Transcript: Mr. Harmon Holiday Special (Part 1)

Good morning and welcome back to the show. We are here once again with legendary science teacher, Kilroy shareholder in natural science and environmental studies, and outdoor project advisor, Mr. Terry Harmon. How are you today, Mr.

Harmon? I'm very good, and it's an appropriate weather to talk about some of the best parts of outdoor projects through history is what we do in the snow. Well, I mean, kind of going to that, Mr. Harmon, obviously we're in the winter, we're in the cold, we have the great fire behind you.

But if winter at U.S. kind of had an opening ceremony, what's the first sign that you look for that kind of tells you that this season really has arrived? Well, we've had a series of years where winter was very mild here. And the one great feature of outdoor projects in the winter was the experiences you could have on the frozen pond, a place we call Lake Kilroy. It rarely freezes solid enough to have extensive things like open skating and hockey and ice fishing that used to be more common when winter was actually more predictable with ice.

This year we're lucky. Winter came before Thanksgiving, and it's been continuous cold below freezing so that the pond now has a really good base of ice with snow on top to add to the structure for skating. Today, which is the 16th of December, we had tons of kids out on the ice enjoying that aspect of it. Some skating, some just throwing a puck around.

And that's the thing we want to do to extend the experiences that this beautiful campus that the school sits on can offer. And Mr. Harmon, a lot of those kids, they look on your whiteboard to figure out if the ice is safe enough to be on. But can you explain more about what's going on with the ice to make it safe for the kids to be on, just so that when they're on the ice, they can understand why it's safe for them to be on it?

Right. That's a good question, because to go out on a regular basis without looking at the signs of the environment around the lake would be foolish. we've started measuring the ice thickness for holding people a long time ago and depending on the conditions that produce the ice which is a steady temperature below zero below zero celsius or 32 ice starts to form and when it gets to be about three inches it's generally accepted that it's okay for a few people to go out and stand around together. But we really look for a safe level at around four to six, four to six inches. We're well beyond that now out in the lake.

And so it's absolutely safe as long as certain parts of the pond are avoided. Places where the ice is always kept in a thinner layer because of the stream entering the pond up at the north end the pond and then around the the shores uh it's always a little bit thinner uh because it doesn't bond with the bank of the lake or the shore the shore is giving heat to the to the ice and it doesn't form a firm bond to it except with exceptions so the rule is stay away from shores enter the lake where it's indicated off the school dock and re-enter there the ice is perfectly thick and safe. You know Mr. Harmon when you have one of the very very few experiences of actually living here on campus so whether it's in the winter or the summer or any season when you kind of walk out in the mornings and you kind of hear the campus sound like what goes through your head being kind of steward of nature here at university?

I'm not a steward but I find very to be very fortunate, lucky to have the position of living on the campus. And it is a vantage point to experience nature in all seasons. And it does become a personal issue with me. I have a bird feeder like many people do, and it is a good way to keep a tab on the bird populations that come and go here.

So just as we have maintenance on buildings, it's important to have some awareness of what's going on in the forest surrounding us. So I enjoy that. I take a hike most days and especially to the hatchery to make sure that the water system that's running and incubating our trout eggs is operating despite the freezing temperatures. We also keep data on what's going on down there with water flow and temperature.

And those data are then going to be used for studying trends in our water systems. That's pretty cool. And Mr. Harmon, something I've always wondered is what's going on underneath the ice when it freezes over?

Because it's not like the entire lake is frozen, right? There's still things and fish moving underneath. So what does that look like under the ice and how does the ecosystem change? Well, you know, you're asking a question that is really part, it's called limnology, the study of the physics of lakes, the physics of water and lakes.

As is very easily determined with a thermometer and water in different temperature regimes, water is the most anomalous physical material in the universe. Its properties allow us to have life as we know it. The oceans don't freeze to the bottom and neither do ponds. And that has to do with the physical state of water at different temperatures.

So if we want to start with an annual look at water in a pond, such as here at university school, if we start in the summer, by the time we get to high summer in July, the amount of heat energy that's impingent on the lake surface from the sun, which is at a high angle, is increasing so that by the end of the summer period, the lake has absorbed an enormous amount of energy. So water is a great absorber of energy and storing of energy. We know, too, that that kind of principle is applied also to the oceans, such as the Atlantic, the Gulf Stream, which originates along the equator to the south of Florida, then coming westward encounters the Florida Peninsula, is pushed northward up along New England and then into eastern Canada, and then arcs right going east along south of Iceland and Greenland, and imparts a rather warmer summer in the northern Atlantic regions. Europe is kept warm by that same principle.

