion biology as a science or something you could actually do for a living, but there’s so much stuff that happened way before the zebra mussels even got here that’s important to know. And then –

[the slide animates to the left to reveal two more questions to be answered in the talk – Where Are We Now? W(her)e Are We Going?]

– I’d also like to talk a little bit about where we’re going and, you know, well, where are we now and where we’re going because I think as somebody that deals a lot with invasion biology, there’s a lot of really interesting stuff that we’re going to be doing in the future that I think will help us manage all of these impacts.

[the slide animates to zoom out and reveal a timeline of invasive aquatic species in Wisconsin at the bottom of the slide featuring several photos that are linked to episodes along the timeline]

So, I threw together a ton of stuff, and when I was putting together my presentation, normally it’s not this big of a collection of information. Its – I don’t have nearly enough stuff.

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

I have way too much stuff. So, we’ll see how much we get through. But before I think we should get started, we should talk a little bit about how I got here. I think it’s always good to have a little frame of reference for where I’m coming from with all my information. And, well, I guess to get started, my father was a conservation officer –

[slide featuring the logo of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources]

– with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, and I apologize for a few blurry logos. I didn’t get a chance to swap them all out. But he worked on the Mississippi River –

[slide animates to the left to reveal a photo of a bridge over the Mississippi River in Muscatine County in Iowa]

– in Muscatine County, Iowa. So, I spent a lot of time near the water, not as much on the water as I’d like because if your dad spends 40 hours a week, more like 60, out on the water, the last thing you want to do is go back out on the water.

[laughter]

But we spent a lot of time next to it. And, you know, we dealt a lot – or I always heard stories, you know, about, you know, game infractions, people poaching –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– you know, work on the river with sturgeon and catfish, but, you know, as I was growing up, zebra mussels were discovered in the Mississippi River. And most of the time people don’t care about mussels, but Muscatine, Iowa, was the pearl button capital of, you know, the United States, or whatever. They made a lot of pearl buttons there. So, you’d walk around and see a lot of mussel shells. For whatever reason, I was really interested in mussels, knew zebra mussels had an impact on native mussels, so I kind of got the gears turning there a little bit. And then I do remember at one point in time in my life – this – I am not in this picture; I wish I was in this picture.

[laughter]

[slide featuring a photo of three Iowan fishermen holding up their abundant catches for the day on a long pole with a multitude of fish hanging down from the pole on hooks. In front of the three men are their three small boys one of whom is holding up a fish that he caught as well]

But my dad worked a lot of sport shows during the winter and inevitably found himself next to a charter fishing company. And this was something we were supposed to go do on Lake Michigan –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– but before we could do it the charter captain told us, You know, maybe you shouldn’t do that, the fishing’s not so good, we’re not really catching any perch anymore like we used, you should go salmon fishing instead. So, we went salmon fishing, and it was cool. But this always sounded like a lot of fun to me, and at the time I didn’t really get why we didn’t get to do this and now I understand that invasive species had a big role to play for me not being able to go catch perch. And if you’re somebody that remember fishing for perch in Milwaukee off the piers or the break walls back in the ’50s, you know –

[return to the slide with the photo of the fishermen and their kids]

– kind of a similar story.

[The slide animates a zoom out, slides left, an zooms back into a photo of a man in a baseball hat, tank top, and shorts on a small boat looking at a fish that he has caught]

As Tom said, I went to college at the University of Notre Dame, but a big influence in my time there was spending a summer at the research station in Land O’ Lakes. I did do some work, but I tried to do – crunch all my work in the morning so I could fish all day in the private lakes. There were 40 lakes up there that had no traffic outside of researchers and priests that were going on vacation.

[laughter]

So, the fishing was awesome. [laughs]

But I managed to – my adviser there was a PhD student in David Lodge’s lab, and he’s a very –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– prominent invasion biologist for the Great Lakes and, you know, I kind of fell into invasion biology by working in his lab, which, oddly, one of my duties in the Lodge Lab was making coffee –

[slide featuring a photo of a researcher in a baseball cap, a tank top, and a backpack type research equipment on his back that is connected to a pole that he is holding in his right hand which he is using to take samples from a shallow area of a lake (or river)]

– for the coffee group [chuckles] that worked out of that building. And one of the post-docs there started a lab up at Oakland University, needed a few graduate students, so I went up there to do some work on the Round Goby and tributaries of the Great Lakes. And that got me to Sea Grant –

[slide side animates a zoom out and slides to the left and zooms back into a slide with the title – What Do I Do? That has the logos for the Wisconsin D.N.R. and U.W.-Extension underneath it]

– where I have been, you know, for the past five years but I’ve added a few affiliations on there now. So, I guess, what do I do for a living? I’m an aquatic invasive species outreach specialist.

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

That means I do a lot of things for a lot of different organizations. I’m housed out of U.W.-Extension, but I’m specifically in the Environmental Resources Center, which is at the intersection of communities and natural resources. So, we know a lot of our environmental problems are not just ecological problems. They’re human problems too. And so, I like taking that science and working with communities to help come up with workable solutions for everyone.

I also work for the Wisconsin department of D.N.R. –

[slide featuring the logo of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources]

– and help manage some of the aquatic invasive species, communications, and they fund a lot of A.I.S. work in Wisconsin that I’ll be talking about here in a little bit through their A.I.S. grants program. And I work with all those people-

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– that the D.N.R. funds to help make sure that they have consistent materials, the right programs, all that kind of stuff. And, of course, I also work for University of Wisconsin Sea Grant, which is based out of U.W.-Madison but has field offices all over the Great Lakes, and they –

[slide featuring the logo for Sea Grant at the University of Wisconsin]

– promote the responsible and sustainable use of our Great Lakes through research, education, and outreach. For some reason, that’s the only one I’ve managed to memorize the mission statement for.

And so –

[the slide animates a zoom out and tilt down and zoom into a new slide titled – Tournament Angler Survey – featuring a photo of a researcher with a clipboard talking to a line of fishermen at a fishing tournament along this bulleted list – Home state; Last Event; Number of waters; Steps Taken – inspect, drain, dispose, remove, flush, wash, or dry; Opinion of A.I.S. threat]

– I’ve done a lot of things I never would have thought I’ve done. I’ve worked with professional fishing tournament anglers helping, you know, characterize what kind of risk fishing tournaments pose to invasive species transport and then develop solutions for fishing tournaments to prevent the spread of invasive species.

[the side animates to the left to reveal a new slide titled – Our Toolbox – which features six photos of educational materials that Sea Grant uses including keychains, roadside signs, bar mats, a brochure, a fisherman pledge document and a DVD]

I develop outreach materials with consistent branding. I work with things other than Stop Aquatic Hitchhikers, even though this slide seems to suggest that’s all I do.

[the slide animates to the left to reveal a new slide featuring a photo of a man and a woman standing in front of a bin with another woman holding a boa contrictor snake in her hands at a local D.N.R. office]

And then, you know, I’ve even gotten into finding new homes for exotic pets, which I won’t get to talk about this as much as I’d like, but –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– pet release is a pathway for aquatic invasive species. Think about the Everglades in Florida. And so, we’re trying to get ahead of that here in Wisconsin. So, I actually had to hold that snake. I couldn’t find the picture, but I’m kind of like creeped out holding this really long boa constrictor. But, you know, these are all really random things I found myself doing that I never would have thought I’m doing or would have been doing.

So, now that we’re not strangers anymore, let’s talk about invasive species. So, let’s just –

[slide titled – What Are Invasive Species? – with two photos on the left of the slide, one of zebra mussels and one of a crayfish and then the words VS and three photos on the right-hand side of the side, a pheasant, a bunch of turkeys, and a woman holding up a salmon that she has caught]

– I guess I’ll make sure that we’re all in the same footing here. What are invasive species? Does anyone want to provide me with a definition of invasive species?

[Female audience member, off-camera]

Species that are in the wrong place.

[Tim Campbell, off-camera]

They’re in the wrong place. Anything else?

[Male audience member]

They usually out-compete the native species in the places where they are.

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

They’ll out-compete native species. A few other things that we usually give in our standard definition of invasive species.

[Female audience member]

They were never here before.

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

Yeah, they were never here before.

[new female audience member]

Don’t have predators.

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

Don’t have predators. A lot of these things are actually traits or characteristics that help make things invasive.

[new male audience member]

They dont have any economic value.

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

Don’t have any economic value. That’s a big thing. So, when we talk about a definition of aquatic – invasive species in general, non-native species that have ecological harm, economic harm, and then we also tag on harm to human health as well. So, if we talk about like the West Nile virus, that will get, you know, lumped into calculations of how much our invasive species cost.

