Howdy! My name is Todd Crail, I am a graduate student studying Ecology at the University of Toledo, in Toledo, Ohio. As you may have already figured out, I have varied interests, but all are concerned with nature and North American natural history. Through photography, film and this website, I hope to demonstrate why eastern North America is claimed the most diverse temperate ecology in the world, and why European naturalists during American colonial times were beside themselves to get any undescribed organisms from this continent. Most of all, I hope to inspire you to go check it out for yourself.

As well, you may have taken note that I've extended my time with nature through aquaria and native plant gardening. I hope you'll enjoy the information and presentations I've put together on those topics, and perhaps consider these ideas for your own.

Growing up geek...
So. How did I get into all this stuff? Well, I was kinda born this way, I guess. My parents had to be very patient folks to try and take a walk with me. With so much interesting stuff "right here", why would I want to go any further? At the age of 3, my family all gathered at a cottage on a lake in west central Ohio known as Indian Lake, that used to serve as a reservoir for the Erie and Miami Canal. There's pictures of me routing through the worms. But then someone caught a fish. Man, I was sold! I've been trying to play in the water as much as possible since.

That was the normal part of growing up. The irregularities, however, surfaced very early. I've been quite fortunate to have had a mom that appreciated them.

Case Point: The picture to the right is from the Halloween where I went dressed as a cecropia moth caterpillar (the real cecropia moth caterpillar is below, in case you couldn't tell them apart). I even have the host plant strapped to me. Worse yet, I wanted to crawl up the porches, and was horribly disappointed that no one knew what I was.

Certainly, there's a tragedy in that no one knew I WAS a cecropia moth caterpillar. The greater tragedy was that this put a big "G" for GEEK on my chest, and certainly begged a meeting with the class bully behind the big oak tree next recess. The good news is... They never got through to me :)

Life down on the Farm
In November 2007, I married a wonderful woman named Erika, who has the most effervescent personality and endearing laugh you'll ever hear. She also loves the outdoors, gardening, and photography which is very conveinent for me. She has taught me so much about working with people in the general public, as she is conservation manager with a background as a park natualist, planetarium coordinator at Lourdes College and Zoo Snooze Guide at the Toledo Zoo. We compliment each other deliciously.

We own a Lustron home. What is a Lustron, you ask? Well, for now, take a hop over here:

They've left off some of the pictures from the City Paper article, but our house looks EXACTLY like that. They ALL look exactly like that. Does the "Home" navigation button at the top of each page now look familiar? It could be our house, could be someone else's, you never know!

That Professional Stuff
If you'd like to know what it is that I do professionally, my research interests involve assemblage, niche and interspecific interactions in North American lotic aquatic systems (specifically fish and Unionid mussels), with specific regard to exotic introductions and land use influences on those communities. I also have a keen interest in aquatic zoogeography, in particular, using phylogeography to reconstruct Pleistocene / Holocene refugia and range recovery in glaciated landscapes.

My CV, if you'd like to see it

Or... To quote my Uncle George:

" You say any of that again, and I'll wash your mouth out with soap, boy! "

Which is why I have pictures of kids in my professional section, and probably reveal that I'm more geared toward education than research. The way I see it, if I can't communicate why all that garblely-gook in the first paragraph is important to a central city 11 year-old, then all that knowledge, all those books and papers and talk are merely ego, and useless.

The "Nemo Found" Series
My friend Cindy came to me with a question about her honors course she was teaching at the University just prior to my own enrollment in the grad school. Her students were doing service learning projects in the central city at an after school project and wanted to do a whole "Finding Nemo" thing with the kids. She wanted to know how to set up a "cheap marine tank with percula clowns and such" that would "work". Since I don't believe such a thing exists, I said "Why don't we go find Nemo in THEIR backyard instead?". These pictures are from the banks of the Ottawa River, an urban stream here in Toledo (we caught 17 species of fish, all native). Perhaps at some point I'll put in some text.

The Field Trip
The Classroom Session

Later I got to talking with some of the Education folks at the Toledo Zoo, and we came up with a week long camp for 11 - 13 year olds. Man, did we have fun. The sea lamprey and steelhead on the bonus "picnic" Friday night with their parents was the icing on the cake!

Our week at the Toledo Zoo and Northwest Ohio

Time constraints and location due to my masters schooling have made it more easy to spend my outreach time with adults (who are important too :), but I did get another opportunity with the kiddos through my neighbors in the Biology department. My friend Brenda came and asked me if I'd like to help out with a Saturday project with 250 central city 5th grades, many of whom were in the program because academically, the school system was willing to try "anything", "do you have any ideas?"