And then the current of course turns into a current that goes southward along the African coast called the Benguela Current And that clockwise gyre is distributing the heat that provided by the sun On our pond, our water temperature as of this year, which we had quite a sustained hot period, got up to 81 degrees Fahrenheit. And that was the peak we measured. At that point, the water being warm is in the least dense state that would occur in our pond. So as water warms, as does other things, it expands.

It'll expand all the way up to 100 degrees Celsius or 212, which is the boiling temperature for water. You could say, well, the lake is not boiling. No, but it's storing tremendous amount of heat. And if we look at the lake in its particles, if we look at a milliliter of lake water, as it is reaching the top of its temperature regime at 100 degrees Celsius or 212, it will lag for a while until it absorbs 450 calories per milliliter before it goes off as vapor.

So to make a lake start to evaporate or any water, you can prove yourself on the stove with this, with a bottle of water. It will be a long time before it boils. That lag is caused by the property of water to hang on to calories of temperature until it reaches a point where it can come off. Those calories have been accounted for as for a milliliter 450.

On the other end, which we're talking about to begin with about ice, water will reach zero degrees, which it will before it freezes. and then it will stay there for a long time as a liquid until it gives off 80 calories. It's not something to dwell too much on, but at the boiling end, it's 450 calories. At the freezing end, it's 80 calories. So water will stay as liquid as 0 degrees or 32 degrees Fahrenheit until each milliliter gives off 80 calories.

So, this principle is obviously used along the shores of the Great Lakes in agriculture. We all know that Lake Erie has a huge mass of water, and that size of a lake conditions the climate along the shore. Within 10 miles of the shore, we can actually grow peaches. We can grow grapes.

We can see a fantastic apple harvest. So you get this staggered season. Within 10 miles of the lake, you have a completely different agricultural belt. You wouldn't raise peaches here, but you can raise them in Lake County up by Madison and Grand River.

So that all has to do with these properties of water. To finish this thing on the ice, once that water loses, that milliliter loses 80 calories, bingo, it will form a solid crystal. Now it is a solid. Just as solid as a piece of concrete.

And as you know, it has weird properties. As it forms the solid, instead of shrinking as most materials would when you chill them to freezing, it expands. So it breaks water pipes, it'll expand, break concrete like it was nothing. The force of the expansion of those molecules when they finally become solid.

But that expansion does another thing for it. What is it? It makes them less dense than the water below it, and up it rises. So just before the lake freezes over, the top of the lake is at zero.

The bottom of the lake is actually warmer. It's down at four degrees Celsius, which is the temperature of maximum density. After four degrees Celsius or about, what, 35 degrees or so, that water, the water will actually expand and come up. So it's always the surface that's ready to freeze has a less density than the water at the bottom.

Otherwise, ice would not float and we'd be in big trouble. Well, Mr. Harman, you know, that's incredibly interesting. But one of the things that I was also very interested is that in recent history, you know, we've had incredibly cold winters, right?

I mean, especially last winter, I can personally remember it being colder than just usual in my mind. Can you kind of, do you remember a specific winter at U.S. that felt totally different from others, either harsher, weirder, or just a little more crazier than usual? You know, you can go to any weather office, and they have records back 100, 150 years, but here, what strikes me as the real challenge winter was the winter of 1977 into 1978. So in 1977, we started out with very similar kind of winters we have now.

Very cold before Thanksgiving and a tremendous lake effect storm off Lake Erie, which is another property of water that we haven't discussed. But for the same reason we can grow peach trees on the South Shore of Lake Erie. It's the same connection to what we get as a huge snowfall when the warmer lake uh adds a lot of humidity to the air that's coming from canada when the wind is right from the north in the the snow period we will have very little snow along the lake and then as soon as it hits the rise of land here south of the lake and especially on towards pennsylvania erie buffalo Everybody knows that we often get snowfalls that reach four to five to six feet. And so that's something that is unique to this part of the world is the call lake effect snow, which is on the lee sides of all the lakes, lakes of all of them.

South Shore Lake Superior around Chicago at times and especially Indiana, the south south all the way to south bend where uh notre dame is uh gives a snow belt just like cleveland and um so uh let's see and during this time also what's going on is the process of the you know you're always in the process of the trout and keeping them alive through the hatchery But where specifically are you in this process during this time of year when winter's starting, it's becoming real cold? What part of the trout hatching process are you in? Well, we know that the trout here is an emblem of wilderness, as are a lot of animals. Just recently I saw a report that one of the metro parks in Cleveland saw a fisher, which is one of the larger members of the weasel family.

