August is the best time of the year to take a dip in Lake Michigan, when its waters hover in the balmy upper 60s. Experts say so, and Chicago’s crowded beaches offer proof. But an invisible hazard can quickly turn a sunny day out into a sick night in.

In 2024, over 300 beaches across the Great Lakes closed to visitors or issued swim bans or advisories due to the presence of bacteria in the water — mostly E. coli, from nearby surface runoff or sewer system overflows, especially during heavy rain — according to state and federal data.

Bacteria levels triggered 83 advisories or closures in Illinois last summer, making it the second worst in the Midwest, with 71 in Lake County’s 13 lakefront beaches and 12 across nine beaches in Cook County. As of Thursday, Lake County beaches have had 49 advisories this summer, according to data from the state’s Department of Public Health. There has been at least one beach advisory in Cook County so far, according to Evanston officials.

“What we want, really want, to see is not that people say, ‘Well, that’s just the way it is.’ It shouldn’t have to be this way,” said Nancy Stoner, senior attorney at the Environmental Law and Policy Center, who focuses on clean water issues. “It’s pollution that can be controlled and should be controlled, because people deserve to be able to know that they can swim safely in the Great Lakes.”

In Wisconsin, 90 beaches closed or had advisories between May and September 2024 — representing the most lakefront locations affected — followed by Illinois, Ohio with 67, Michigan with 62, Indiana with 20 and Minnesota with 17, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Beach Advisory and Closing Online Notification system, which ELPC analyzed.

Even these numbers are just a starting point. In addition to different frequencies in testing among municipalities, there can also be a lag time by states in filing this information to the U.S. EPA. For instance, the federal agency’s system lists no advisories or closures for Illinois in 2024, data that currently can only be found on the state website. According to a spokesperson, the IDPH attempted a submission, which was rejected because of formatting compatibility issues. The state agency said it continues to work to rectify the situation with the U.S. EPA.

“Beachgoers should be able to rely upon the information provided by U.S. EPA to find out whether the beach they want to go to is safe for swimming,” Stoner said. “They can’t do that right now, and the fact that wrong information is being provided by U.S. EPA makes the situation even worse. U.S. EPA needs to fix this problem right away so that beachgoers don’t unknowingly swim in contaminated water and risk getting sick.”

Known as the BEACON system, it is supported by federal grant funding that allows officials to monitor water quality and bacteria levels. Symptoms in humans exposed to this and similar pathogens can include nausea, diarrhea, ear infections and rashes. According to scientists, each year, there are 57 million cases of people getting sick in the United States from swimming in contaminated waters.

When a certain safety threshold set by the U.S. EPA is exceeded, local officials can decide to issue a swim ban or advisory. Three locations, all north of Chicago, exceeded the EPA’s threshold on at least 25% of days tested last year: North Point Marina Beach, Waukegan North Beach and Winnetka Lloyd Park Beach, according to data from BEACON analyzed in a July report by advocacy nonprofit Environment America.

Chicago tests the water in all its public lakefront beaches every day of the summer, unlike communities in Lake County, which only test four days a week. The report also found that, on the city’s 26 miles of public lakefront during the 2024 season, at least four beaches had potentially unsafe levels between 14% and 21% of the days that the water was tested, including 31st Street Beach, Calumet South Beach, 63rd Street Beach and Montrose Beach.

Most of the funding for testing and monitoring comes from the BEACH Act, or the Beaches Environmental Assessment and Coastal Health Act, which has protected public health in recreational waters across the country since its unanimous passing 25 years ago. Since then, the U.S. EPA has awarded over $226 million in grants for these programs.

“(It) is a small program for a federal program, but a lot in funding” impact, Stoner said.

However, in its 2026 proposed budget, the administration of President Donald Trump suggested slashing the EPA’s budget and clean water programs. In July, the House Appropriations Committee approved a 25% cut in the agency’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund, which helps states manage wastewater infrastructure to ensure the cleanliness of waterways.

