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Professor
Doug Facey is deeply into Lake Champlain’s ecology |
Every angler who’s ever dropped a line
into a lake, river, stream or ocean has some kind of fish tale to
tell. Doug Facey, Professor of Biology and an expert in fish
communities and water quality, has plenty. But when he talks about
fish, it’s not about the big one that got away, but about some of
the smallest and least known fish in the lake, and the quality of
the water in which they live.
Facey has taught biology at Saint Michael’s since 1990. His
research, which he conducts with students, includes work with sand
darters and channel darters, whose habitat includes just a few
rivers in Vermont, and yellow perch and invasive white perch and
their diets. With Facey, Jeff White ’08 is researching the effects
of the presence of non-native white perch, which arrived in the lake
through the Champlain Canal and are now abundant. White and Facey’s
research, which has been funded with a grant from the John C.
Hartnett Endowment in 2006 and the Lake Champlain Research
Consortium in 2007, explores the impact of white perch on the food
chain, whether they are competing with other species.
Facey’s relationship with Lake
Champlain began as a child, when the Levittown, New York resident
(“the quintessential Long Island suburb,” he says) and his family
vacationed on the Mississquoi Bay in northwestern Vermont for
several years. In a lakefront cabin for two weeks, Facey fished
every day and “liked it a lot.” After earning his bachelor’s degree
at the University of Maine—Orono, he returned to Vermont for his
master’s degree at UVM, where he learned more about the lake’s
ecology. After earning his PhD at the University of Georgia and then
working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and teaching at
Erskine University, he returned to Vermont in 1991 to teach at Saint
Michael’s. He was very happy, he says, to come back to the lake.
In Vermont, Facey became the Saint
Michael’s representative to the Lake Champlain Research Consortium,
a collaboration of the Vermont academic institutions in the
Champlain Basin. Its mission is to coordinate and facilitate
research and scholarship on the Lake Champlain ecosystem and related
issues; to provide opportunities for training and education of
students on lake issues; and to aid in the dissemination of
information gathered through lake endeavors. Facey is now the
executive director “which keeps me in the middle of a lot of Lake
Champlain issues and involved with issues related to federal funding
that comes through NOAA. I’ve also hosted several conferences on the
lake, including a water-quality conference held at Saint Michael’s
in 2006.”
“Lake Champlain is not a badly
polluted lake,” says Facey. The concern about water quality in the
lake now is the amount of nutrients going into the water, as well as
chemicals and pharmaceuticals.
“The health of the lake is a much
more complicated issue than people think,” says Facey. “People ask
‘How do we fix the problem,’ or ‘How come we haven’t fixed the
problem,’ but there are so many different problems that contribute
to the overall quality of the lake’s environment that it’s hard to
find an answer.The issue of water quality is an issue of complexity.
A lot of different things contribute to the water quality of the
lake.
“I wish people would realize that the
lake is very diverse. We tend to focus on what we catch — five or 10
species — when the reality is there are over 50 kinds of fish in the
lake, most of which people don’t know about. We need to manage the
lake for biodiversity, not just for fish and game concerns.”
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