Ohio Cooperative Living - June 2020 - Logan

Page 39

Mike Rowe — not once, but twice. A year after that, Rowe described the experience as one of his five worst: “You catch the water snake, and you make it vomit. Then you look under a microscope at the puke to make sure it’s healthy. What she doesn’t tell you is that when you grab the water snake, it will bite you.” Stanford and her team of researchers and students were able to save the Lake Erie water snake, which subsequently has been removed from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s threatened and endangered species list. While the little gem known as Gibraltar Island is owned by OSU, it’s open to all. In fact, half the students and researchers there come from other universities. “Right after my sophomore year, I took a six-week field zoology class,” says Mollie Knighton, a former Heidelberg University environmental science major. “It’s a lot to complete four credit hours in that time — every day it was go-go-go.” After graduating, she spent a year working for the Fish and Wildlife Service in West Virginia and credits her summer on Gibraltar for great preparation.

water sampling this season and has her eye on teaching science-related classes next year. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources is flush with Stone Labbers. Although Travis Hartman never took classes there, he worked on the island as an undergrad in 1990 and has been singing its praises ever since. He’s now the ODNR’s Lake Erie program administrator. “I thoroughly enjoyed it. Spent the whole summer there performing a multitude of tasks,” he says. “I thought I wanted to work on Lake Erie, and being out there for a summer cemented it for me. Now I go there and give fisheries management presentations. A lot of the stuff going on there is cutting-edge that’s applied throughout the Great Lakes and the world. It’s not just work for the classroom, it’s real research for the real world.”

“It’s so completely hands-on — you’re almost never in a classroom. It forces you to engage with the environment and outdoors, plus classmates, instructors, and other researchers. I’m definitely not a person who prefers to be holed up in a lab by themselves for days on end.” Knighton, who recently began working at the Lakeside Chautauqua program at Marblehead, will be conducting

Left page: The “Island Snake Lady,” Kristen Stanford (wearing visor), with students and snakes, in the lab (photos courtesy of Ohio Sea Grant); right page: Stone Lab’s idyllic setting makes spending a summer, or even a day there, an irresistible proposition.

JUNE 2020  •  OHIO COOPERATIVE LIVING   33


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