The proposed cuts come at a time when humid weather and heavier storms, intensified by human-made climate change, are overwhelming outdated sewer systems and releasing human waste into waterways. Stormwater can carry runoff pollution and manure from industrial livestock operations into beaches. E. coli also grows faster in warmer water, so increasing lake temperatures pose a growing risk to swimmers.

Advocates say that — for the sake of public health and recreation — the federal government must continue to ensure funding for these programs and support the staff and institutions that uphold environmental protections.

“The BEACH Act is a piece of it. That’s about monitoring and public notification. That’s important,” Stoner said, “but really, funding the underlying work that needs to be done is essential. So, funding the EPA, funding the staff at the EPA, funding these labs throughout the Great Lakes, funding NOAA … There’s a whole system.”

While it doesn’t often do so, Chicago is one of 158 communities authorized to discharge sewage into the Great Lakes.

Besides Chicago, cities like Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Toledo, Ohio, have also updated their sewer systems and reduced the raw sewage they send flowing into the Great Lakes, thanks in no small part to federal infrastructure funding. These systems, advocates say, might offer a blueprint for the safety of beachgoers across the basin.

“There are solutions. We just have to invest for them to happen,” Stoner said. “So, it’s not a technological problem. It’s a … failure to decide that we want to solve this problem with solutions that exist.”

Emily Kowalski, outreach and engagement manager at the research and education center of Environment America in Illinois, said investments should go beyond upgrading sewage systems and focus on green infrastructure or natural, permeable surfaces like green roofs, parks and wetlands, which can help absorb rainwater and reduce flooding.

“A lot of these problems are things that we know how to fix and mitigate, but they do take money,” she said.

A report released by the U.S. EPA last year found the country needs at least $630 billion to address wastewater, stormwater and clean water infrastructure needs over the next 20 years.

“We need Congress to fully fund the Clean Water State Revolving Fund so that we can enjoy Chicago’s beaches, but also so (that) when we are on vacation on other shorelines or coastlines, we can enjoy beaches that are safe for swimming,” Kowalski said.

Sewage and animal waste

Every morning between Memorial Day and Labor Day, a handful of University of Illinois Chicago students head out to the city’s public beaches. As the sun rises and the day starts, they wade into the lake at each location and collect water in two plastic bottles.

The samples are then tested in a laboratory to detect the presence of genetic material from Enterococci — bacteria that, like E. coli, live in the intestines of warm-blooded animals such as humans. While Enterococci are not considered harmful to humans, scientists test for their presence in water as an indicator that other disease-causing microbes like E. Coli might be present from possible fecal contamination. In a few hours, the results allow the Chicago Park District to issue the necessary water quality advisories for any of its beaches.

If the concentration of Enterococci in water samples from a beach registers an estimated illness rate of 36 per 1,000 swimmers, following U.S. EPA criteria, the Park District will issue a swim advisory. But the agency rarely issues full-on swim bans based on water quality; for that to happen, test results need to correspond with an event when sewage flows into the lake, said Cathy Breitenbach, natural resources director at the Chicago Park District.

“Our river flows backwards. Sewer overflows are pretty rare these days, and even when they do occur, they don’t go into the lake,” Breitenbach said.

That is, unless intense precipitation levels overwhelm sewers already overflowing within the city, and officials open the locks between the river and the lake and reverse that flow.

“Then we’d issue a systemwide ban until we test below the threshold,” she said.

The last time this occurred and a ban was issued in Chicago was in July 2023. The locks near Navy Pier were opened to relieve the pressure on the sewer system during heavy rainfall, allowing more than 1.1 billion gallons of murky, bacteria-laden waste to flow into Lake Michigan.

While sewage contamination from heavy storms attracts the most attention, waste from animals, such as seagulls and even dogs, can be washed by rain into the lake and is often the biggest source of bacterial concentrations across Chicago beaches.

“We have so many beautiful buildings, but when water falls on our city, that water runs off of our roads into our waterways, picking up pollutants along the way,” Kowalski said.

Runoff can contaminate Lake County beaches, too, when waste from waterfowl makes its way into the lake.

