Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
WATER’S EDGE
The worldwide demand for freshwater research grows stronger every day—and an increasing number of Milwaukeeans think their city is in the best position to meet it.
BY ERIK GUNN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN MIYAZAKI
On a brisk April morning, the research vessel Neeskay is plying the Lake Michigan waves off Milwaukee’s lakefront, the dull roar of its Detroit Diesel engine filling the air.
As the 71-foot boat draws to its first stop five miles offshore, a team of scientists disperses to their assigned tasks. Associate Scientist Carmen Aguilar-Diaz and lab tech Margaret Malone lower a video camera into the water to inspect the lake floor and videotape the findings. Senior Scientist Russell Cuhel sets up a sophisticated sensor array to descend slowly, collecting lake water and mapping the conditions from the surface to the bottom, nearly 100 feet below. Lab techs Tyler Kehoe and Brittany Widner begin preparing a series of sample bottles for the water that the sensor will fetch to the surface.
The scientists and their boat are part of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Great Lakes WATER Institute, the largest academic freshwater research facility on the Great Lakes and one of the nation’s leading centers for freshwater research. The WATER Institute—the acronym stands for Wisconsin Aquatic Technology and Environmental Research—houses a series of research programs taking on subjects that are as wide ranging as the Great Lakes themselves: why Wisconsin’s favorite fish-fry delicacy is dwindling, how to spur the productivity of fish farming, what to do about invading quagga mussels and whether the unique ability of fish to cure their own blindness might someday be conferred on human beings.
But the institute is also the fulcrum for a much broader project: turning Milwaukee into nothing less than the Silicon Valley of the planet’s most precious resource.
Two decades ago, Milwaukee coined a tourism slogan: “A Great Place on a Great Lake.” Though long discarded, that tagline foreshadowed an economic development campaign to make the area a world center for water-related industry and research—a “World Water Hub,” as it has to come to be known by some.
It’s a campaign that marries the city’s machine-shop heritage with its natural resources. Essential to it is the recognition by businesses, the government, academic institutions and non-profit groups that in the future, water will be “the next oil,” in the words of one consultant to the World Water Hub project.
One of the project’s main proponents is Richard Meeusen, the chairman and CEO of Badger Meter, a publicly held manufacturer of fluid technology equipment like water meters and control valves. And when it comes to Milwaukee’s water research and technology initiative, Meeusen is not just a founder—he’s an evangelist.
“Actually, Milwaukee has always been the Silicon Valley of water technology. The problem is that we’ve forgotten it,” says Meeusen, an ebullient man who effortlessly reels off the area’s water-related history.
“Wet” industries like breweries, tanneries and slaughterhouses helped build Milwaukee, he explains. “And around those wet industries grew a lot of little businesses that served them.”
For Meeusen, it’s a point of personal pride. “That’s exactly how Badger Meter started,” he says. “Two German immigrants in the late 1800s were making parts for Miller Brewing—valves and fittings and things like that—in their machine shop when they realized they could make a better water meter. Now, here we are, 104 years later, and Badger Meter is the largest manufacturer of water meters in North America. That simple story played out again and again and again. Those little companies have grown into a sizeable concentration of water technology companies.”
Sammis White, a professor in the department of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, counts at least 120 firms in the area employing 20,000 people, with revenues representing as much as 4 percent of the global market for water-related industry. They cover categories that range from wastewater treatment to environmental engineering to recreational gadgets. They include Meeusen’s Badger Meter and the water-heater manufacturer A.O. Smith—whose CEO, Paul Jones, co-chairs the recently formed Water Council with Meeusen—as well as toilet makers, sewage treatment firms, manufacturers of sewer-inspection miniature TV cameras, boat builders, and makers or suppliers of valves, membranes and industrial controls used by water industries.
Meeusen, White and others believe the area can become not just a hub, but also a magnet, drawing more water-related industry to the area. So does the Milwaukee 7—the seven-county regional economic development group encompassing the greater metro area that formed the Water Council two years ago to bring together the different institutions supporting the World Water Hub project.
“Water is increasingly being recognized as the next oil, the next truly essential ingredient for the survival and growth of the human race,” wrote White in a paper for the Water Council. “With that recognition comes greater business interest in solving water problems.”
Many in Milwaukee have begun to seize on this opportunity— but while it enjoys an advantage now, the city is not alone.
“The race is on,” White warns. “Milwaukee is out of the starting gate early, but unless the community steps on the accelerator hard and soon, placing a bet squarely on the expansion of this industry … Milwaukee will lose the race. That should not be allowed to happen.”
White’s words are falling on receptive ears. Jones says that from the first steps that he and Meeusen took two years ago to convey their vision of Milwaukee as a World Water Hub, “We were overwhelmed by the interest that we got from the community.”
Two “Water Summits” have been held so far, to increasing interest from local business and civic interests—and everyone wants in.
“We have business and industry, academia and the government all working extremely well together,” Jones says. “It is amazing to me the amount of energy that has been developed by hundreds of people wanting to be involved in this vision.”
The academic part of the initiative is chiefly represented by the WATER Institute, which Jones calls “a relatively unknown gem.”
Headquartered in a former ceramic tile factory that overlooks Lake Michigan just south of Downtown Milwaukee, the WATER Institute houses a collection of research projects and shares space with other related agencies and programs: the UWM Center for Great Lakes Studies and the Aqua-culture and Fisheries Research Center; the Marine and Freshwater Biomedical Sciences Center, where researchers look at how toxic substances affect aquatic and human life; two units of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, which keep an eye on commercial fisheries and enforce DNR regulations on the lake; and a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency research vessel.
The institute began more than 30 years ago with the creation of the Center for Great Lakes Studies. After that program had grown, the WATER Institute was formed in the late 1990s to act as an umbrella for more than a dozen university scientists who do research at the center.