So, I threw up zebra mussels and the rest, crayfish, as good examples of invasive species, at least in the aquatic world. Zebra mussels from –

[return to the – What Are Invasive Species? – slide with the five photos]

– Black and Caspian Sea in Eurasia. You know, those are obviously from, you know, a different country, cause big problems. I put the rusty crayfish up there as just an example. You don’t have to be from a long ways away.

[the slide animates to zoom into the two photos on the left of zebra mussels and a crayfish]

You don’t have to be from a long ways away to be an invasive species. The rusty crayfish is invasive here in Wisconsin, but it’s actually native to the Ohio River Basin. So, it’s not really that far away. It just kind of switched –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– drainages pretty easily, and we think it’s fishermen that brought them up to use them as bait.
So, you don’t have to be from a long ways away to cause problems.

And then, if we go down here a second, or just pan out a little bit, I also brought up these other words that are used to describe –

[the slide zooms out and pans left to the three photos on the right – pheasant, turkey, and salmon – and underneath now are four words used to describe invasive species – non-native, alien, exotic, and nuisance]

– invasive species a lot. A lot of times people will mention non-native, alien, exotic, nuisance, and I really like to keep it to invasive species just because I know exactly what that means. Non-native just means they’re not from here. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they have problems. I think alien and exotic are really the same thing. And nuisance could be either a native or non-native species that’s causing problems. So, you know, and –

[the slide zooms into the three photos on the right – pheasant, turkeys, and salmon]

– I guess just a couple of things to build off that point. I’m from Iowa. We used to hunt a lot of pheasants there. A couple of hard winters and habitat loss makes it so we don’t have pheasants there anymore. But something I realized growing up is that pheasants weren’t native. They’re actually from China. And it really got me wondering about kind of the economic impact of pursuing all these non-native species. And, you know, kind of the same thing with – not kind of – exactly the same thing with salmon and the Great Lakes, which I’ll talk a little bit about that story too. But a big industry has built up around fishing for these non-native species.

And then, lastly, always happens at a sports show, somebody asks me when we’re going to get rid of those invasive turkeys or deer or something like that.

[laughter]

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

Definitely native. Both cases are actually great conservation success stories. But they can be a nuisance to some people, and they oftentimes confuse those two words. So, a lot of things can cause problems, or a lot of things can not be from here and actually be really good for us and our society. But when we talk about invasive species, it means a very specific thing.

And so, you know, I really kind of focus in on the zebra mussel because that was in the title –

[slide featuring the timeline at the bottom of the first slide zoomed in to Year Zero of the zebra mussel infestation and featuring two sets of four photos in a grid. The first grid of photos is labelled economic and the second grid of photos is labelled ecological. Additionally, under the two four by four photo grids is a movie file]

– so, I felt obligated to talk about it at length for a little bit. You know –

[the slide zooms into the four-by-four photo grid labelled – Ecological – with the four photos being (from left to right, top to bottom) a photo of zebra mussels bunched together on a native mussel, an underwater photo of a fish swimming above a swarm of zebra mussels on the bottom of the lake, a photo of a researcher standing on the shores of one of the Great Lakes, and an infographic on how zebra mussels alter their habitat by removing algae]

– we can walk through some of the impacts of the zebra mussel to, you know, show that they have ecological impacts. There’s definite impacts on our native mussels. The zebra mussels attach to the native mussels, make it so they can’t move around so that way they can get silted in. They also, obviously, populate or become very dense in the bottom of a lake or river, and that has big impacts for filtering the water. There’s, I think – somebody did the math, but like 7 trillion quagga mussels, which is in the same genus as zebra mussels –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– in Lake Michigan, and they filter through all of the water in Lake Michigan in about a week. So, it has very big impacts for water clarity and the amount of food in the water. And if we zoom in a little bit on this graph or graphic right here, you’ll – youll notice that there’s an –

[return to the – Ecological – slide with it zoomed into the zebra mussel infographic titled – Zebra Mussels Alter Their Habitat By Removing Algae – the graphic shows a cross-section of a lake with a boat dock on the left-hand side and the sun shining down on the water to its right. Underneath in the section that depicts the water and the surface of the lake it is noted (in the water) that – Water Clarity Dramatically Increases, there is Deeper Sunlight Penetration which causes the Water Column to Warm at Deeper Depths. This causes an increase in Epilimnion and a decrease in Thermocline as well as making Aquatic Plants Move to Deeper Waters]

– interaction between zebra and quagga mussels. Filter-Filtering out the water it makes it clear so that way more sunlight gets to the bottom and then you get more algae. In the case of Lake Michigan, they have a Cladophora problem, which is in part because of zebra mussels and quagga mussels making the water clearer so then there’s more algae at the bottom, or more sunlight getting to more algae, and then the zebra mussels and quagga mussels also concentrate the nutrients at the bottom of the lake. So, it makes the Cladophora/algae problem really bad in like Cleveland, Manitowoc –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– Two Rivers area. So, these are all ecological impacts.

Let me see. What’s next?

Oh. So, I think next is a video of – of – there we go. A quagga mussel sped up, filter feeding –

[slide with a placeholder of a YouTube video of quagga mussels in a jar filter feeding]

– just to kind of give you guys an idea of how this actually works because it’s not something that ever happens particularly fast. So that you actually get to see it is kind of cool. Maybe. Oh, there –

[the video, titled – Quagga Mussels Feeding (speeded up 10x) – starts playing – it starts with the statement – Algae has been added to the water and the mussels have closed up, follow by the statement – They soon begin feeding]

– we go. I feel the need to narrate it, but John did a pretty good job with the text. So, you can see them sticking out their syphon –

[the video shows the quagga mussels opening up and the statement – The mussels draw in small bits of algae and other material with their syphons… on screen. The video then animates in three arrows to point out where on screen a few quagga mussels have protruded their syphons]

– here in a second. And then you’ll see them pull material in, and then you’ll also see them spit material out. That’s called the –

[the video animates in the phrase and they spit out what they dont want]

– the pseudo feces, and that’s the stuff that’ll concentrate at the bottom that promotes –

[the phrase – The rejected material accumulates in mussel beds – appears on screen in the video]

– the Cladophora growth in Lake Michigan.

[in the video an arrow animates in to show where to look to see a quagga mussel spit out pseudo feces]

And then if you’ve heard, I guess, about the shift in energy dynamics –

[the video animates on the statement – Its high in phosphorus and other nutrients – on screen]

– in Lake Michigan and some of the Great Lakes and how it’s going from more pelagic to benthic oriented, this is generally the process –

[The video animates on the statement – This redistribution of nutrients has radically altered Lake Michigans food webs – on screen]

– that’s driving some of that.

So, I know, it’s super exciting.

[the slide animates a zoom out from the quagga mussel video and pans left and zooms back into the four-by-four set of photos under the heading – Economic]

A really fun thing to do is if you’re with a bunch of kids, you need an NR40 permit to do this, which means you can transport invasive species and possess them, but get some green water [laughs] and put the zebra mussels or quagga mussels –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– in the water and put, like, a container of clear water next to it, and over the course of the day that water will eventually be clear. So, if you ever have to do an educational exhibit with kids, call me first, I can get you an NR40 permit, and then you can do that.

So, I think part of – moving on to the economic side of things – I think part of the reason why zebra mussels really kind of, I don’t want to say created, but really pushed invasion science as something you could actually do for a living was it was very clear what the economic impacts were of the zebra mussels. If you had a boat and –

[return to the slide with the four-by-four grid of photos labelled Economic]

– it had zebra mussels in the engine and your engine didn’t work, that made people really mad, and it cost them money. [laughs] A lot of other invasive species, we’ve had to do a lot more work to really connect the dots as to what the impacts are. Some of those ecological impacts of zebra mussels, you know, it takes a lot of time and effort to study those impacts and, you know, connect the dots. But this, not so much. If your boat motor doesn’t work, if you can’t get water through your pipes, that’s a really big deal, or if you can’t use a beach, that’s a big deal too.

The western United States –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– which I don’t talk a lot about here, have actually really gotten on board with a lot of our aquatic invasive species prevention efforts because of their water infrastructure. It’s a lot dryer out there so they have a lot more water infrastructure. Currently not a lot of zebra mussels or quagga mussels. And they’ve calculated that it would cost an additional $15 to $20 million a year to provide water to like an area of like Los Angeles if zebra mussels and quagga mussels were to get there. So, you know, they’ll spend a million-plus dollars a year just to keep them out of that region. So, you know, again, I think zebra mussels, really easy to see what the economic impacts were there.

