IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
131 
THE OKOBOJI LAKESIDE LABORATORY. 
BY THOMAS H. MACBEIDE. 
The establishment of the Okoboji Lakeside Laboratory, founded by the 
alumni of the State University of Iowa, promises to affect so deeply the future 
scientific work of our state that some account of its beginning and especially 
its raison d'etre may rightly claim the attention of the Academy. The labora- 
tory has been located on the west shore of Lake Okoboji in Dickinson county 
for the reasons following: 
In the first place the topography of Dickinson county is peculiar, unique. 
Situated on the western border of the Iowa Wisconsin drift, the region illus- 
trates, as possibly no other equal area in the state, the special characteristics, 
not only of glacial moraines in general, but in particular the very expression 
of the Wisconsin moraine. In fact, I think that it must be admitted that the 
Okoboji lakes and their encompassing hills do indeed form the finest bit of 
morainic topography to be found on our western prairie.* 
This fact, of course, makes the locality an especially interesting field for 
illustrating to the student all the fascinating features of the latest page in the 
geologic history of our state. Indeed, the » very fact that the locality is 
marginal makes it especially interesting, and studies of contact, of movement 
and retreat, as well as of direction and relation to pre-existing topography — 
all these things are especially accessible and patent within half a day’s drive 
along any highway south or west. 
Secondly, the region having Okoboji for its center is, by reason of the 
peculiar topography just mentioned, the field of a special fioral display difficult 
to illustrate anywhere else within such narrow limits. We have a forest fiora 
and a prairie flora; and neither in this part of the world has ever been ade- 
quately studied. It is believed that the fungal flora of the region, for instance, 
is especially rich and interesting. We have all kinds of habitat conditions, 
from aquatic to xerophytic. We have deep water, shallow water, but perma- 
nent; marshes, springs; and zerophytic slopes and hill-tops, some so dry as to 
offer home to the vegetation of the higher western semi-arid plains. The 
plankton of the lakes is filled with desmids and diatoms and all manner of 
algal flora, during July and August rich beyond comparison in all that makes 
up the tide of life for these simple but fascinating forms. 
Neither have the xerophytes been studied nor the flora which joins these, 
perchance, in ecologic bonds with their aquatic congeners, for the waters are 
filled with flowering plants, richly indeed as with floating cryptogams, and 
the factors of ecology and distribution all are here, in large part so far, unex- 
plored and certain to interest for centuries generation after generation of 
Iowa students. 
*It is here assumed that the Okoboji hills are morainic : further exploration may offer 
another explanation. 