"Oh sure, we'll do a program on mussels."

Yeah, she looked at me the same way. I managed to convince her not to worry and proceeded with the program. The easy part was the wet lab portion where we had them drawing larval stoneflies, mayflies and dobsonflies, snails, crayfish and whatever else turned up in our stream bottom sample. They never imagined such cool things. And then it was Farmertodd's turn. First, we passed each student their very own polished up mussel. [click][clack][click] Ah the sounds of play.

I built a quick Powerpoint using the footage of host infection using Chris Barnhart's footage from his Unio website . (note: Check this out, or view the mussel section on my website. It will blow your mind.) The second that snuffbox mussel slammed shut on the nose of that logperch darter... I owned them. What a great day out! Unfortunately, there wasn't anyone taking pictures. These kids were INTO IT.

There have been many other programs, but these were my absolute favorites.

The Signs
Realizing that no single person could be in all places at once (nor should they have to), I started to get the idea that if I could leave interpretative signs and flyers laying around, information would get out almost as readily. My best bud Jeffro and I had done a program at "Blue Creek Week" for the Anthony Wayne school's 5th graders, where we caught some fish, tossed them into a 30 long, and sat in the rain talking to a whole bunch of interesting kids, 20 at a time, all day long. Exhausted, we decided we needed to spend some time to put together interpretation, teach naturalists, teachers, etc on the poster, and let THEM sit in the rain all day :)

So we wrote the good people at the North American Native Fishes Association for a small grant, and we've produced 8 of these water proof posters with the funds!

leftpane.pdf (450 kb)	middlepane.pdf (1.1 mb)	rightpane.pdf (300 kb)

A very special shout out to our great friend Ryan Argo for his drawing of the habitats. This poster wouldn't even be a part of what it is without that art work that he donated!

Jeff got the mussel bug and we both really took a dive in the deep end with that topic. Fish are cool... but the "Wow's" with the mussels never end. Wanting to interpret this, Jeff got some ideas from Chris Barnhart at MSU with a board he'd done on the Mussels of the Meramec River.

I replicated the effort and had the fortunate situation to aquire a glass case in the department.

For more pictures of the display, click here.

For a quick ditty on making your own, click here.

While all this was being assembled, Jeff upped the ante, and began assembling photographs and Photoshop work for a guide to Maumee River mussels. He also found money to put it into print to give out to folks in the watershed, but we've made the guide available to anyone for free as pdf's. You can find out more about either here:

Freshwater Mussels of the Maumee Drainage

Not content to work exclusively with aquatics, I started fussing with interpreting the Oak Openings Region, which you can read about extensively in the Botany section of my website. The first poster was put together as interpretation along a bike trail adjacent to a tract of savanna we're managing for the Sylvania School district.

While doing management at the site, it occurred to me that even though this small tract of land was literally PACKED with plants imperilled in Ohio (3 State Endangered, 11 State Threatened, 1 Potentially Threatened), unless you were a botany geek, you wouldn't know this fact. What was even more impressive were the abundances of these species. I needed to figure out a way to interpret this, as I remain convinced MOST people actually care, especially in a demographic that's as educated at Sylvania, Ohio.

This is the resulting signage (1.6 mb pdf)

We color coding the statuses and marking a flag for each individual in a random 40 feet of this little prairie. I think it worked out pretty well. We've been unable to keep a plastic flyer roll stocked with single page prints of the poster. I think the funniest part (perhaps saddest) of it was that a friend actually overhead some guy explaining to another that the flags were there to mark hose lines the schools were installing to grow turf grass there. The site was covered in the blooms of tall coreopsis and rough blazingstar when he said this. Man, talk about trading DOWN.

Accomplishing all these projects while completing my Masters [ahem] delayed graduation a little bit, and I ran out of funding from the department. However, my good friend Mike Weintraub was just getting his lab going and had the resources to bring me on as a lab tech, working on his soils research. This was a great opportunity for me to work outside aquatics, and really see another side to plant community management with his truly cool work studying the below ground effects of exotic plants .

As a part of this position, we worked to create a poster that was a comprehensive look at the Oak Openings Region. The result of our work is here on the right.

Click here or on the picture (1.8 mb pdf)

There are other projects, but I think this is a good glimpse of the work done. It is nice to finally have it all in once place!

Thanks for staying intersted this far. Hopefully you've formed some ideas from reading and seeing all this on how you can get involved and form similar projects. The first step is to know what's out there. Take walks and lots of pictures!