So, but even before zebra mussels, you know –

[return to the slide with the timeline now at the very beginning of the timeline labelled – 150-ish BZ to Early 1800s and featuring an illustration of a Carp fish and the statement – The Carp is the queen of rivers; a stately, a good and a very subtle fish; that was not at first bred, nor hath been long in England, but it is now naturalized – Izaak Walton]

– we’ve had stuff for a long time [laughs] that we were bringing over. For me, you know, before I started this job, the story really started at zebra mussels because that’s what I knew about as somebody that really hung out inland. Like, that’s what you heard about. But common carp in all of my research, which I don’t know how much that is, but, was usually the earliest thing that I could think of that we’ve brought over that’s a definite aquatic invasive species that causes problems. But even when we brought it over, we didn’t really think it was that bad. It was –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– “the queen of the rivers. A stately good and very subtle fish. Even though they’re new, it wasn’t from, well, in this case, England. But from the United States. It had a lot of food quality, sporting qualities. People really liked that fish. I think it only took like seven or eight years before they were like, “No, don’t want anymore carp.” They stopped stocking carp. But they did a really good job at stocking them in the six or seven years they did. So, they’re currently pretty much all over the United States except Maine or Alaska.

And so, while there are still some people that like to fish for them –

[slide featuring a photo of a carp on the shore next to a fishing rod]

– there are carp fishing societies and my grad school adviser liked to practice catching carp on the flats of the Great – Lake Huron because he said it was a lot like trying to cast to a bonefish. So, it was good practice for when he went to the Bahamas. But, you know, other than that, not a ton of sporting – well, there’s some sporting quality to them right now, but people tend to be pretty apathetic towards carp these days.

[the slide aminates to the left to reveal another photo of two carp surfacing near a reedy area]

And they actually cause pretty big water quality concerns with their behavior of rooting around in the vegetation to try to find something to eat. They muddy up the water. And I can’t think of a better example of some of these impacts than our own –

[the slide zooms out and then animates off to the left to reveal a four-by-four grid of photos labelled – Carp Removal in Lake Wingra – the four photos are an aerial shot of Lake Wingra with the carp exclosure indicated, a zoomed in aerial phot of the same carp exclosure, a photo of researches dragging a net full of carp out of a frozen Lake Wingra in the winter, and a photo of swimmers and beach-goers enjoying Lake Wingra in the summertime]

– Lake Wingra. It used to be an algae dominated lake. Part of that was due to the turbidity that the carp cause, and they made it so there were – were no aquatic plants, so you had algae doing a lot of the primary production. So, they were like, What if we can flip this lake from an algae lake to a plant lake, and we think we can do this by getting rid of the carp so that way there’s less turbidity, more sunlight, you get more plants. And here’s a picture of Lake Wingra [indicating the first aerial photo] from 2007. And you can see where they excluded carp. There was less turbidity, more plant growth, the water actually turned clear. So, they were like, Let’s do this! So, they got rid of, I think, all of the carp from Lake Wingra except maybe two –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– or three, and they do a good job of keeping those carp populations low, if they’re still there. But then they’ve actually made it so Lake Wingra is someplace you want to go swim and hang out, which I wasn’t here in Madison so I don’t know what a green Lake Wingra was like, but this looks a lot better to me.

So, there’s actually a lot of efforts in Wisconsin and across the country to reduce carp populations to, you know, help maintain water quality and, you know, give people back some of the services from their lakes and rivers.

So, an entirely different story that I’m not going to go into, the carp story is actually really similar to the story of the rainbow trout but –

[slide featuring a photo of the book cover of – An Entirely Synthetic Fish, by Anders Halverson – which itself has the head of a rainbow trout as its image]

– from a different perspective in that we actually like catching the rainbow trout still and we like eating it and we still pay to stock it. But it’s a very similar story that I found really interesting. So, I’m going to plug two books. You can check them out from the Wisconsin Water Library. This is one of them. But a very similar story to the common carp.

[the slide zooms out and slides left at a diagonal to reveal the next slide titled – Curly Leaf Pondweed – featuring a photo of said weed along with the following information – Earliest Record, 1841; Intentionally Planted For Waterfowl Habitat; Secondary Invasion by Watercraft]

So, kind of just moving down our timeline here of things that have actually been here a long time. Curly-leaf pondweed was first recorded in the United States in 1841, intentionally planted for waterfowl habitat and a second invasion by watercraft. So, this is something that’s been here for a while causing problems, moving around –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– us intentionally introducing it before we even knew it was a problem. Like a lot of aquatic vegetation, it just out-competes our native vegetation, becomes really dense, stunts fish populations, all that kind of stuff.

Same with Eurasian watermifoil.

[slide titled – Eurasian Watermifoil – featuring a photo of said plant and the bulleted list – Earliest Record, 1881; Linked to the Aquarium and Aquatic Nursery Trades; Secondary Invasion by Watercraft]

It was discovered or brought over to the United States a little bit later. The earliest known record is 1881. Although, there’s like some foggy records from much earlier than that. And this has been linked to the aquarium and aquatic nursery trades. Again, secondary invasion by watercraft. Now the similar –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– aquatic plant impacts.

So, if we go to about 70 – before zebra mussels, or the 1920s. This is when we start to – the story starts to include the Great Lakes a little bit more. For me, the story of aquatic invasive species and the story of the history of the Great Lakes are very intertwined. It’s hard for me to talk about invasive species without talking about the Great Lakes. But they made improvements to the Welland Canal. While the Welland Canal existed, you know, well into –

[slide titled – Improvements to the Welland Canal – featuring a four-by-four grid of photos (left to right, top to bottom), a photo of the sucker mouth part of a sea lamprey, a researcher holding up a lake trout with two sea lampreys attached to it, a black-and-white photo of a bunch of dead alewives along the shores of a Great Lake, and a photo of a group of alewives swimming]

– the 1800s, they made improvements to the Welland Canal to help – the Welland Canal, I should probably explain, is the canal that goes around Niagara Falls and allows large ships to get into the upper Great Lakes. And they made improvements to help larger ships get in. And so, this is where I think our first wave of invasive species came in. And most notably in my mind are sea lamprey and alewives. We had sea lampreys come in. That’s obviously pretty nasty little –

[the slide zooms in to the first photo of the sea lamprey and its sucker]

-sucker they have there to attach to fish, liquify the innards. While there are native lamprey in the Great Lakes, they’re a lot smaller and good parasites and they don’t kill their host. These are bigger than our native lamprey. They kill our host. I think one adult sea lamprey can kill 40 pounds of fish in its entire – in its lifetime. So, that combined with commercial fishing really did our native predators in, like the lake trout.

[the slide animates to the left to reveal the second photo of the sea lampreys dangling from a lake trout]

There we go.

[the slide animates up to reveal the fourth photo of the group of alewives]

And then the alewives also just swam through and up into the upper Great Lakes. And so, without the lake trout, and there’s another interaction between alewives and lake trout –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– I won’t go too much into, but without the lake trout there was no predator to eat the alewives, so they became really embolden. And I don’t remember this, but this looks awful. I remember, I think, the first year I lived or worked in Manitowoc –

[return to the slide with the photo of a multitude of dead alewives along the shore of a Great Lake]

– there were some alewives on the beach, and I was like, Oh, this is kind of bad. We had it really good that year, relatively speaking. So, I think this was in the ’50s. I think Time magazine ran a cover article on it once where they had to –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– take tractors and move them off the beach. So, this is kind of the state of things in the ’50s.

But then, some genius fisheries guy from Michigan was like, I’ve got an idea. I’m going to get rid of these alewives. I think he might have been told to get rid of the alewives.

[slide featuring a photo of a fisherman on a boat holding up a large Pacific salmon that he has caught]

So, I’m going to introduce Pacific salmon because these things are engineered to eat little silver fish swimming around at the pelagic zone. So, first it was coho salmon and then Chinook salmon, which people tend to really like the –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– Chinook because they’re a lot of fun to catch. Cohos are fun to catch too. But then that sport fishing industry took off, and even today that sport fishing industry in the Great Lakes valued at $4 billion to $7 billion a year. So, these non-native species eating non-native species is really fueling that recreational fishery. And even today you can still go catch fish out on the –

[slide featuring a family on a boat sitting in front of their Great Lakes fishing catch for the day]

– Great Lakes. This was my family two weeks ago out of Racine catching a boatload of fish. A lot of fun. So, you still can go catch fish out of Lake Michigan. But a lot less Chinook –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– and more cohos and things that have a little bit more diversity in their diet.

So, if we move to the ’70s, what do we have here? Oh, more improvements to the Welland Canal. So, they didn’t improve it enough last time –

[slide titled – More Improvements to the Welland Canal! – featuring a photo of a large ship on the Welland Canal and the following list – Simplified Ship Passage Through the City of Welland; Slightly Larger Ships; Reduced Canal Transit Time by 30 Minutes]

– and the ship traffic had started increasing enough that it was starting to delay traffic in downtown Welland. They had a drawbridge and every time it went up it would delay traffic about 30 minutes. Sorry, 10 minutes.

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

And so, they’re like, We need to fix this. We need to build the canal around the city. So, they did that, and the process made it slightly larger, and it reduced the canal transit time by 30 minutes, which allowed more boats to get and out of the Great Lakes. So, more traffic, bigger boats.

