More than $95K in scholarships awarded to local students by Crown Jewels Links chapter
The Crown Jewels Chapter of the Links awarded more than $95,000 to area high school seniors.
From education to employment, Charlotte program offers jobs, benefits
Scholarship recipients completed applications and interviews to compete for the funds to continue their education.
Jade Smith plans to attend UNC Chapel Hill and received $20,000.
'I'm really passionate about community service, leadership,' Smith said. 'I'm so excited to be honored here by the Links. It's an incredible honor and opportunity and I'm so grateful for this experience.'
The students were recognized at the 10th Annual Crowning Achievements Program, along with some important community partners.
The Crown Jewels Links is a group of ladies committed to friendship and service.
VIDEO: CMS seniors awarded scholarships to join college marching band
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Axios
10 hours ago
- Axios
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Yahoo
4 days ago
- Yahoo
Teen Wants to Keep Late Dad's Last Name After Mom's New Marriage, but She Says It Sends the Wrong Message
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Chicago Tribune
5 days ago
- Chicago Tribune
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They've reduced the species' population by an estimated 90%. By the turn of the century, whitefish had rebounded to their 'highest ever abundance,' Smith remembers. Today, though, the threats to whitefish are much harder to control — and are receiving much less funding. The EPA's Great Lakes Restoration Initiative funds several invasive mussel research and control projects. In 2023, federal agencies put a total of $1.6 million toward GLRI-run mussel projects. Their main invasive mussel research project has gotten a total of $2.45 million in federal funding since it started in 2015. In comparison, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission budgets over $20 million annually toward sea lamprey control, with a smaller slice of funding also coming from Canada. Agencies that partner with the commission on lamprey control were targeted by Donald Trump's administration earlier this year, but after some delays, the program is back on track. 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Whitefish and other native species typically lay their eggs in nearshore reefs in the fall. As the eggs incubate over the winter, ice cover along the Great Lakes coastlines helps protect them from winter storms and UV radiation until they hatch in the spring. But over the past 50 years, surface water temperatures in the Great Lakes have consistently increased. In Lake Michigan, the coldest lake surface temperatures recorded each winter averaged 43% warmer from 1970 to 2022 than they were averaging from 1941 to 1970, according to a recent study produced by the University of Michigan. With warmer lake surface temperatures comes less ice cover — and less protection for whitefish larvae. 'If these fish were simply adapted to hatching in a very sheltered environment, and then all of a sudden, due to climate change, there's no longer ice cover, and they're getting that direct sunlight as a very small, fragile larvae, it seems like it's maybe causing higher mortality,' Stacy said. In Illinois, it's hard to track this trend in a definitive way. Lake whitefish are generally few and far between in southern Lake Michigan. That's been the case for several decades, even before zebra and quagga mussels were introduced to the lake, Stacy said. When Illinois' commercial fisheries were still active, whitefish catches in the region were simply lower than their counterparts in Wisconsin and Michigan. The state ceased all commercial fishing in the 1990s. Farther north, Smith said there are still a few spots, such as Wisconsin's Green Bay or the St. Mary's River that connects lakes Superior and Huron, where zooplankton levels are high enough to sustain whitefish populations. 'The northern bay seems to be, not completely, but somewhat in lockstep with Lake Michigan,' Henriksen, the Green Bay-based fisherman, said of whitefish populations in the area. 'But the southern bay is its own little world, and it's thriving.' By establishing strict quotas on how much whitefish local fishermen can catch, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and other local authorities have helped preserve at least part of the whitefish population in the nutrient-rich waters. Still, Henriksen said, it's not quite enough. 'There's no way that we could acquire enough quota in the lower bay to produce at the levels we produced when there was a lot of fish in the northern bay and in Lake Michigan,' he said. 'So we've made some adjustments.' At MSU, Homola and his team are testing out a method called close-kin mark-recapture to more accurately track whitefish populations. Through this strategy, researchers use fish tissue samples to identify individual fish that are related. Based on the number of parent-offspring pairs or 'family groups' they find in their data, Homola said they can calculate how many total fish are in a population. Currently, most Great Lakes agencies estimate whitefish populations based on the amount of whitefish caught in surveys. But Homola noted that this becomes far more difficult as whitefish populations shrink. 'The fewer lake whitefish there are, the more important it is to know how many there are,' he said. Smith and other researchers at tribal fisheries are also working on incubating whitefish eggs in tributaries of Lakes Michigan, Huron and Superior. Nutrients are typically more abundant in rivers, so by introducing them in these more stable habitats, Smith said they're hoping to give young whitefish 'a chance to keep going.' Other Indigenous researchers with the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians are raising Atikameg, or whitefish, in natural ponds. Last year, they released over 45,000 whitefish into the waters around the eastern end of the Upper Peninsula. These methods are meant to serve as a 'bridge' to rehabilitation, Smith said. In the past, government-run fish restocking projects have relied heavily on man-made hatcheries, leading to a lack of genetic diversity in fish populations. 'I don't think any of us are thinking about restocking hundreds of millions of fish through this method,' he said. 'What we're trying to do is make sure that that wide variety of genetics continues.'