“Some of it is very localized,” said Alana Bartolai, ecological services program coordinator at the Lake County Health Department. North Point Marina Beach, she said, is well-known in the community because “the seagulls and the gulls love it.”

It’s a recurring observation among department staff when they conduct monitoring at the county’s lakefront beaches. Waukegan Beach has the same issue.

“When we take samples … we routinely are recording 300-plus gulls on the beach,” at those two locations, Bartolai said.

North Point Marina and Waukegan beaches accounted for almost half of all bacteria-related advisories and closures issued in Lake County last summer and so far this summer.

Bartolai said most of the advisories and swim bans in 2024 were weather-related. “Even though we were in drought conditions, we did still have heavy rain events,” she said.

Because swimmers at a lakefront beach are engaging in an activity in a natural body of water, “there’s no such thing as no risk,” Breitenbach said.

Earlier this month, at a beach in Portugal, over 100 people had to be treated for nausea and vomiting after swimming.

“When you see reports like this, you’re really thankful that Chicago is so ahead and has been doing (testing) for over a decade now,” said Abhilasha Shrestha, a University of Illinois Chicago research assistant professor of environmental and occupational health sciences who leads the laboratory testing for the city’s public beaches.

The rapid test the Chicago Park District is now using cuts the wait time down to only three to four hours, providing the most up-to-date information to ensure the safety of beachgoers. Before the city’s partnership with UIC began with a pilot program in 2015, testing relied solely on culturing E. coli, a laboratory process that incubates live cells in an artificial, controlled environment — with results available in 18 to 24 hours.

“It didn’t really make sense, because you were telling people what the water was like yesterday and doing the closure or advisory the day after,” Shrestha said.

But some municipalities say they can’t afford the more expensive rapid test.

“Not every community has the funding or has the setup where their beaches get tested every single day,” said Kowalski of Environment America in Illinois.

The Lake County Health Department uses the more time-consuming culture method to test water samples for E. coli — largely due to resources and funding constraints to adopting the faster methodology, officials said.

“The cost of it is almost like 10 times the cost of running an E. coli sample in our lab,” Bartolai said. “But we are looking at it, because there is that need to have that quicker turnaround.”

She said many Lake County suburbs take precautions such as raking the sand at their beaches to clear droppings from geese and seagulls “so that when it rains, it’s not getting washed in.”

In Chicago, Park District staff clean the public beaches daily, starting before dawn. Operations include tractors pulling raking machines, supporting crews of laborers who pick up litter and empty trash cans by hand and beach sweepers who clear paths for pedestrians and bike trail users. Kowalski said beachgoers can also help by picking up after dogs and ensuring babies wear swim diapers.

“(We) ask people to help, to do their part, to keep the water quality good and the beaches clean,” Breitenbach said. “Put your garbage away, don’t feed the birds, listen to the lifeguards.”

More information

Beachgoers across the Great Lakes can find water quality monitoring results on state government websites such as the Illinois Department of Public Health’s BeachGuard page or from volunteer-led efforts in nonprofits such as SwimGuide.

Beach advisories in Chicago are updated on the Park District’s website and with an on-site color-coded flag system that indicates whether conditions are safe for people to swim. These can change throughout the day due to bacteria levels in the water, as well as weather like lightning or high winds, and surf conditions like high waves.

In Chicago public beaches, three colored flags indicate three different things: red for a swim ban, yellow for a swim advisory, which means that swimming is allowed with caution, and green for permitted swimming. On any given day, the flag color between noon and 1:30 p.m. likely indicates the most recent information from water quality test results.

adperez@chicagotribune.com

As the Trump administration slashes funding for health, energy and climate research, there’s one science the administration is promoting: de-extinction.

Earlier this month, a biotechnology company announced it had genetically engineered three gray wolf pups to have white hair, more muscular jaws and a larger build — characteristics of the dire wolf, a species that hasn’t roamed the Earth for several millennia.

Now, the Trump administration is citing the case of the dire wolf as it moves to reduce federal protections under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. On Wednesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced a proposed rule to rescind the definition of “harm” under the act — which for decades has included actions like harassing, pursuing, hunting or killing endangered wildlife and plants, as well as habitat destruction.