And that kind of led to – I don’t want –

[slide featuring a map of the world with the primary ports that travel to the Great Lakes indicated as circles. Additionally, the larger the circle the more voyages that port sends through the Great Lakes]

– to say an explosion – because I haven’t done the work to say that properly, but we have a lot more boats going in and out of the Great Lakes. And this is a graphic showing how connected Great Lakes ports are today to the rest of the world. The circles are direct voyages to the Great Lakes. And all those little crosses are either secondary, tertiary, or quaternary connections to the Great Lakes. Point being, we’re connected to the entire world now through the Great Lakes, which is really good for a lot of our goods and –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– services that we need to get to the rest of the world. It’s good for us consuming things. Not so good because it’s a lot of ballast water that’s coming into the Great Lakes. From about the ’70s to 1990 to 2000 –

[slide featuring a photo of a large ship releasing ballast water into one of the Great Lakes]

– we had a lot of ballast water come into the Great Lakes, which, as most people know, is how a lot of our invasive species got into the Great Lakes.

[the slide zooms out and pans left and then zooms into a photo of a man holding an Asian carp and then zooms out again, pans right and zooms back into the photo of the ship releasing ballast water]

So, I didn’t have the map –

[the slide tilts down to reveal the world map with the circled ports]

– but there’s a different map that’s pretty similar to this that shows environmental suitability, and it’s a pretty fun map. The warmer colors are more environmentally similar. And we’ll notice that the most environmentally similar – similar part of the world to the Great Lakes is this area, [uses the mouse cursor to circle the area around the Caspian Sea] the Ponto-Caspian region. Our favorite place to swap species with. Zebra mussels, quagga mussels, round goby, all those things are from that area. And, as you’ll see, we’re pretty well connected to that area.

[the slide zooms out, tilts down to the photo of the ship releasing the ballast water then zooms out again, pans left and zooms back into the previous photo of a man holding up an Asian carp]

So, if we move a little bit further, early 1970s, I think it’s ’73, this is when all that nonsense with Asian carp starts. Silver and bighead carp were brought over for fish farming, and they weren’t what we were actually farming. They were brought over –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– for their filtering capabilities to help keep catfish farms clean, and in the ensuing 40 years [laughs] they’ve worked their way all the up the Illinois River to right [knocks twice on the podium] knocking on the door of the Great Lakes. We’ll talk a little bit more about Asian carp but not as – not as much as I’d like.

So, year zero. I was looking at the data records for Wisconsin. I’ve always heard 1990 for invasive, or, sorry, zebra mussels in Great Lakes. The D.N.R. database goes ’89 or ’91. So, it’s around here sometime. This is when zebra mussels came in, and that’s when we really started to pay attention to aquatic invasive species. And from, you know, here on, for about the next 10 years it was, you know, a new species every six months. Probably even faster than that. So, your round goby, Eurasian ruffe, spiny water fleas, white pert. Tons of stuff. There’s over 180 non-native species in the Great Lakes, so I’m not going to list them all. But this is when all of the stuff starts coming in and changing our Great Lakes to – making them the lakes we know today and not the lakes that a lot of people grew up with.

So, it took about 10 years of stuff coming in before we actually, I think, were able to figure out what exactly we needed to do. And there were some things that happened before that. Like in the early ’90s, the International Maritime Organization put out voluntary best management practices for ballast water exchange, but it wasn’t until 2000 that it really became standard –

[slide featuring four illustrations of how ballast water exchange works in large ships – the first shows a cross-section of a ship at the service port loading ballast water in and discharging cargo, the second is step two – during voyage ballast tanks full and cargo hold empty, the third is at destination port, discharging ballast water and loading cargo, and the fourth is during voyage with cargo full and ballast tanks empty]

– that every ocean-going ship coming into the Great Lakes perform ballast water exchange, which, if you aren’t familiar with it – so, ships bring on ballast, which helps bring them lower into the water, helps stabilize their ships, but unfortunately, you’re not just bringing in water, you’re bringing in all the species that are in the water too. Journey across the sea, and then once you get here, you either need to – well, you need to get rid of your ballast to bring on more cargo, so, as you expel that ballast, you’re expelling everything in it. So, what ballast water exchange is stopping somewhere in the middle of the ocean and flushing out that brackish, almost freshwater ballast that you have, bringing in salt water. So, you’re both expelling all those invasive species, and then if anything is there, that salinity shock often kills them. So, we’ll see it here in a second, but we think this has done a really good job –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– at preventing new invasions. While we did discover things between 2000 and 2006, we think that was more of a lag time from them being introduced and taking that long to find them.

Also, about this time, one of the first papers about recreational watercraft being the –

[slide featuring a photo of the backside and engine of a recreational watercraft with seaweed and other plants hang from the motor and the bottom of the boat]

– vector for aquatic invasive species out of the Great Lakes into all of the lakes in the Great Lakes region came out. And so, this is when a lot of our recreational watercraft outreach really started. We, you know, could say that Yes, recreational watercraft, that’s how –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– these things were moving around. So, this is when we really started to think about how do we best reach boaters? How do we give them the tools to help prevent the spread of aquatic invasive species?

So, once we knew that, shortly thereafter, the Clean Boats, Clean Waters –

[slide featuring the logo of the Clean Boats, Clean Waters campaign featuring the words on four sections of a round life preserver and an illustration of a boat on a boat ramp in the middle of the circle]

– watercraft inspection started, which is the volunteer, now we also have paid inspectors now, but program that help educate boaters on how to prevent the spread of aquatic invasive species. If you are interested, I could help you sign up to be a Clean Boats, Clean Waters inspector tonight. But you should just send me an email, and we could do it later. But then a lot of other things –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– like the Stop Aquatic Hitchhikers campaign, the Citizen Lake Monitoring Networks, A.I.S. program, all these things started kind of popping up now. And then, oh, here we go. Anyone know what this is? –

[slide featuring a photo of a Bloody Red Shrimp]

[Male and female audience members, simulataneously]

Spiny water flea?

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

It’s not spiny. It looks a lot like a spiny.

It’s Hemimysis. It’s the bloody red shrimp. And this is the last invader that we have found in the Great Lakes due to ballast water in 2006. It does look a lot like a spiny water flea. I have a picture of one of those later. So, 2006 was the last time we’ve found – found a new invasive species in the Great Lakes due to ballast water.

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

And from what we know of the bloody red shrimp, it does get really dense in these clouds. I’ve heard of people diving at shipwrecks all across the Great Lakes and all the sudden they’ll see this like super dense red cloud swimming toward them. We don’t really know what bloody red shrimp do. [laughs] They get really dense. That’s what we know so far. And some things eat them. I don’t know what else [laughs], but I think we’ll figure out more of what their role is in the ecosystem here soon.

And then, shortly after that –

[slide featuring a photo of a dead skinny salmon from Lake Huron]

– so, blurry salmon picture. This salmon is a very unhappy, skinny salmon from Lake Huron. All of these invasive species that have been piling up in the Great Lakes, for whatever reason Lake Huron –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– and how that fishery was structured, there was a lot of different things going on. There was less food going to the alewives due to zebra mussels and quagga mussels. There was natural reproduction of salmon in Georgian Bay. So too many predators, not enough alewives, collapse of the salmon fishery, which I think you can, you know, pin a lot of that on aquatic invasive species. And so, that’s really impacted how fishery managers think about the Lake Michigan fishery.

2009, Wisconsin came out –

[slide returns to the timeline with a marker labelled – Wisconsins Invasive Species Law – at the bottom of the slide on the left are the words Prohibited and Restricted above two photos, and on the right the words Invasive Species Transport above a photo and an illustration]

– with their invasive species law. It was one of the first invasive species laws of its kind in the country. So, I’m really proud that we work in, you know, a state that’s really pioneered this approach to invasive species management. It has two different parts. There’s a prohibited and restricted species list. And then an invasive species transport policy. And so –

[the side zooms out, pans left and zooms in to the Prohibited and Restricted photos now revealing a third photo underneath – the photos are of (upper left) water lettuce, (upper right) water hyacinth, and (lower) Eurasian watermifoil]

– the prohibited and restricted species are both things that are illegal to – well, they’re classifications that make it illegal to buy, sell, trade, transport invasive species. Prohibited species, the D.N.R. can – can mandate that you take action to control them if they’re on your property and they’re illegal to bess – or possess, where restricted, which I misspelled, species are widespread already across the state. Things like Eurasian watermifoil. I hesitate to call it widespread.

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

I think it’s in about 200 lakes, give or take a few. And there’s over 15,000 lakes in Wisconsin. But there are things that they’re present. We’re not going to expect you to, you know, take action to control these kinds of things. So, this has been a really powerful tool for keeping things like water lettuce and water hyacinth out of Wisconsin, things we know are invasive elsewhere but not established here.

