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By Bob Hecky

The University of Waterloo’s involvement with African lake research began in 1964 with the appointment of the first chair of the Biology Department, Prof. Noel Hynes, who had worked many years in Africa prior to joining the the department. Prof. Hynes had been a student of Dr. E.B. Worthington who participated in the original fisheries survey of Lake Victoria in 1928-29 and went on to a distinguished career in aquatic research in Africa.

Dr. Hynes was soon joined by other tropical and African lakes researchers on the faculty at Waterloo such as Prof. Arthur Harrison and Prof. Herbert Fernando. These three were instrumental in designing and implementing a major CIDA funded Institutional Enhancement project at the University of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia from 1981 to 1989. This linkage project strengthened the Biology faculty of Addis Ababa and trained faculty for a Fisheries and Limnology program at Addis Ababa. This training and research project in Ethiopia also involved Profs Bill Taylor and Hamish Duthie of the current Waterloo Biology faculty.

In 1995 Biology at Waterloo took on another major African training and research project in partnership with the Freshwater Institute of the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Five M.Sc.’students from Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania were trained in fisheries and limnology as a part of the CIDA co-funded Lake Malawi/Nyasa Biodiversity Project (also sponsored by the Global Environmental Facility of the World Bank and the Southern African Development Community). Several postdocs, PhD and M.Sc. students from Canada were also involved in this project. Profs. Duthie, Taylor, Dave Barton, Stephanie Guildford and Robert Hecky were involved in the supervision and the implementation of the students' projects and the various aspects of Lake Malawi research.

Currently, our research in Africa focuses not only on the Great Lakes (Victoria, Tanganyika and Malawi), but also upon various lakes and rivers across Africa. The topics of our research vary from ciliates and phytoplankton to fish migrations to contaminant and nutrient cycling. We examine the roles of food web structure in various lakes and how it affects fish and nutrient composition within lakes, the way agricultural and changing land demands impact lakes and even atmospheric deposition of contaminant and nutrients upon lakes. Our associate researchers are from across Europe, Africa and North America. Involved Waterloo faculty include the people listed above and Profs Sherry Schiff, George Dixon and others.