PUT-IN-BAY, OHIO -- The Franz Theodore Stone Laboratory on tiny historic  Gibraltar Island in western Lake Erie has hosted generations of students, young biologists and leading researchers for more than 100 years.

Nestled among a cluster of other smaller islands near Put-in-Bay, the lab is the United States' oldest freshwater biological field station and the island campus of The Ohio State University.

It is also the site of important research that collects sobering evidence of the changes in Lake Erie's ecosystem which could have dramatic effects on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border if governments and environmental agencies do not commit to more long-term restoration and water management initiatives in the Great Lakes. When Stone lab researchers and staff are not showing school-aged children on field trips how to collect plankton samples from Lake Erie, they are carefully studying the lake's temperature patterns, water levels, sources of pollution and its effects on the numerous species that inhabit the shallowest and warmest of the five Great Lakes.

When a Stone lab vessel trawled for fish on a sample collection expedition Monday morning, the net also collected handfuls of zebra mussels and round gobies, just two of the invasive species that have entered the Great Lakes through ballast water from international ships. According to biologists, there are currently more than 180 invasive species in the Great Lakes.

Holding up one of the tiny round gobies, John Hageman, co-manager of the Stone lab, said the fish species have been observed across Lake Erie by the billions.

And that's just one of the problems creating "huge changes" in Lake Erie over the last several years, Stone lab director Jeff Reutter told a group of journalists this week as part of a Montana-based Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources (IJRN) program aimed at educating media about environmental issues.

Pollutants that cling to lake sediment, the flow of contaminants such as phosphorus and the persistence of aquatic invasive species have wreaked havoc on some parts of Lake Erie, said Reutter, who often works and consults with University of Windsor's Great Lakes Institute.

There are also plumes of harmful algal blooms spreading across the southern shore of Lake Erie in Ohio during the warm summer months - caused by phosphorus dumped into the lake by industries, municipalities, tributaries and agriculture.

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