And then our invasive species –

[return to the slide now panned over and zoomed into the Invasive Species Transport section of the timeline featuring a photo of a sign with a boater to-do list at a boat landing and an illustration of watercraft check points featuring an illustration of a boat and arrows pointing to all the areas that boaters should inspect (Hitch, Rollers, Live Well, Axle, Lower Unit/Propeller, and Transom Well)]

– transport law. Before this, it was just illegal to launch with it – well, illegal to launch with invasive species on your boat. So, you could be driving down the road with invasive species, but you had to be caught in the act of putting your boat in the water, which, good luck. [laughs]
So, this law made it illegal to transport any sort of plant material on a public roadway, and any –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– law enforcement can enforce that – or any law enforcement officer can enforce that. And we also have rules in there that make it illegal to transport water. Some of our bait laws are tied in – in there as well. So, this has been a much more enforceable law for our law enforcement officers and a really easy talking points for people to help them comply with our laws.

Around the same time as when, I think-

[slide titled – Understanding the Chicago Waterways – featuring a map of the water ways, locks and dams, pumping stations, and electric barriers around Chicago. The map also has two inset areas showing parts of two waterways in more detail]

– there was a carp eD.N.A., positive. Are you guys all familiar with E(nvironmental) D.N.A. technology? So, there was a carp positive in Chicago. So, everyone was focused on carp for about three or four years. Haven’t really heard much about it in the recent years. There’s the Great Lakes Mississippi River Interbasin Study that came out with a couple of alternatives to the –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– electric barrier in Chicago and how they could maintain commerce in the area but still prevent the spread of invasive species. And after they, you know, proposed seven alternatives, now that’s another two years before they recommend one. So, that’s kind of where that’s at. Although, the Fish and Wildlife Service still does eD.N.A. sampling in the area. There’s the occasional eD.N.A. positive, but our understanding of eD.N.A. has changed to the point that a single eD.N.A. hit doesn’t really mean as much. There’s a lot of different ways eD.N.A. can get places through bird fecal matter or fish markets in Chicago that are selling Asian carp and then they dump the water. So, there’s a lot of ways e – eD.N.A. can get around. So, it’s, you know, repeated detections over time that really hone in on the fish, and we haven’t seen those. Just like we’ve had eD.N.A. detections in Sturgeon Bay and the Fox River, just single hits over a long period of time. It’s cause for concern, but not cause for action, if you will. So, it’s kind of where Asian carp are at.

21 A.Z. or 2011 is –

[return to the slide of the timeline now at 21 A.Z. featuring a photo of Tim holding his hand in a thumb up]

– a very important date. It’s the date I started working. I thought you should note that on the timeline.

[the slide zooms out, pans left and then zooms into the 26 A.Z. words on the timeline]

But in – it took me three or four years to figure out what I’m doing. So, the past year –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– I feel like I really got a lot done. So, you know, that puts us to pretty much today and where we are. And, whoops. So, I think we have a lot of stuff here. We’ve got about 20 minutes. Not even. So –

[return to the zoomed-out timeline slide now with an arrow pointing towards the future and featuring four new groupings with photos – New Pathways! – New Species! – New Methods! – Our Partnerships – and ends with a photo of a book cover]

– we’ll see how much we can cover here. We might skip some of the videos. But we have a new species, new methods, new pathways. You know, tons of different things that we’ve been doing –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– I think, the past 10 years. And in Wisconsin we’re at the point where we’re revising our initial aquatic invasive species management plan. We wrote one in 2002, effective in 2003 and kind of in response to creating of invasive species program in Wisconsin. And so much has changed since them. We, you know, our first plan and first kind of body of work was all about reaching boaters and getting that message out there. But, you know, there’s so much out there now and we’ve done such a good job with boaters that, you know, I think this will help kind of show where else we’re going and, you know, how we’re focusing on things other than the zebra mussel too.

So, we have new species, and –

[return to the timeline slide that has now zoomed into the phrase – New Species!]

– I hesitate to call them new because they’ve been present in the Great Lakes for other states for a while. But there are new things for us to be concerned about here in Wisconsin. So, if you’ve been paying attention to the news, you’ve probably seen a few of these things.

[the slide tilts down, pans left and zooms into a photo of the round goby fish underwater]

We have the round goby, which was discovered inland for the first time in Wisconsin in Neenah – in Neenah and Menasha in Little Lake Butte des Morts, just below the last lock that goes into Lake Winnebago. And this is especially concerning to me as a goby guy. I know gobies eat a lot of fish eggs. If you’re familiar with Lake Winnebago, there are –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– lake sturgeon there, and gobies love lake sturgeon eggs. So, we – I’d really like to keep them out of there for the sake of our sturgeon fishery. But there is – once things learn how to eat gobies, they’re pretty good food. And so, you’ll notice that a lot of fish coming out of Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair, where gobies have been a while, are getting pretty big. Some people attribute that to the gobies. So, you know, it could- – there’s a little give and take there, but for me the impacts of the round goby are potentially a lot bigger than what the benefits are. And Lake Winnebago’s already a really good fishery. I don’t think we need to change much there. So, gobies are something we’re spending a lot more time educating anglers about.

[slide featuring an underwater photo of a bunch of starry stonewart]

Anyone know what this is? It sounds like it should be really pretty, and it’s present in Washington County, Waukesha county. Starry stonewort anyone? Okay. Me neither. I wouldn’t have known that. So, starry stonewort is actually – actually a macroalgae. It looks like a plant. It has not quite roots. But it’s been present in Michigan for about 10 to 15 years, and maybe –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– even longer than that. And for whatever reason it just took a long time to get over here to Wisconsin, probably because we’re doing such a good job reaching our boaters. And we just discovered it in Big Mosquito Lake, Little Muskego Lake, and two or three other ones. But there’s been a lot of popular literature out there saying it’s a lake killer and all that kind of stuff. But initially what we found here in Wisconsin; it seems to have some pretty similar impacts to our other aquatic invasive plants. Nothing too much worse. Unfortunately, there’s no good chemical controls for it. So, we’re really experimenting with other mechanical and, yeah, mechanical harvesting methods, like diver assisted suction harvest and manual removal, things like that to try to manage these populations of this new aquatic plant that’s, you know, slightly different than everything we currently have.

Here’s –

[slide featuring a photo of a spiny water flea up close]

– spiny water fleas. Again, it was present in the Great Lakes, I think, early ’90s. I’d have to look up the date to nail that down. But it’s mostly been limited to the Great Lakes and a handful of other lakes. But in 2009 we discovered, by we I mean Jake Vander Zanden’s –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– limnology class here at U.W.-Madison, discovered spiny water fleas in Lake Mendota and have actually measured them at the highest concentrations of anywhere known in the world. [laughs] But they have a lot of impacts. A paper recently studied by that lab suggests that it’s – its not as easy as saying that they cost us $3 to $5 million a year, but we’d have to pay $3 to $5 million a year to get those impacts back due to decreases in water clarity, which we spend a lot of money in the Madison lakes watershed to, you know, keep water quality and water clarity high. So, you know, spiny water fleas are reducing that. There’s also impacts to fisheries that spiny water fleas have. You know, when they get all globbed up on fishing lines like that, they can cause line to snap due to the friction.

So, I already mentioned water lettuce –

[slide featuring a photo of water lettuce up close]

– and –

[slide zooms out, pans left, and then zooms into a photograph of water hyacinth on a lake]

– water hyacinth. These things have actually popped up in Wisconsin a few times the past couple of years. Theyre very – they were very popular water garden plants. They’re now, in our most recent revision of NR40, they’re prohibited species. So, illegal to buy, sell, transport.

People still get them because you can drive to Minnesota and buy them and drive them over. That’s illegal –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– I’m not encouraging you to do that. But people still have them here in Wisconsin. And, for whatever reason, when they’re cleaning out their water garden ponds decide to dump them outside. And while evidence suggests that they’d have a tough time surviving here, I’d never want to give things the chance to survive here. So, we’ve spent a lot of time the past two years on response efforts, manually removing these things, which for the most part has been pretty easy as far as response efforts go. You can see the plants on top of the water, get them with canoes. But what we found out in Lake Mendota is that the water lettuce leaves act like little sails, so they blew all the way down – we found them in University Bay near the Sea Grant building, and then they blew all the way down past the Union, I think to the Yahara like lock, or whatever down there in Tenney Park. So, they got quite a ways.