“The status quo is focused on regulation more than innovation. It’s time to fundamentally change how we think about species conservation,” said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in an April 7 post on X, formerly Twitter. “The revival of the Dire Wolf heralds the advent of a thrilling new era of scientific wonder, showcasing how the concept of ‘de-extinction’ can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.”

But bioethicists and conservationists are expressing unease with the kind of scientific research being pioneered by Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based company on a mission to bring back extinct animals.

“Unfortunately, as clever as this science is … it’s can-do science and not should-do science,” said Lindsay Marshall, director of science in animal research at Humane World for Animals, formerly the Humane Society of the U.S.

The dire wolf also came up at an April 9 meeting of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources that considered amendments to a proposed law that would strip federal protections from western Great Lakes gray wolves — the latest in a decadeslong back-and-forth between conservationists, hunters and politicians that has shifted the species on and off the endangered list since its inclusion 50 years ago.

At the congressional meeting, Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman of California suggested an amendment to allow a federal judge to reconsider the removal of federal protections if population numbers begin to decline significantly again.

“Well, didn’t we just bring a wolf back that was here 10,000 years ago? I mean, if it really gets that bad, we can just bring woolly mammoths back,” responded Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a Republican and the bill’s sponsor.

“That’s a deeply unserious response to what should be a very serious issue,” Huffman replied.

Gray wolves that live in the Great Lakes and West Coast regions are one of 1,662 species currently protected under the Endangered Species Act. Hunting and trapping almost drove them to extinction in the lower 48 states by the mid-20th century.

Naomi Louchouarn, program director of wildlife partnerships at Humane World for Animals and an expert on human-wildlife coexistence, had a gut reaction to the dire wolf news: “This is going to be a problem for gray wolves,” she recalls thinking. “It almost immediately undermined our ability to protect species.”

In a Wednesday statement to the Tribune, Colossal’s chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, said the company sees de-extinction as “one of many tools” that can speed up the battle against biodiversity loss, which humans are “not close to winning.”

“We don’t see this as an ‘either/or’ question, but rather as a ‘both and,’” she said. “We as a global community need to continue to invest in traditional approaches to conservation and habitat preservation, as well as in the protection of living endangered species.”

Advancements in genetic technologies could revolutionize wildlife conservation, said J. Elizabeth Peace, senior public affairs specialist with the Interior Department, in a statement Wednesday.

“By preserving genetic materials today, we equip future generations with the tools necessary to restore and maintain biodiversity,” the statement said. “This approach aligns with our commitment to stewarding natural resources responsibly, ensuring that our actions today support a sustainable and thriving ecosystem for the future.”

However, critics say de-extinction sends a misleading message and is, overall, a flawed approach to conservation.

“It’s important to realize that they did not bring the dire wolf back from extinction,” said Craig Klugman, a bioethicist and professor of health sciences at DePaul University. “What they did was genetically tweak a gray wolf … so you have a gray wolf that has some characteristics of a dire wolf.”

“It’s like one, but it isn’t one,” he added.

Shapiro said Colossal is working toward functional de-extinction.

“The goal of de-extinction has never been to create perfect genetic copies of an extinct species,” she said, “but instead to bring back key traits that fill an ecological niche that is vacant because of extinction.”

An inefficient science?

As the executive branch targets federal agencies through mass firings, funding cuts and regulatory rollbacks in the name of efficiency, those skeptical of de-extinction argue that it’s an inefficient science.

“It requires a lot of embryos that fail, a lot of pregnancies that don’t take, to get one creature,” Klugman said.

Those few dozen embryos were implanted in the wombs of two female domestic hound mixes, one embryo taking hold in each. A similar procedure was repeated a few months later with another surrogate who gave birth to a third puppy.

“This type of pioneering genetic research often requires multiple attempts to achieve success,” Shapiro said, “and the knowledge gained from both successes and failures contributes to future improvements in efficiency.”

