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Jeff Reutter : Stone Laboratory's a very unique asset to Ohio State University. This is the oldest freshwater biological field station in the country and we started in 1895. This is the North coast campus, the island campus. We moved here in 1925, this building was built in 1925 and we've been doing regular college courses up here every summer since then. With research going on up here year round. People need to understand the difference between Lake Erie and the other great lakes. Lake Erie's the southernmost, the shallowest, and the warmest of the Great Lakes. Biologically, we are the most productive, in fact, we produce more fish for human consumption from Lake Erie then from the other four Great Lakes combined. So if you're going to study biology or if you're going to work on water quality this is the place to do it.

John Hageman : Stone Lab offers many of the ology classes. Limnology, which is the study of inland waters; fish ecology and ichthyology that studies fish; herpatology that studies reptiles and amphibians; botany that studies plants; entemology that studies insects. And students can get classes anywhere from introductory level to the upper level, 500 and 600 level, graduate classes. We do fish identification labs, bird walks, invertebrate surveys, and really give people a sense of the entire food chain here at Lake Erie. Agency groups even come up and learn about the lake. A variety of groups that get a chance to see the lake first hand.

Jeff Reutter : You know Ohio State has about four thousand faculty members. One of our goals is to focus that tremendous expertise on Lake Erie problems and issues. Each year we'll have about thirty research projects going on up here. Some of them funded by the Sea Grant program, some of them funded by many many different agencies, including the National Science Foundation and Office of Naval Research and on and on and on. But some of them are focused on basic inquiry driven research. We want to know more about how Lake Erie works. And some are focused very much on a specific problem or a specific issue.

Kristin Stanford : This year we're looking at a lot of water snake gobe interactions. So we're doing some maximum prey experiments in the laboratory right now; some digestive trials; all sorts of different things and it changes from year to year.

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Keith Hanson : This is a round gobe. It's a pretty big guy. It's called 'Gobezilla', actually. And these are the guys who've kind of invaded Lake Erie. And they out compete every other fish. They have explosive reproduction. Reproduce like six times a season. So the Lake Erie water snake can go out and forage a come up with, basically, a gobe every single time it goes out and forages. So I think it's the first evidence of an invasive helping to save an endangered species. So it's a pretty interesting ecological interaction.

Kristin Stanford : Right here you can see where we've put a pit tag in him. That's how we individually mark all of the snakes that we're either experimenting with or we're capturing and releasing in the field. It's a small microchip that's about the size of a grain of rice that has an indiviual, unique number and letter code. When we run a scanner over that it tells us what that number is. And so when we take data we can go ahead and put that into our database and lets say we catch this snake about three years later, when it's an adult. We can look and see just kind of the relationship of how quickly they're reaching adult size.

We have four different students that are in the herpatology REU program this year. The REU program stands for the Research Experience for Undergraduates and it's a program we started in 2005. And basically it provides a short research experience for undergraduate students who are interested in, basically pursuing a career in, we hope, research biology or field biology.

Tyler Lawson : So we're on North Bass island right now and among all of the islands it's our lowest snake population density site. And so to try to help increase our survey numbers for this island we have these artificial, we call them snake mats, out all over the island. We put out thirty mats, all along the shoreline. And they kind of attract the snakes because they're dark and black and so they heat up real fast. And it makes it a lot easier to find the snakes, usually, when it's a little more sunny out.

Jennifer Yi : My study is figuring out how well these mats work in catching snakes over here. And I'm taking the temperature of the top of the mat, under the mat, and next to the mat of every mat that we see. And record how many snakes we catch, if any.

Tyler Lawson : So this is a neonate water snake, probably born like last August, early September. And this one's got a very distinct banding pattern. Usually, in the water snakes you'll see that's not the case. You don't see any of that banding that you see right there. So, that's a baby and Sean's experiment, research is to check and see if there's any prey in it. What he's going to do right now is, basically, all you do is you've got to take you're fingers and work it up his belly and if you see if you feel a hard spot anywhere in it and if you feel one, it's got food in there.

Tyler Lawson : Nope. He's hungry.

Tyler Lawson : No food in that guy.

Aaron Wibberley : You know on main campus you learn about these things that are going on in the environment, different interactions between organisms. But, you come up here and you're outside learning about these things. It makes you really want to learn the material because you're seeing how it's applied in nature. And I've also had experience with that with the SCUBA diving as well. Just seeing some of the fish interactions and just some of the stuff you'd never see on main campus. One of the big things I've really noticed is that you bond a lot more with you professors, your teachers up here. Because the class sizes are smaller. One of the classes, I know, is only four people. You eat dinner with your professor, you eat lunch with your professor, you eat breakfast with your professor, you're going on field trips with them . It's just an awesome experience, there's nothing else like it.

Aloah Pope : It's really inspiring when you're working on research or you're working on my class, ichthyology. It's nice to be able to have a background and actually go out and pick samples and be right here in the field. I mean lab work is fun, but field work is so cool. Because I can just go out a few feet from my front door and study what I need to.

John Hageman : It's a beautiful place, great scenery, pleasant to be around. People pay big money to be here. And it's a slice of paradise and it's a valuable treasure for the people of Ohio and for the region.

Jeff Reutter : We really want the impact that Ohio State University has from this laboratory to be as broad as possible. So some of our work is in Conneaut, Ashtabula, Cleveland, or we're working on a project in Lorraine, or we're at Old Woman Creek in Huron, or we're in Sandusky Bay, or we're at Toledo or we're down in the Maumee River and we're concerned about agricultural run off. Those are all issues that we have the capability through the Sea Grant program and this laboratory to address. They're also issues that Ohio State has the expertise within its faculty to work on those problems and solve those problems and that's what we try to do.