By Jeannie Griffith
Joe Ogrodnick/NYSAES
The Cornell University Biological Field Station at Shackelton Point.
Imagine a field site for internationally renowned fisheries and aquatic research, and it probably won’t look like Shackelton Point. This realtor’s dream of a 430-acre property on Oneida Lake retains all the vestiges of its former glory as Xandria, the summer retreat of Syracuse inventor Charles Seamans Brown, including a pillared white manor house; meticulously appointed outbuildings designed to house domestic staff, prized Great Danes, cigar-smoking card players, dairy cattle, and six automobiles; and a classically columned gazebo at water’s edge.
Brown, a graduate of Cornell’s class of 1909, bequeathed it all to his alma mater. Three years after his death in 1953, his personal Xanadu became the home of the Cornell University Biological Field Station (CUBFS) — a unit of the Department of Natural Resources — and the springboard for a prolific and wide-ranging research program including studies of fish ecology and management, limnology, ecological modeling, population dynamics, wildlife ecology, geochemistry, fish diseases, the human dimensions of natural resources management, invasion biology, and colonial birds. In addition to serving as a training ground for many graduate students and postdocs, CUBFS has hosted about 300 undergraduate interns over the course of 50 summers.
Joe Ogrodnick/NYSAES
John Forney (left) and Harlan Brumstead chat at the recent 50th-anniversary open house at Shackelton Point.
Some of those interns, past and present, were among the throng of friends and colleagues who brought their families to Shackelton Point in late July to celebrate the field station’s milestone anniversary. John Forney, the station’s founding director, was there with three generations of his family, including his children, Jim, Arlyn, and Diane, who endowed a student internship in his honor. State Assemblyman Bill Magee (D-Nelson) and State Senator David Valesky (D-Oneida), who earlier this year secured $200,000 in state funding to renovate housing at Shackelton Point, came bearing a 50th-anniversary citation from the State of New York.
The centerpiece of the research at CUBFS has been a data set, begun in 1956 and continuously updated, that documents the significant changes that have taken place in the ecology of Oneida Lake since the field station was established. This database has become a valuable resource for understanding large lake ecosystems and freshwater fisheries dynamics throughout the world.
Joe Ogrodnick/NYSAES
Ed Mills speaks during the recent open house about the station's value to aquatic research.
“Our research program has gone from local to global in the past 50 years,” said Professor Ed Mills, director of the field station and a 30-year member of its faculty, gesturing expansively as he stood amid the comings and goings of anniversary visitors enjoying the grounds. “Shackelton Point is really on the global map.” Adding to his optimism about the facility’s promise is the recent completion of an aquatic research laboratory, funded by the National Science Foundation. “One of the voids in our program was that we did not have adequate experimental space,” said Mills. “We are now blessed with a very nice facility.”
Much of the work being done in the new facility involves invasive species, including zebra and quagga mussels, water chestnut, and gizzard shad. With Lars Rudstam, associate professor of natural resources, for example, Mills is examining how organisms respond to the clearer water that results when zebra mussels eat all the phytoplankton. Mills and associate professor Bernd Blossey are looking at the impact of invasive plants on native Great Lakes freshwater organisms. Nelson Hairston, the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Environmental Science, is using Oneida Lake to study predator-prey dynamics between the rotifer Daphnia and phytoplankton. Rudstam and senior research associate Randy Jackson are exploring the role that warmer winters resulting from global climate change might have in expanding fish populations.
Joe Ogrodnick/NYSAES
Lars Rudstam with one of his research tanks at Shackelton Point.
While the lake and the life it supports remain vulnerable to climate change, pollution, and biological invasion, important fish like walleye, yellow perch, smallmouth bass, and sturgeon have been making a big comeback since CUBFS scientists began studying the lake. As Mills concluded in his newsletter message last spring. “Despite evidence of environmental change, these are the good times for Oneida Lake.” Mr. Brown would surely be pleased.
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