Colossal announced in early March — around the same time Burgum met with company leaders to discuss their role in conservation efforts — that they had genetically edited 38 mice to have hair like the woolly mammoth, a significant step toward engineering Asian elephants with traits similar to those of the extinct species.

To get to those few dozen mice, however, scientists produced 385 embryos, of which 291 were implanted in 16 surrogate females.

“It’s mice. People don’t really care about mice — but we care about mice. We care what’s happening to them,” said Marshall, of Humane World.

Colossal’s facilities are certified by the American Humane Society and registered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, according to Shapiro. She said the company’s research is overseen by a committee of scientists and nonscientists that is required by federal regulations. The committee reviews and evaluates the company’s research protocols and ensures the ethical use of animals.

Skeptics also argue that animals manipulated to mimic extinct ones likely have no future in the wild.

“They have to be taught how to live and hunt and take care of themselves,” Klugman said. “How do they know how to survive? How can they thrive?”

Leaders at Colossal have acknowledged this reality.

According to an Associated Press report, Matt James, Colossal’s chief animal care expert, said that despite the resemblance, “what they will probably never learn is the finishing move of how to kill a giant elk or a big deer,” because they won’t have opportunities to watch and learn from wild dire wolf parents

Shapiro said the pups won’t be released into the wild, where they would have to compete with gray wolves. Instead, they will live in an “expansive ecological preserve” — the company has said it’s a 2,000-acre site in an undisclosed location — where their health and needs will be continually evaluated under managed care.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a wild wolf pack’s territory can be as large as 32,000 acres, extending up to 640,000 acres where prey is scarce. They can travel as far as 30 miles a day to hunt.

“If you think about (it), those pups aren’t going to live much of a life trapped in an area that’s a tiny percentage of what they should have,” Marshall said. “They’re not a self-sustaining population. They have nowhere to live. … We don’t know if those animals are going to suffer as they get older.”

Ed Heist, a professor at Southern Illinois University and a conservation geneticist,  said the news bothered him.

“This is not conservation, but people conflate it,” he said. “The point is entertainment.”

Nichole Keway Biber feels similarly unsettled. She is a tribal citizen of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa and leads the wolf and wildlife preservation team at the Anishinaabek Caucus of the Michigan Democratic Party. She said it demonstrates that the natural world, to humans, is for consumption or entertainment — and that it ignores the inherent worth of voiceless animals beyond any commercial or amusement benefit they can provide.

“That has a danger,” she said, “of setting a pattern of behavior: to be dismissive of the vulnerable, or take advantage of the vulnerable or be abusive toward the vulnerable.”

Inability to coexist

Louchouarn, the Humane World program director, has dedicated her studies and research to the relationship between humans and animals, specifically carnivores like gray wolves.

“The reason our current endangered species are becoming extinct is because we don’t know how to coexist with them,” she said. “And this doesn’t solve that problem at all.”

Humans can treat the symptoms of wildlife conflict with “big, flashy silver bullets” and “in this case, advanced, inefficient science,” she said, but the real solution is behavioral change.

“Assuming that we could actually bring back a full population of animals,” Louchouarn said, “which is so difficult and so crazy — that’s a big if — I don’t understand the point of trying to bring back a woolly mammoth when we already can’t coexist with elephants.”

In the United States, political discussions surrounding gray wolf conservation have been based on different interpretations of whether their populations have recovered enough to be sustainable without protections.

“But we define what well is, not the wolves,” Louchouarn said. “The ecosystem can carry a lot more wolves than that. We just refuse to live with them.”

Recent winter estimates count more than 750 wild gray wolves in Michigan, almost 3,000 in Minnesota and just over 1,000 in Wisconsin. Some of those wolves may occasionally travel to Illinois, where they were common until they were wiped out after the arrival of European settlers.

The bill in the U.S. House aimed at removing protections from the species is called the Pet and Livestock Protection Act, and its supporters and sponsors argue it will allow ranchers and communities to manage conflict with wolves as they fear for the safety of their domesticated animals.