And then –

[slide with a photo of a myriad of New Zealand mud snails surrounding a U.S. dime to give perspective]

– New Zealand mud snails. I forgot about New Zealand mud snails, as evidenced by the tiny picture at the end of this. But we found these in Black Earth Creek in 2012 or 2013. The first time they’ve been found inland in Wisconsin too. And so, they have a big impact on our trout – trout fishing community because they move –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– on waders, and they can become really dense and out-compete native macroinvertebrates for food. They’re not particularly good food themselves. So, these are all things that we’re spending time with. If you want to know more about what you should be concerned about, the Council of Great Lakes Governors came up –

[slide featuring a photo of a memo that the Great Lakes Council of Governors came up with featuring photos and descriptions of the 10 Least Wanted Invasive Species]

– with a “10 Least Wanted Species” list. There’s some pretty interesting things on here that we don’t want. Zander, Wels catfish. It’s on River Monsters. And then –

[the slide animates to the left to reveal the second page of photos and descriptions of the Governors Councils Ten Least Wanted]

– my favorite is the Yabby crayfish –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– like Cherax destructor. Sounds pretty terrible, like we don’t want it.

And then, this is just the NR40 invasive species plant list. There are a lot of invasive species or prohibited and restricted plants in Wisconsin. This leaves out all the animals as well. So, feel free to look this up whenever.

So, we have lots of new methods too.

[return to the timeline slide with the slide zoomed into the – New Methods! – portion of the future timeline]

We used to – well, before we get into the really exciting stuff that I’ve been working on recently –

[the slide tilts down to reveal a four-by-four grid of movies and photos (top to bottom, left to right) – a photo of a newspaper headline for the Healthy Lakes Herald with the headline – Spiny Water Fleas Plan Further Invasion of Inland Lakes! – a video placeholder for a video about the round goby; a video place holder for a video about ; and a video place holder for a video about ]

– something –

[the slide continues to pan down and zoom into words underneath the grid that say – Social Science!]

– that I’ve learned a lot more about, if there’s any actual social scientists in the room, you know, are probably like, Why are you generalizing all of this? But I’ve incorporated a lot more social science in our work just because I realized that just telling people about the problem –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– doesn’t always help them solve the problem and take action, I guess, to, you know, stop or solve the problem. So, you know, incorporating some of these social science techniques have really been a lot of fun for me just because it’s not really what I’ve been trained in. So, I just took this out of –

[slide featuring four photos – a person holding a round goby in their hand, a photo of water hyacinth, a photo of water lettuce, and a photo of a man in a boat next to jumping carp]

– a different talk specifically on this subject. But I just – well, I’m going to blow through some of these.

[the slide zooms out and rotates through several photos – fish gathered in a fishery, a koi pond, a farmer on a combine]

So, I’m sorry about the rotation. That’s part of the reason.

[the slide then stops on the phrase – Behaviors Can Change! – with the sentence – Every Invasion is Theoretically Preventable – underneath it]

So, all of these invasive species that I just blew through humans brought them here. That’s kind of the common thread.

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

If something gets here on its own, that’s natural dispersal. If humans brought them here, that’ll be an invasion. And the thing is if all invasive species are – invasions are human mediated, that means it’s a human behavior and behaviors change. People learned how to recycle. People learn how to stop smoking so we can learn how to stop moving invasive species. And this is – like that little fact combined with every –

[return to the slide with the phrase – Every Invasion Is Theoretically Preventable – at the top and now the slide is tilted down to reveal a man in a suit giving a thumbs up sign]

– invasion is theoretical preventable makes me really happy and helps me get up in the morning and, you know, keep a positive outlook on what I do cause invasive species isn’t always that.

[the slide zooms out, pans left at a diagonal and then zooms into a section of the timeline labelled – This Is How This Works? – featuring two photos – one of weeds hanging off of the bottom of a boat, the other shows water in a boats live well – stacked on top of one another and then a plus sign and then two informational illustrations – one says, Amazing Facts to Your Head with a hand-drawn surprised face and the other that says Science with an illustrated figure pouring green liquid out of a beaker – stacked on top of one another and then the equals sign and then the logo for the Stop Aquatic Hitchhikers campaign]

So, you know, kind of with that, we want people to pick all the weeds off their boat, drain all the water. So, if we tell them that, combine that with some science and amazing facts, they’re going to stop aquatic hitchhikers, no more invasive species. And it’s obviously how this works, right?

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

Right?

No.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite how it works. There’s some of us that are super motivated, and with the right knowledge, they’re going to take action. And this is, you know –

[slide featuring titled – Deficit model – and demonstrating this model as a glass half full with an arrow pointing to the water line that is labelled Current Behavior and an arrow pointing at the top of the glass which is labelled Desired Behavior and a yellow line between the two which is labelled Knowledge Gap]

– if you’re interested in this, kind of the – the deficit model of learning. Your cup is half full. We give you some knowledge. And you have all the knowledge, you’re going to do what you want.

[the slide zooms out and pans left and then zooms into a bulleted list and five examples of things that Sea Grant has used to educate the public – the bulleted list is – Consistent Messaging; Brand Awareness; Tools Already Exist – and the examples are the logos for the Play, Clean, Go, Clean Drain Dry Initiative, Stop Aquatic Hitchhikers, Habitattitude ,and Dont Let Loose! campaigns]

And I think that’s how we did a lot of our invasive species outreach early on. That we had all these awesome brands and campaigns. We’ll give people the message –

[the slide pans left to reveal the Deficit Model illustration again but with the Amazing Facts illustration now in the empty area above the water line labelled Knowledge Gap]

– you know, all these amazing facts that blow their mind. And we’ll get that desired behavior that we want.

[the slide zooms out, pans left at any angle and then zooms into the sentence – Life is full of things you do even though you know you shouldnt]

Unfortunately, you know, that’s not really how it works, like I said.

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

Life’s full of things you do even though you know you shouldn’t. I have lots of examples.

[laughter]

I use this. I know I should not eat a hamburger with fries after this – probably just shouldn’t eat a hamburger period, but if I do, I should get the salad on the side. But I’m not going to because fries are awesome.

[laughter]

And nothing pairs better with a hamburger than fries. But you might put yourself or give yourself like a prompt or –

[slide featuring three photos in a row – one of a hamburger with a salad on the side, one of a hamburger with French fries on the side and one that has two Fitbits on it]

– something like that to help encourage you not to do that. So, like a Fitbit or something like that. You can see it and be reminded that, Hey, I should maybe make a healthier decision. And so, you know, using things like that in our work –

[the slide zooms out, tilts down and zooms back into the two photos plus the two illustrations and now with another plus sign and six more photos and illustrations now equaling two new phots of people doing the right thing when it comes to invasive species]

– I think we’ve done a lot of really interesting things to help people prevent the spread of invasive species. So, it’s more like, you know, tell people that they need to pick their weeds off their boat, drain the water, you know, facts and science, and then, well, have a whole bunch of other things.

[the slide zooms into the six new photos representing new information]

So, we have prompts –

[the slide zooms into the first photo showing a bunch of Stop Hitchhikers keychains lined up along a pier and a bulleted list labelled – Prompts – with the following list – key chains; towels; stickers; Landing Blitz]

– which, sorry about that. I don’t know why that did that.

[the slide zooms further into just the bulleted list labelled – Prompts]

But in our invasive species world, we use a lot of prompts, which just little reminders to take action. So, we have the key chains, towels, and stickers that all have the Stop Aquatic Hitchhikers logo on them. And these are all things people use at that very strategic point. The key chains when they’re starting their boat, towels a lot of time when they’re on their boat, and then stickers right on the boat trailer –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– to help remind them as they’re taking their boat out to take action.

And then we also have reminder signs. You can see these at some of our Dane County –

[slide featuring a photo of a Sea Grant volunteer standing in front of a reminder sign to – Inspect, Remove, Drain, and Never Move – at a Dane County boat launch]

– landings. And give people the tools that they need to help clean their boat. Just try to make it really easy for them.

[the slide animates a tilt down to a new photo of a boater filling out a survey in front of his boat at a boat landing and then zooms out and pans left to reveal another photo of a D.N.R. warden holding up an ice pack that has helpful information to boaters to keep them from inadvertently transporting invasive species. The slide is labelled – Convenient Alternatives]

We also try to offer convenient alternatives. So, we found out that a lot of people weren’t draining their live wells because they needed to – like they didn’t compute that taking their fish home in water was illegal even though they knew that they couldn’t take water or transport water. So, we started the “Drain” –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– campaign, or the “Ice Your Catch” campaign and started giving people ice packs when they were taking fish home. So, that way it’s like, Hey, we don’t want you to drain – transport your fish in water, but here’s something that’s really easy to do, and then provided literature to say, Actually your fish probably is going to taste a little bit better too if you throw it on ice. So, we found this to be really effective.

I don’t know why that happened.

We also use opinion leaders. So, for the Drain campaign, we enlisted –

[slide featuring a photo of the chef from Wisconsin Foodie holding a bag full of groceries with an inset photo of a fisherman spraying off his boat engine]

– professional fishermen. And this is a Wisconsin Foodie chef, you know, just telling people about the benefits of icing your catch and transporting your fish on ice as opposed to water.

