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A Look at Frozen Lake Ecology
| Join naturalists Moose Johnson and John Kohlstedt as they explore Wolf Lake with one of the classes attending Wolf Ridge. The February sun blazed over Lake Superior. The cold spell had ended and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to drag Moose Johnson out onto Wolf Lake for a little ice fishing, Wolf Ridge style. |  |
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| As we crunched across the frozen white expanse of Wolf Lake we could see small groups of students moving in the distance. Moose was still half asleep and it took us a few minutes to join a team of sixth graders at one of a series of colorful insulated covers. The covers, we immediately discovered, were protecting pre-drilled ten inch holes in the ice. The students bustled about lifting the covers, dipping slush, measuring ice thickness, and dropping the transducer of a sonar into the holes. A girl with a neon yellow jacket passed the information to the boy in neon green with the clipboard. “Ice thickness is 18 inches, water depth is 23 feet, flat bottom....oh look! a fish is registering on the screen about five feet down. He’s heading for the next hole, come on.” As they zoomed away I could see that Moose was waking up and looking confused. “I thought this was fishing class, Vulture.” |
“There’s more to fishing than just wetting a line these days, Moose. The kids are spending the first hour or so on the ice learning about the lake environment so they can be good anglers. They’re using sonars to check out lake structure.
| We trudged over to one of the dark houses and peered in the door. “Hey, shut the door, we gotta have it dark in here!” Shouted a small form hunched over a large hole in the floor. The magical light from the hole glowed up into the dark house and we watched students jigging with colorful decoys, hoping to lure a predatory walleye into view. Another form was slowly swishing a plankton net around the edges of the hole. “Food chain study?” Moose whispered. The form nodded. We didn’t witness any big fish attracted to the lure but when one of the students held up the plankton collection bottle to the open window we all went gaw-gaw. The light shining into the little glass jar revealed a soup of tiny daphnia, cyclops and seed shrimps, all jetting around in happy chaos. In his excitement Moose was beginning to jet around himself. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have here for your viewing pleasure, The Bottom of the Food Chain , starring benthos, neuston, nekton...” |  |
A crew of kids from another dark house interrupted the old guy’s theatrics, pounding on the door and clamoring to know the purpose of the giant saw hanging on the outside of the house. Moose bounced out and ordered the kids to gather round and follow him to the ice cutting yard. In a moment he was lustily sawing away at a foot wide slot in the ice.
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| “You young-uns may not believe it but I used to do this as a kid. Puttin’ up ice in an ice house we had on the shore was the only way we had to refrigerate food in the old days. Why, I used to saw cakes of ice all day long...(blah, blah, blah).” He soon tired of the sawing and let the kids take over but did not give up the history lesson until several gigantic ice blocks had been hauled up out of the water and stood like cubes of blue crystal in the sunshine. By now class time was running short and when the instructor shouted “catch and release,” the crowd grabbed jigging rods and dispersed across the lake looking for the ice holes that promised the best conditions for catching a fish. A young girl in neon pink handed us both baited rods. “Well, Vulture,” said Moose as we fished back and forth in the long slot the students had cut, “it appears as if you’re providing these young-uns with a good introduction to the art and science of sport fishing. The old days of the ‘Lotsa big fish fast’ attitude are ending and we’ve got to give the next generation some new ideas so they can assume their roles as stewards of our natural resources.” |
“Why Moose, you old dog,” I said innocently, “I do believe you’re learning some new tricks. Maybe you’ll even get a neon green coat for Christmas next year.”
ECOLOGY CLASSES
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