Nanosilver kills microbial life, and, as the “nano-” in its name suggests, the antibacterial battle takes place in minutiae, each particle so small that a million of them could fit on the period at the end of this sentence. Nanoparticles have applications in technology, medicine, and agriculture. As Cheever’s post-doctoral supervisor, Maggie Xenopoulos, an aquatic biologist at Trent, said to me earlier, “They’re the future, and yet we have no idea if they’re affecting our environment.” In one laboratory study, scientists found cranio-facial deformities in minnows exposed as embryos to high concentrations for ninety-six hours. But lab studies only show so much; a beaker or bottle experiment does not necessarily reflect the complexities of an entire lake. If nanosilver killed off too many species or a key component in the web of life, the whole ecosystem might malfunction and collapse. To learn what happens in situ, Cheever’s team intended to spend two years sending an infinitesimal galaxy of particles into the lake.
Lake 221 lies within the bounds of the Experimental Lakes Area, a field site familiar to readers of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Limnology and Oceanography and theJournal of Plankton Research. Since 1968, fifty-eight freshwater basins contained by 200 square kilometres of granite and boreal forest have functioned as real-world test tubes, untouched by human hands except by scientific design. Lakes 226 and 227 demonstrated that phosphorus led to algal pollution, which convinced politicians to mandate the reformulation of detergents. Sulphuric acid caused a dramatic shift in species in Lake 223, bringing about international emissions limits to address acid rain. Long-term data has shown the lakes to be early warning sentinels for climate change. More recently, in an experiment on Lake 658, scientists demonstrated how mercury accumulated in fish; and on Lake 260, scientist Karen Kidd identified a single chemical, the synthetic estrogen in birth control pills, as the cause of mass feminization in male fish and a cataclysmic population crash. Anywhere else, such massive die-offs might have resulted from confounding factors: human activity, industrial effluent, or any number of synthetic organic compounds found in pharmaceuticals and personal care products. But the studies at the lake pinpointed cause and effect more decisively. They have drawn generations of scientists and students to the boreal shield, like pilgrims to the holy waters of ecological research. Cheever made her first pilgrimage in 2012. (...)
Six months earlier, on May 17, 2012, at 7:55 a.m., as Cheever’s colleagues headed out from the lab for a day in the field, the phone rang. Michelle Wheatley, regional director for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the Experimental Lakes Area’s federal overseer, called a mandatory emergency teleconference for the half-dozen full-time employees who happened to be at the field station that day (it employs seventeen staff in total). The government scientists dropped their packs and rain gear and gathered around a scratched wooden table inside the library of Hungry Hall. Wheatley told them the ELA would be closing within a year and their services would no longer be required. The meeting lasted forty-five minutes and ended with tears.
The department made no official announcement. In an apparent effort to avoid a paper trail, all communication about the closure took place verbally, over the phone or in face-to-face meetings. The shutdown had been precipitated by cuts proposed in Bill C-38, the Conservatives’ federal omnibus Budget Implementation Act. Buried within 400 pages of amendments and billions of dollars worth of cuts was a provision that effectively pulled the plug on the ELA’s $2 million in federal funding. In “affected” letters sent to federal employees to notify them that their positions might be eliminated, the department explained that the closure reflected “the government’s efforts to reduce the deficit, aimed to modernize government, to make it easier for Canadians to deal with government, and to right-size the costs of operations and program delivery.” The department’s research needs would be met by other facilities, wrote David Burden, the official who sent the letters. He did not specify which facilities; nor did he respond to a request for additional comment.
One scientist, who asked for anonymity after being instructed not to speak with the media without prior written consent, said, “People say these cuts were made at a high level outside of the department, which is likely true, but at some point they were offered up. People higher up would have no idea what the ELA is.” The source wondered if the motivation could be political: “The bulk of the cuts to scientific research programs come in the Prairie and Arctic regions, which have the most industrial development; the new Ring of Fire, the oil sands, huge industrial projects. It doesn’t quite add up.” (...)
The Experimental Lakes were formed nearly 10,000 years ago, on the shallow eastern shore of Lake Agassiz, a vast, irregular basin that once covered the middle of the continent. As the glacial waters receded, they left Lake Winnipeg and the Lake of the Woods; and the Red River Valley, which drains the broad, flat plains northward into Hudson Bay. Eons later, in 1887, far beyond what would have been the river’s southernmost banks, at a scientific meeting in Peoria, Illinois, an entomologist named Stephen Forbes became one of the first naturalists in North America to give a semi-coherent account of a living laboratory. A lake, he wrote, “forms a little world within itself—a microcosm within which all the elemental forces are at work and the play of life goes on in full, but on so small a scale as to bring it easily within the mental grasp.” The idea of lakes’ reflecting the outside world and being tethered to it foreshadowed the discipline of ecology, the study of relationships between things both living and not. Stephen Carpenter, the Stephen Alfred Forbes Professor of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin, explains the discipline’s many challenges this way: “Ecology is not rocket science,” he writes. “It is far more difficult.” To build a rocket entails a certain technical prowess and a society’s worth of resources. To understand an ecosystem requires a patience and persistence similar to that of raising a child: both are autonomous beings, evolving, adapting—and actively not doing what you want.
by Peter Andrey Smith, The Walrus | Read more:
Illustration by Marco Cibola