In Wisconsin, wolf attacks on livestock have increased over the last three years, resulting in animal deaths or injuries: from 49 confirmed or probable cases in 2022 to 69 in 2023 and up to 85 in 2024. While wolf attacks on dogs in residential areas are rare, they have also increased in recent years, according to state reports.

Conservation biologists who oppose hunting worry it will only exacerbate this type of conflict. When a wolf is killed, it can disrupt pack dynamics, which can in turn lead to lone wolves preying on livestock or pets outdoors — smaller and easier to kill than larger prey such as bison, elk, moose and deer.

For other people, coexistence is a way of life. Biber said the Anishinaabe, the Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region, live by the principle of dabasendiziwin, or humility in regard to other living organisms.

“It’s not self-denigration, but a realistic awareness of our dependence (on) the elements,” she said, “but also plants and animals, and us. And all the other orders of being can exist apart from us. They’re OK. They were here long before. We’re the newcomers.”

Anishinaabe people, like the Ojibwe and the Odawa, believe in a parallel history with the gray wolf or Ma’iingan, that their fates are intrinsically connected.

“What happens to one, will happen to the other,” Biber said.

A question of stewardship

Species don’t exist in a vacuum, Heist often reminds his students at SIU. “They are parts of their communities.”

So when a species ceases to exist, it loses its place in the ecosystem. It’s a void left to be filled by others over hundreds, thousands of years.

Klugman wonders whether resurrecting animals unprepared for the modern world — “which we clearly have not done yet” — would even be fair to them. “Is that us being good stewards of this planet?”

During a livestreamed town hall with Interior Department employees on April 9, Burgum said: “If we’re going to be in anguish about losing a species, now we have an opportunity to bring them back. Pick your favorite species and call up Colossal. And instead of raising money to get animals on the endangered species (list), let’s figure out a way to get them off.”

Ken Angielczyk, curator of mammal fossils at the Field Museum who researches extinct species that lived 200 to 300 million years ago, said it’s a misguided approach.

“If that’s the basis … for changing regulations related to the endangered species list, that is very, very premature,” he said. “Because we can’t resurrect things.”

Biber said humans should be focused on preventing further loss. “It’s a lot better use of effort, time, resources, mind power.”

“If the purpose is to restore the damage to the shared ecosystem, we have that opportunity right now,” she said. “And that’s the necessity immediately.”

Angielczyk, who studies mammals that survived the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history, said fossil records after such events show it takes a long time for real ecosystem recovery to occur: 1 to 10 million years — way longer than the human species has existed.

“So, changes that we can cause today quite easily, in some cases, have very, very long-term implications,” he said. “Just another reason why conservation efforts really are important and something that we should be concerned about and actively involved in.”

It’s also crucial to preserve the ability of species to adapt to changing conditions, Heist said, which requires large populations and genetic diversity.

Red wolves represent one such opportunity. The species — once common in most of the eastern and southern United States — still exists, but is critically endangered partly because in the wild, the wolves often mate with coyotes and produce hybrid offspring. That has led to low genetic diversity and weak evolutionary fitness. Just under 20 red wolves exist in their wild, native habitats today.

Alongside the dire wolf news, Colossal announced it cloned four of these hybrids and removed most of the coyote DNA along the way. They say it’s the first step to restoring genetic diversity in the captive breeding populations of red wolves, 241 of which live in 45 facilities across the country.

Some conservationists feel more hopeful about this endeavor, though they still express reservations.

“There is a benefit to trying to bring back some of the genes that would diversify … red wolves, that would enhance their ability to survive,” Louchouarn said. “But will that fix red wolf extinction, at the rate that they’re going extinct? No, because the reason it’s happening is they’re being poached at extreme rates.”

Heist said it might not be practical to spend so much money trying to create genetically diverse red wolves to significantly restore their populations.

Bioethicists and conservationists argue that, at its core, the issue is whether humans can put aside self-interest to invest in the well-being of other creatures.

“This whole idea that extinction is reversible is so dangerous,” Marshall said, “because then it stops us caring.”

adperez@chicagotribune.com