This page gives a little information about my long time interest in freshwater organisms. Other subjects will be added later, but mainly I hope to teach some of what I have learned about organisms in freshwater and wastewater during forty years of examining all types of waters mainly as a hobby. My doctorate study at Purdue University used bacterial viruses and I have produced mammal cell cultures used in Indiana hospitals to assay patients for human viruses. I have read and studied human and animal pathogens extensively since 1970. About 1970, I ran a package sewer plant in Eastern Indianapolis before sewers reached that area. I have written research proposals with Purdue and Cincinnati professors intending to use desktop reactors to study recombination genomes in sewage treatment. Since 1970, I have taken every opportunity to visit sewage plants and I am especially interested in developing new methods for treating wastewaters to avoid the costs and failures common to typical plants. My broad interests and experiences in nature study, conservation, agriculture, electronics, computer programming, genetics, microbiology, and --- give me a broad background for approaching environmental problems at lower cost but greater effectiveness. Since the late 1960s, I have been quite vocal in my efforts to improve waste water treatment using less engineering and more biology. That has brought me into association with many people seeking to use sound science to improve environmental protection.

If you pay attention for a few years, you will see great variation in the population of any species you care to study. You may have heard that populations of squirrels, rabbits, lemmings, and other animals follow cycles. If you are expert in agriculture, you are aware that many cultivated crops which once did well can no longer be grown. Examples are cotton after the boll weevil, blue mold in tobacco, indigo, American chestnut, Americal elm, and -----. In some instances, we found remedies, but not always. At any given time, we have on hand only enough food to last a few months. When you recall how black raspberries and chestnut trees have been wiped out or how disease epidemics such as AIDS have blossomed inspite or our greater knowledge biology, it is very easy to see how the rapidly increasing human population could undergo the same dramatic collapse due to failure of importance crops or epidemics that have occurred in past centuries. My personal opinion is that similar edpidemics will occur again and our success in battling them will vary from excellent to total failure. Thus management of waste waters becomes an interesting, important field of study rather than just a smelly job that somebody has to do. Ultimately, we not only need to make wastewater safe, we need to regard it as an important resource and reuse it. Of course much waste water is already being used by the people down stream.

As a six-year old farmboy, my interest in wastewater management began in 1939. Our family moved to some dry, infertile, abandoned farmland in the spring of 1939. There was no water supply and no buildings. We built a pitless privy (known in polite circles as a Sears and Roebuck library) which served us 16 years until we built a bathroom in 1955. Since my Eddleman ancestors had been living on farms in America for 200 years, my parents had the average farm family's awareness of the importance of sound disposal of human and animal wastes to avoid illness. My Eddleman ancestors came to Kentucky before the Revolutionary War and to Indiana before statehood.

That was my introduction to disposal of human wastes, but we also needed a safe water supply. The neighbor across the highway let us have a couple buckets of water each day and when his well began running low, we kids carried water from Mrs. Ritchie's well 700 feet away. That well was only 12 feet deep and located on the side of Pilot Knob Hill. It never ran dry; the water was clean, clear and tasted good and I often wondered why. Occasionally, we drank water from the wells of friends or relatives we visited. Our teachers and parents taught us the importance of protecting these wells from contamination and sometimes I chose staying thirsty rather than drink doubtful water when working on a distant farm or I took my own water can. A neighbor had a spring and let us improve it and we carried that water 200 feet to water our cows.

Good drinking water was rare for miles around. Cisterns were common and that was the choice we made on our farm, but the alkaline water was often difficult to gag down. Later we built a pond to supply the livestock and we had two pressure water systems, one with cistern water for people and another using pond water for the livestock. That supply of pressurized pond water enabled us to install a bathroom with its flush toliet many years before Sears quit publishing its important catalog. Later at Purdue when my Ag Engineering professor gave us a test by laying out hand 100 tools to be indentified. The years I spent reading the Sears catalogs in the privy enabled me to score 100 on that test--that was several points better than my classmates.

In 1956, I purchased a top-quality Ziess phase-contrast microscope while I was a soldier in Germany and I still use that to examine water from many water sources. The day I got delivery of the microscope, I collected from ditches, farm village manure vats, and found them relatively free of bacteria and protozoa. In 1958, I purchased a copy of Pennak's Freshwater Invertebrates and began teaching biology in Salem High School. Salem's water supply is a man-made lake and Mr. Brown, plant superintendent, had a living collection of 100 algae he had found in the lake. He was a great inspiration to my students and me. I now have 7 microscopes and have taken one or two along on my travels during the last 40 years to examine the waters of lakes, rivers, sewage ponds, and aerated tanks. At the peak, my collection had 2000 living cultures of algae, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, yeasts, and bacteriophages. Teachers have used my cultures in four continents.

You can Assist this Project

Students, faculty, operators, and others around the world having an interest in wastewater managememt are invited to submit materials, book reviews, ideas, articles, and comments to make this site more complete.