They're like the wolverine in the West. The fisher has been seen in South St Grin So we still hanging on to the vestiges of wilderness in certain animals but we certainly don have wolves anymore We do have coyotes We struggling to keep bobcats or the southern lynx. And the fish in the fish world, the salmon family has a penchant for the coldest waters, surface waters that we can have in the world. They evolved in the northern hemisphere, and their numbers are legion in many places.

Of course, the salmon on the Pacific coast have been an enormous commercial contribution to food for man for centuries. It's still a productive area, and just as with the rest of wilderness areas that produce animals, it's threatened by a lot of the development of our land caused by people. Just excess clearing of land for farming, timbering, the exposure of streams to higher temperatures in the summer, all cut away at the ability of these fish to hang on. And the fish in this case on our side of the country is the brook trout, which is a branch of the salmon family that occupied all of the the eastern Narkomera streams that were cold enough, beginning from the high country in Georgia and the Appalachians, all the way up into eastern and central Canada.

Cleveland, Lake Erie, the south shore is among the few areas where the fish is hanging on because of the high settlement of land and the changes in the environment for the fish. The fish needs really one main thing in terms of temperature, and that is it cannot be sustained above 70 degrees for any length of time. The fish will thrive anywhere from the temperatures we have now, about 33 degrees, all the way up to about 70. But its prime operating temperature is at around 55 degrees.

So they were here in great numbers, we found, in streams that tributary to the Chagrin River. So at settlement, we know the river must have had some good runs of this fish from Lake Erie. All the streams, as it turns out, along the south shore of Lake Erie at one time had the brook trout, all the way to Doan Creek, which runs through a university circle down by Martin Luther King Boulevard. That stream would have had the brook trout as well as the streams in the Chagrin Valley and further east.

The fish is not threatened in its wide range. In fact, they've been introduced in the west for years where trout fishing had become a great sport. They put all kinds of trout in streams that didn't belong there or didn't arrive there, but were happy with it because it made a good sport fish. So here, the project with the brook trout was simply to augment, hang on to populations that could expand into our streams, granted that the conservation efforts in this area have produced our metro parks.

So right now we have thousands of acres of land that are under protection. It's also expanded to a national park in the Cuyahoga Valley. And these large tracts of land, especially in Geauga County and up here to Sulphur Springs, still have habitat that is suitable for this trout to live. And it has to live through the most extreme part of the growing season, and that's summer.

So that means streams that have a lot of groundwater in springs. And that becomes a compromise as agriculture pumps more groundwater, as land gets warmer from exposure to the sun. All of our streams that used to have capabilities for the brook trout and indeed had populations lost that by the extension of just more human commerce. It's a sad thing to say that the things that we have in wilderness are put in the background because of the needs of humans.

We need more food as populations, our population grows. We need more land for more housing. And all of this conflicts with the products of wilderness, which are trout streams and fishers and cats, wild cats and the wolves. So man has put his stamp on most of the landscapes, especially in our area in Ohio.

It was once seen that by 18, I think by the time of the Civil War, something like close to 75% of Ohio was cleared of its forests. That was all by hand. So that was turned into farmland. Ohio was always seen as the most attractive place for settlers for farming.

And the result of that was a lot of forest clearing so that what was judged to be the forest inheritance in Ohio, magnificent trees, was relegated down to about 30% of what it had originally. So now there's a big effort in the questions of the climate change regarding forests as a very important asset to keep a gas balance in our atmosphere. I guess. Yeah, no, that helps.

So we went from lake ice, properties of water to have ice, properties of water that produce a favorable agriculture, climate. Yeah, you know, Mr. Herman, actually, can I go into that trout part? We talked about it a little bit last year, but, you know, last year in our interview with you, we talked about where you got that initial love for trout. and when you were talking about you said that it maybe it started around your days at michigan when you're in college or maybe even a little bit further can you go into how you started to really get into trout and then how you brought it here yeah i'm i'm just reading uh the life history of a guy who sounds like he had the same kind of background who whatever each of us has as a uh a really interesting or energizing experience, personal experience, can play a large role in a lot of the decisions we make about our careers, where we live, what we want to see happen and where we live.

