Local environmental experts hold lesson on invasives

WHITE LAKE — Last Wednesday at White Lake Public School, 4th and 5th graders saw one of their classrooms completely taken over by a giant web.

This wasn’t a sticky web made by spiders, however, but a yarn creation, made by they themselves.

Or, that is, made by the species they represented.

Each one of the roughly 20 students in attendance, you see, had been given a laminated index card holding the name of a random Wisconsin animal or plant.

One student was a wood turtle. Another was a nymph butterfly. There was a trillium, a sugar maple, a walking stick.

The activity — part of a special lesson plan designed by local Aquatic Invasive Species Coordinator Derek Thorn, Timberland Invasives Partnership Coordinator Abby Vogt, and Langlade County Conservation Specialist Katie Bahr-Bender — charged each student to throw a skein of yarn to another holding the card of an organism that, in nature, actually was known to interact with their own.

Thus, after about ten minutes, the web.

In the middle of the proceedings, the yard ball rested in the hands of a little girl representing a mouse, and a boy across the circle of students from her raised his hand to indicate that he thought he was connected to her.

“What are you?” asked Vogt, who led the web activity.

“A screech owl,” he said.

“What do you think a screech owl will do to a mouse?” Vogt asked the screech owl boy.

“Eat it,” he said, and then the yarn came flying across the center to him.

“So we have a screech owl,” Vogt said. “Does anybody have a plant that a screech owl might interact with?”

A different boy in the circle held up his card and said, “It could sit on a sugar maple.”

“Exactly — throw that over there,” Vogt said, before turning toward a new raised hand. “What do you have?”

“A chickadee,” yet another student said. “It can nest in it and maybe lay its babies.”

After the web had branched out to all corners of the circle of students, Vogt, in a surprise, introduced a new card and handed it to a random student: garlic mustard. The invasive plant often smothers those native to Wisconsin, and then, as the students learned, radically disrupts the web of other life in the area as well.

A student’s starling had nowhere to nest. A boy’s spotted salamander had nowhere to hide.

When a student asked Vogt how garlic mustard would lead to the death of her mosquito — perhaps both to avoid the convoluted explanation and to avoid generating sympathy for the garlic mustard — Vogt decided to skip her, but her point was made: invasive species devastate native ones.

Both Vogt and Bahr-Bender said this was the point of the expert group’s visit to the school.

“We have a really cool web that we can create with everything that lives together,” Vogt told the kids at the end of the yarn web activity. “But sometimes invasive species come in and then that web collapses. So it’s important that we make sure to get all those invasive species out of there, for us to have really awesome ecosystems that are thriving.”

“When they’re holding the yarn and you start asking those questions,” said Bahr-Bender, who facilitated the special class, “you can see the gears start turning.”

Prior to the web activity, they spent around 30 minutes showing the kids real, preserved examples of invasives, both the terrestrial and aquatic variety.

Thorn, for example, spoke about Eurasian watermilfoil, curly leaf pondweed, rusty crayfish, purple loosestrife, and, of course, zebra mussels. While Thorn said zebra mussels don’t reside in White Lake, a similar invasive, the banded mystery snail, does, and disrupts the lake’s natural state of affairs in a similar fashion.

“When they start filtering out the water and making everything clear, it’s an unhealthy type of clear,” Thorn said. “If you would take the analogy of putting a fish in a hot tub, it’s a very stressful environment. Fish and other animals won’t enjoy the warmer water deeper down. It also can cause algae problems later on in the lake’s life because sunlight can reach so much further down and just create more of those nutrients around.”

Many students decided to add their two cents about invasives like zebra mussels and banded mystery snails as well, including about policies they might enact to end it.

“What if you found some and then put them in a ziplock bag with no water and then put them in a freezer?” suggested one very small, earnest girl. Thorn later explained that just removing them and bagging them would probably do the trick, but the girl liked the freezer element to her plan. “Maybe that could be a new way to get rid of the zebra mussels.”

But questions slightly out of left field led on to others that yielded a wealth of interesting information. Freezing actually will kill mussels, he said, but many area lakes containing them are actually too deep to completely freeze during winter, and so they survive.

Dousing them with chemicals is ineffective — they just clam up until it dissipates. It takes vigilance to stop their spread from one lake to another — inspecting anything that has contact with the water like waders or paddles is necessary.

The visit fit seamlessly into the class’ curriculum.

“They’ve already been out to their school forest and interacted with some invasive species,” Vogt said. “They had actually pulled buckthorn in their school forests, so they all got excited when I started talking about buckthorn. They said, ‘Oh, I know what that is!’ They had interacted with it directly.”

One of the students’ teachers, Jonathan Wood, said now, each of the students will design a poster about a specific invasive species pervasive in Wisconsin.

“They do a little research on it and the posters say things like, ‘Warning’ or ‘Beware’ or ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive,’” Wood said. “But this came up and I was like, ‘Fantastic — this is perfect timing.’ It was free, and experts come in and talk, so it’s just great. Also, whenever we have guest speakers, we always try to hit on that, ‘What did you have to do to get this job?’ and ‘What does the day to day look like?’ so that the kids get an idea of, ‘Oh, there’s jobs like that too that I could do.’”

Vogt said visits like Wednesday’s are worthwhile most of all perhaps because of how they begin to give students an understanding of the real natural issues with which their generation will one day have to contend.

“I think it does actually help in the aspect that they get really excited and then they tell their parents about it and then there’s more of an overall conversation that they have with their families, and then it can progress to other places,” Vogt said. “In their own activities that they do, they will be able to make sure that they are doing what they can to prevent invasives.”