[the slide zooms into the inset photo of the boaters hosing off the back of their boat]

And then we also, in a fishing tournament project we worked on, had pro fishermen talk about the importance to their peers about –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– washing their boats and clean – taking all the weeds off, draining all the water. You know, and something from, you know, their peer means a lot more than the guy that gets paid to do it. So, it was really awesome to see that kind of change in behavior and even mindset of our pro anglers.

We also used pledges. People –

[slide featuring two photos one of a Pledge form and one of a Care Sheet for boaters]

– that pledged to do something are more likely to do it. So, for classroom pets, we had the red swamp crayfish in Germantown, Wisconsin, which is the first time we found the red swamp crayfish in Wisconsin. Oftentimes it is either used –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– in crayfish boils or as a classroom pet. And a lot of times classroom pets get sent home with people and then they get tired of the pet, you let it go. So, to help prevent people from releasing those pets, we have a pledge form that we can distribute to teachers, and the teachers have to give this to the student to take home to the parents so that way the parent knows that, you know, how to take care of the pet and that they should never release the pet.

We also try to equip our obligatory hubs –

[slide featuring a photo of a bait shop with the label – Obligatory Hubs]

– with the right information to help give their consumers. So, one campaign we have here in Wisconsin is the bait shop initiative. And the idea is to go to the bait shops, try to develop partnerships –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– with the people that work at bait shops, let them know what aquatic invasive species are, give them the materials they need to give their consumers again cause they’re opinion leaders. These are places that the fishermen go, and so it’s a great place to get our message out.

I’ll skip that.

And then, I think we also have, you know, something I’ve been thinking about more recently. There was – so, we have, as far as communication goes, all these ways we can reach people and tools that we have to reach people. I never often thought about myself as the tool to reach people. And so, last fall I took a one-credit class here at improv – improv – improvisational theater for science communication. And it put me in a lot of really uncomfortable situations cause I was never an actor. I was in the band in high school. Not in theater. But it got me a little bit more comfortable being uncomfortable. And I realized the value of that class in helping speak to people and read your audience a little bit. And so, I think that’s something I’ve been working a little bit more with our A.I.S. coordinators across the state. You know, think about yourself as the vehicle, the message too, not just the pamphlets and the tools that you’re bringing people. You’re important too in helping making sure our message gets across.

And all of that stuff combined helps us get people to transport their fish on ice –

[return to the revised equation now showing a close up of the two photos on the right side of the equation after the equals sign – one of a catch of fish on ice in a cooler, and one of a boater washing down his boat at a boat landing]

– and drain the water and pick all their weeds off the boat. You know, it’s not any one thing. It’s all of those things combined and little marginal gains from each one –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– of those.

So, that’s kind of the social science aspect to some of this stuff. And I have a few minutes. So –

[Narration from the round goby video over acoustic guitar]

This is a goby.

[slide featuring the round goby video – now paused]

So, sorry. Thinking about all that kind of stuff, I thought – made me think a lot about our communication materials that we have. I think they’re very good in a traditional sense. They’re good at communicating –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– the topic, but as a hypercollected – hyperconnected millennial that spends a lot of time on his smartphone and consumes a lot of my content via Twitter and Facebook, I realized a lot of the content that we produce seems like it’s more produced for the people I work with rather than the people I’m trying to communicate with. And, you know, in an effort to try to make sure we’re reaching that younger audience, we really started thinking about different ways we can communicate too. Creating videos that might appeal to younger audiences or people that are just on social media and just try to make things that we think people are going to share too. So, not just what kind of information can we get out there. How could we put it out there in a way that people are also going to talk about it? Because, again, it means a lot more coming from them than it does, you know, from me.

So, this is an example of a video –

[return to the slide with the round goby video paused]

– well, so round gobies are very easily caught on hook and line, and they’re hard to catch in traps and traditional fishery gear, especially when they’re in really low densities. So, in efforts to try to know where round gobies are, in the Lake Winnebago system we’re encouraging anglers to report round gobies. So, this little video, we bought a Facebook ad, put it out there. It was pretty successful in those regards. But just encourages people to report round gobies and what to look for in I.D. of a video –

[Narrator of the video]

Gobies are bad.

[in the video a man uses a red marker to circle the illustration of the goby and put a line through the circle]

They invade our waters and threaten the other fish that are good.

[the illustrator adds a new round goby sitting upright and shaking a fist at other types of fish which the illustrator has drawn opposite the goby]

[goby in a menacing voice]

I’m going to eat your eggs.

You can tell it’s a goby by its bulging eyes, black spot, and the weird fin on its belly.

[illustrator draws a close-up of a goby and uses red arrows to point out the gobys characteristics]

[Narrator of video]

If you accidentally catch a goby –

[Illustrator draws a goby at the end of a fishing line]

– don’t throw it back. That’s bad.

[Illustrator draws a circle around the caught goby in red marker and draws a line through it]

Or use it for bait.

[Illustrator draws a goby in a bucket labelled Bait]

That’s bad too.

[Illustrator draws a red circle with a slash through it over the top of the Bait drawing]

Please do what you can to keep our waters in Wisconsin goby-free.

[Illustrator draws a map of Wisconsin and then draws in a lake and some rivers in blue]

If you find a goby on an inland waterway –

[Illustrator draws the logo for the Wisconsin D.N.R. and colors it in]

– just call the D.N.R. The good fish –

[The illustrator draws a variety of good fish]

– will thank you by multiplying naturally –

[Illustrator draws a fisherman with a fishing pole with a non-goby fish on the end of it]

– and you’ll catch less gobies and more good fish.

[The illustrator draws the words The End above and below the fishermans fishing line]

End of story.

So, we did get –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– we did get some comments that the video wasn’t scientific enough.

[laughter]

It also doesn’t show a goby.

[laughter]

But we made some tradeoffs. And in terms of, you know, reaching a lot of people, we reached almost 35,000 people with this video. Any other video I’ve ever made has struggled to get over 1,000 views. So, you know, I think that there’s something to this approach.

Whoops.

Wrong button.

So, we won’t watch this whole video, but we’re also trying to create tools for people to use online too. So, we have our Clean Boats, Clean Waters program. Some people, the – the volunteers maybe don’t inspect all of the time. They only inspect, you know, the occasional weekend once a month. So, they don’t always feel comfortable going out and talking to boaters. So, we made these scenarios to help people feel comfortable in maybe some weird situations that they might get into or some – some different situations. And these are – have actually got a couple hundred views in the past year that we’ve had them out. But it’s just to give you an idea of, you know, kind of what happens at a watercraft inspection.

[Video of a male volunteer watercraft inspector talking to a female boater who has a cooler at her feet and a boat behind her]

[Male volunteer watercraft inspector]

Water from boat and even coolers like this that might contain catch. Unfortunately, in the lakes here in Madison, we’ve got spiny water fleas. So, it’s really important to drain this water so these things don’t get to another lake.

Also, with your catch, in Wisconsin you need to drain all the water. We don’t want to be transporting live fish.

[Female boater]

Yeah, and I’m well aware that I have to drain everything. I don’t use my live well.

[Tim Campbell, off-camera]

So, not particularly exciting if you’re not interested in Clean Boats, Clean Waters, but –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– a lot of our watercraft inspectors have found these things very useful in refreshing on different scenarios. It empowers them and makes them feel comfortable when they’re at the landing, which hopefully helps them inspect more often.

Wrong button again.

So, something I’ve been spending too much time on is a video on spiny water fleas, which has turned into more of like a short feature film of about 7 minutes.

[laughter]

But I’ve been working with Dr. Brett Shaw here on campus, and he’s had this idea to try to come up with something that combines the arts, the natural sciences, and social sciences. We – you know, it’s something people have been talking about. You see a lot of films or displays that combine the arts and, you know, some sciences, but it maybe doesn’t help promote a sustainable behavior that we’d like to see. So, spiny water fleas obviously here in Madison are a big deal, but they’re also kind of a priority species of us statewide because they’re only in a handful of lakes across the state. So, you know, this is something we’ve wanted to talk about and really talk about the actions that you need to take to prevent the spread of spiny water fleas, which, you know, is cleaning your anchors and draining the water, which is a little bit different than what we normally tell people of like picking the weeds off your boat. But this video, admittedly, is really kind of weird. [laughs] I’ll show you a short clip of it. But, you know, it draws on a lot of social science theory that Brett’s more the expert on than I – I am. But we’re really targeting male boaters and anglers. And we’re really looking for that social media crowd that helps us share it because we obviously don’t have a ton of money to pay for advertising, but if this can “go viral,” you get a big bang for your buck.

[Video starts]

[Man dressed in a German World War One Uniform with multicolored vortices flashing a vibrating behind his head]

Hi, spiny water fleas. We should be everywhere –

[two smaller versions of the narrator with small prosthetic arms flowing out of the German World War One uniform start dancing on either side of the narrators head]

– and eat as much as we can. Forget the fish and the fishermen.