So I was fortunate in having a father who exposed me to the outdoors and he loved farming. He was a businessman, but he was successful enough to buy a farm in Lake County, and that's where I spent the best part of my life, along Lake Erie, where we had streams that still had some trout and we had peaches as I mentioned And so early on my father had introduced me to canoeing which is something I love as you probably know And the canoeing was taken up My father took us up to Ontario, Canada, where there were an endless stream of lakes and connecting rivers. And that's the first time I saw the beauty of this fish called the brook trout, which in Canada is called the speckled trout. It's unique in its color patterns and it is not unique though in its demand for ice cold water.

So on one of the canoe trips that I was able to be taken on at about 10 years of age, I first saw this fish in a lake on a place called Des Moines River in Quebec, Canada. It was a beautiful fish that was in the most vivid colors I can remember. And I can still see that color, that fish coming up in a landing net in a canoe and then flopping on the bottom of the canoe and seeing the colors flashing from this fish. That kind of set the stage for the fact that I was connected with water and so many experiences in my life.

Back at the farm, I think I mentioned maybe on another talk that we had a water supply for the house was a beautiful spring that emerged along the head of a valley that was on one side of the farm property. The water that had been captured in a cistern, which was a stone basin about the size of four or five bathtubs, and it had filled with so much water that it overflowed into a stream valley that went down into Lake Erie. The bulk of the water was piped through a pipe to our basement where it was then pumped into the house for our potable water and our toilets and sinks and wash basins. So this early experience with really good water coming out of the ground always fascinated me.

And the vegetation that grew along that bank, things like watercress and the kinds of insects that were in that kind of a stream, it just begged to have the trout back in it. So I had been given a gift from my mother who researched the availability of the brook trout eggs or fish. And she presented me with a supply of fertile brook trout eggs like I have brought to this school on occasion for our hatchery. And we did what I do here when I was a kid in that farm at Madison. we hatched the trout and got them into this little stream that had been impounded a little by a small dam to make a pond for irrigating a garden and it just blossomed with these fish and allowed me to learn all about the biology that was involved in feeding them and in growing them and then becoming aware here that they were endangered in the chagrin valley and indeed all of the northern part of Ohio, it was an idea that we had long ago to start a project that involved biology that you could do on the campus with our water, which is not really typically good trout water, but we make it so.

And at this time of year, every stream here is trout stream in terms of temperature. They're all cold and running. And so I had learned so much about biology from this thing my mother set up with the trout eggs, I decided that that would be a good project here to get people excited about field biology. And indeed, it has had a history of that here for quite a few years.

We started our first hatchery in the 1970s. So we had, I think our first hatch was 1972, and it's been going ever since. And we know that obviously it's going now and the outdoor project kids have the privilege of you teaching them about it. But a lot of what goes on in there is run by you.

So what are some of those things that you're teaching the outdoor project kids that are crucial for the trout hatchery to keep going? Well, you know, we have this really unique condition of a watershed. That's another topic like the ice, like the temperature regimes of water that make possible a project like this. If we look at Hunting Valley, the zoning history of this place is, it has to be at least seven acres or more of land, which is in forest.

And if you walk at the edges of our campus, You can't help but notice it is forests in every direction, both north, south, east, and west from here. And that is the condition that will keep a stream running in the summer cool because of the shade. It also protects the water quality in terms of sediment. We are in an area that was formed by the glacier and it left large deposits of clay in the aftermath of the ice retreat.

The stream that feeds the pond at U.S. and its hatchery cut through a land that is totally forest and owned by Case Western Reserve Forest. When it enters our property, it's literally gone through most of its history in forest cover. It's only about 229 acres, but it's enough to give us a sustained flow for the hatchery work all year. Now we have impounded that water and in so doing we've heated it up.

So the water below the dam on university school property for the Kilroy Pond, the water below that in the summer is warmer than the stream coming into it. So we have ways of cooling that water by using a siphon to take the water out of the lake to the hatchery the summer from a deeper level. And as we discussed, the deeper water in the summer is colder, right? Because it's more dense.

So we have a pipe that goes down, the inlet pipe of a siphon is down in water that's around 50 degrees. And then that is taken over on the supply side of the siphon into the culvert that goes to the hatchery. And there we can normally keep. This summer was a challenge because of the kind of drought we came under.

We did not have our normal rainfall, so the stream became very small coming into the lake, and that relied on our siphon to keep the hatchery water going. So these conditions here are kept by human intervention. We would not have trout here unless somebody were not to get and modify the habitat so that it's suitable. Well, Mr.

Harmon, this interview has been great so far, but I think it's time to blow back up the fire. So everybody, we'll be back in one second.