Russell Cuhel and Carmen Aguilar-Diaz are two of them. Their research examines how minerals and microorganisms interact in the lake system, down to the cellular level. Out on the WATER Institute’s Neeskay—the boat’s name comes from the Ho-Chunk Indian word for “pure, clean water”—they are witness to the way invasive species like quagga mussels have taken over Lake Michigan in just a few years.
The lake was once rich with yellow perch, the favorite fish fry menu item for so many Milwaukee Friday night diners—until a devastating one-two punch of invasive species, that is.
The first was the zebra mussel, deposited in the lake from the ballast water of oceangoing freighters that had collected the creatures in Europe. Perch spawned either close to shore or out on clay reefs which were once clean, bare expanses—perfect for fish to launch their families.
Then came the zebras. “They covered the areas where the perch liked to spawn,” Cuhel says. “The perch didn’t like to spawn on the zebra mussel beds, so they went out further where it was deep enough that the zebra mussels didn’t go. And then they spawned there.” The baby perch increasingly failed to reach adulthood. Scientists are still looking at exactly why.
Luckily, the zebra mussels were kept somewhat in check by the cold Lake Michigan winters, which they couldn’t survive. What followed was another story, however.
First detected in Lake Michigan less than 10 years ago, quagga mussels arrived in much the same way as their predecessors—and once the resilient species took hold, Cuhel says, “within three years they had completely changed the face of the water.”
Able to survive the cold much better than the zebras, the quaggas have taken their place with a vengeance. Bait fish were affected first, because they fed on the same lake plankton that the mussels ate. The perch and alewives were next.
“They spawn in shore, hatch out in late May or early June, and then try to get blown out by the current and the wind into mid-lake where they’re going to feed,” Cuhel explains. During all of this, the baby fish consume what remains of the yolk that feeds them before and after they hatch, but they also need to eat plankton.
With the explosion of quaggas, though, “the plankton are decimated in June, so the baby fish don’t have anything to eat,” Cuhel says. “So they don’t get big, strong or fast enough to get out of there when something comes to eat them.”
The mussels “completely collapsed the fisheries,” he says. “It was the single biggest event that’s happened ecologically in Lake Michigan since the sea lamprey”— a parasitic fish that ravaged indigenous game fish in the Great Lakes in the last century.
The images that come back from the Neeskay’s underwater television camera are testimony to that: When lab tech Meg Malone maneuvers the camera to pan around the lake bed, the screen often shows her a carpet of mussel shells as far as the eye can see.
Back on land inside the WATER Institute’s two fisheries labs, researchers are expanding the role of aquaculture in the face of depleted wild fisheries. Perch, sturgeon and lake trout are three of more than 40 species being studied.
“Some 20 percent of the world’s protein comes from seafood, and yet there’s hardly a single wild harvested fishery these days that isn’t over-exploited,” says WATER Institute director Val Klump. “Projections are that within the next 30 to 35 years, those fisheries will collapse if the current trend continues.” Another projection, though, offers hope: In the next 20 years, if not sooner, half of all seafood will come from fish that’s been farmed, not caught.
Klump shows off a 5,500-gallon blue bathtub-like tank stocked with 30,000 yellow perch, each about an inch and a half long and around three months old. “These fish are unique because they were born in January,” he says. “You won’t find yellow perch this age anywhere else in the world.”
One goal is to develop fish brood stocks that spawn at different times of the year. “If you’re in the fish farming business, you want to have fish coming down the chute all the time,” Klump explains. So the institute is conducting extensive tests on how to maximize fish production. One way is to develop water-recirculation systems that can hold the water at an optimal temperature to encourage faster growth, which would let the fish farmer speed up the growing cycle.
“The goal is to raise these fish to market size,” Klump says. “[Restauratuers] used to want them at 13 or 14 months, then they said 12 months, now they’re talking 10 months.” The time is up when the fish reaches 7 or 9 inches long. “They like to serve a lot of little fillets, a mess of perch. They don’t want one big fish.”
The WATER Institute itself is on the verge of becoming a much bigger fish—and those who see Milwaukee as a Water Hub are instrumental in promoting that. Buoyed by the Water Council and participating businesses as well as by Gov. Jim Doyle, who included $240 million in the newest state budget to help cover the costs, UWM is preparing to launch a School of Freshwater Sciences which would absorb the institute.
The money will allow the school to expand faculty and research programs, as well as refurbish the WATER Institute’s headquarters and research facilities. It would also facilitate the purchase of a new custom-made research boat.
The proposed school is “something that we’ll look back on and say, ‘That was the event that got us over the top,’” Jones says.
He sees it as the spark that will draw more water scientists and their students to the Milwaukee area, providing the brainpower not just for basic science but also for commercial applications. Existing companies like his own will hire those students, further bolstering the economy.
And when the academic base for water-related study is built, “it will attract industry,” Jones says. “We’ve already got 20,000 people working in this area on water-related things. That could be 50,000 or 100,000 people in a very short period of time, just by attracting industries. They’re going to go where the scientists are that can work with them.”
Jones agrees with White that competition is keen. “Somebody’s going to do it,” he says. “I think it should be Milwaukee. And I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that happens.”
He’s not the only one spreading the word. In April, the U.N. designated Milwaukee as one of 13 “Global Compact Cities,” based on an application that highlighted the city’s water technology industry. Milwaukee is one of only two U.S. cities—the other being San Francisco, whose Business Council on Climate Change encourages area businesses to adhere to eco-friendly practices—with this designation, and one of two worldwide that has a water focus. This significant recognition will bolster the city’s image as a water hub.
It appears that for Jones, his fellow advocates and the crew aboard the Neeskay, the coast seems clear—and there’s water on the horizon.