[four more mini narrators show up dancing on both sides of the narrators head, two on the right and two on the left]

We’ll eat all the little fishes’ food. We’ll get caught in the little fishes’ mouths with our spiked tails.

[the mini dancing narrators disappear and are replaced by four floating heads of the narrator and the background changes to a vertigo-like spinning circles]

Ha, ha, ha, ha!

[The floating narrator heads disappear]

There’ll be more algae –

[Two mini dancing narrators reappear on each side of the narrator]

– in the water.

[the vertigo background changes from black-and-white to green]

Green water! Green water!

[the dancing narrators disappear and two floating narrators heads start spinning around the narrator and the background changes to a Japanese rising sun motif with the rays being green instead of red]

Ha, ha, ha, ha!

[the floating heads disappear]

We shall spread via their bilge water –

[two negative images of the narrator, one red and one blue, appear to the left and right of the middle narrator and then slowly move to the middle to merge with the original narrators image]

– and on their muddy, unclean anchors.

[multiple narrators heads appear behind him in differing colors, from lower left to lower right around his head – purple, red, brown, green, blue, violet]

Ha, ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!

[Video ends]

[Tim Campbell, off-camera]

So, by the end of the video –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– I think most people end up really hating this guy.

[laughter]

Which that emotional reaction is actually supposed to make people care about the subject. And we’re really trying to reach these people that don’t already care. The people that are kind of like “Eh, I don’t know if I care about spiny water fleas.” Hopefully this makes them care about spiny water fleas. [laughs]

[laughter]

And then do something to stop that guy from going everywhere.

So, you should see this next week cause it’s going to go viral. We’ll send press releases out next week.

[laughter]

You might see it via email, but it’ll probably just pop up on Facebook anyway.

We also do a lot of work on new pathways. I’ll kind of go through these quickly. The internet –

[slide titled – The Internet – and featuring the headline – 1995 and noting that Amazon.com started selling each and everything online, and along with that the Jeff Bezos starts first commercial-free 24-hour, internet only radio stations. Then Radio HK and NetRadio start broadcasting. Companies like Dell and Cisco started using internet in their transactions. Online auction started by eBay. The slide also features screenshots of the first webpages for Amazon and eBay]

– is kind of a new pathway, relative to the last time we wrote our strategic plan. So, that’s what Amazon looked like, I think, in ’95. That’s what eBay looked like in 2003. You know, when we wrote our last strategic A.I.S. management plan, you couldn’t buy things online. That didn’t exist. And now this is a way to get species from all over the world, whether you want plants, animals in the aquarium trade or the water garden trade. We can get a lot of really invasive things shipped right to your door.

[the slide animates to the right revealing an new slide titled – GLDIATR – and the logo for the Great Lakes Biotic Symposium]

So, I’ve spent a lot of time working on these organisms and trade pathways. I hosted a first of its kind symposium in Milwaukee two years ago that brought together researchers, managers, one other group, law enforcement folks, I think, [laughs] to talk about O.I.T. (Organisms in Trade) issues and develop a plan moving forward. So, we’ve done some pretty cool work there. You can see that more at –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– seagrant.wisc.edu/oit. You can see all the presentations and the fact sheet there that came up kind of with our deliverables and plan forward from that. And we’ll be having another one next year. And then another, you know, way that we’ve been addressing these O.I.T. pathways is the Great Lakes detector of invasives, aquatics and trades. And it’s actually a program that has some machine learning components that finds that you can input all the invasive species you want it to look for, and it’s smart enough to figure out when it’s a blog post talking about this versus something that’s selling it. So, it’s made it a lot easier for us to find the invasive species online that people are selling, so that way we can reach out to those people selling them to make sure that they can’t sell them here in Wisconsin.

We’ve also had, you know, specialized watercraft. So, we’ve been reaching –

[new slide titled – Specialized Watercraft – featuring two photos of said watercraft – one a boat camouflaged to look like reeds and the other a racing boat]

– boaters and fishermen, you know, in general, but things that, you know –

[the slide zooms into the racing boat photograph]

– we don’t really think a lot about, like, for example, wakeboard boats that really only started being produced as is in about 2000.

[the slide animates down and to the left to reveal the schematics and manuals for a wake boat]

They have ballast systems. Like little, mini transoceanic shipping vessels –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– which is not something we really knew because as much as I would like to be a wakeboarder, I’m not. So, you know, we’ve done a little bit of preliminary research, published a paper. That should be out next month regarding that. But, you know, they have these little ballast tanks in them. They contain lots of water. Some of these things will have over, I think, 20 gallons of water left in the ballast tanks, when we used to be concerned with, like, a cup of water in a fishing boat, but these have 20 gallons and hold live plankton communities that can survive weeks.

And – and that all kind of grew into – along with a whole bunch of other things – the American Boat and Yacht Council developing a new standard for boat manufacturers to help design boats in ways that either make it easier for consumers to prevent the spread of invasive species or just make it so the boats don’t move invasive species in general. So, make it so the trailers don’t collect plant material, or make it so the ballast tanks drain more completely. So, that’s been a really cool product of that work.

And then, you know, we’re –

[return to the Specialized Watercraft slide now with the photo of the camouflaged boat enlarged]

– starting to think a lot more about waterfowl hunters. You know, we think about boaters in the summer, but we don’t really think about waterfowl hunters that are moving a whole bunch of plant material and mud around on their boats. So, how are we going to reach them? What kind of risks are there?

[the slide zooms out, pans down and reveals a new area of the timeline labelled – Our Partnerships – featuring three photos, one of a messaging flag at a boat launch, one of a volunteer inspector at a boat launch, and one of Tim on a lake in a research vessel]

And then, I’m not going to spend a ton of time on this because –

[the slide zooms out and pans down to reveal five more photos, one of a professional fisherman giving a talk, one of a teacher and two students in a high school classroom, one of a research holding up two fish, and one of a gathering of researchers]

– each one of these things is a 20-minute story in and of itself, but we have a great partnership of people throughout the state doing work to prevent the –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– spread of invasive species. Whether, you know, it’s some of our pro fishermen partners – this is former World Walleye Champion Johnnie Candle sporting our Stop Aquatic Hitchhikers tattoo. A couple of our different invasive species coordinators that are either out in the field doing fieldwork or working with students and putting together poster contests to help educate them about –

[return to the Our Partnership slide with the five photos]

– aquatic invasive species. A coworker, Jamie, that works in Green Bay that runs the Exotic Animal Rescue that helps prevent, you know, the pet release pathway. These are all our invaders – invader crusaders award winners for invasive species awareness month, which actually – actually starts today. So, happy invasive species awareness month. So, I work with a fantastic network of people that help me implement the programs that I design but also give me a lot of really good feedback and ideas for new programs that we need. So, I guess I’d like to say I don’t actually do a lot of work.

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

I take all the work that people want me to do, kind of pull a few strings, and have other people do it. And I talk about a lot of the work that other people do too.

So, at that, I think I gave you like a really big overview of what’s happened, what’s going on. I missed a lot of stuff, so I’m sorry if I didn’t get those questions. I’d be happy to answer them here in a second. But this book just came out a couple of months ago, “Lake Invaders.”

[slide featuring the book cover of the book – Lake Invaders – by William Rapai]

There’s a really interesting guy that I sit on the Great Lakes Aquatic Nuisance Species Panel, and it’s open to the public. No people or nor members of the public ever show up because it’s during the week, during the day at some building a long ways out of Ann Arbor. But this author showed up for about three or four years straight just to try to get his thumb on aquatic invasive species issues in the Great Lakes and wrote a pretty good summary about what’s been happening in the Great Lakes region for the past 10 or 15 years. Read it. It was really interesting, so that’s also available at the Wisconsin Water Library. So, if I missed something, Bill probably covers it in his book.

[the slide zooms out to reveal the whole timeline and areas of his presentation and then zooms into an area at the bottom that has a photo of Tim and his contact information]

And I just returned my copy, so it’s there for you to check out. So, at that, if you have any questions that you don’t get answered tonight, you can always shoot me an email. I’m on Twitter.

[slide with Tims contact information along with a photo of Tim and the logos of all the organizations with whom Tim works – Sea Grant, Wisconsin D.N.R., the Environmental Resource Center, and U.W.-Extension]

Pretty active there, so that’s always a good place to get me. And if you want to follow more kind of broadly what we’re doing here in Wisconsin, we do a good job of updating our Wisconsin A.I.S. Twitter account too just to see what people are doing across the state cause I think we do a lot of really cool stuff. And I think you’d all be really interested in that. So, thanks for your time –

[Tim Campbell, on-camera]

– and I’d be happy to answer any questions.

[applause]