(WI) Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - Brian A. Wolf boasted about the shimmering water and the trophy bass he used to catch from Long Lake in central Wisconsin. But since 2005, the lake has undergone a remarkable transformation: It’s essentially gone.

(MI) Detroit Free Press - When people act oddly, they’re sometimes described as having bats in their belfry. Yet if you live in Michigan, one of America’s bat havens, there’s a good chance you really have bats in the belfry, or at least in the attic.

(MI) The Detroit News - It started in February when Debra Miller, who works as a caregiver, noticed dozens of red welts on the body of a man she cares for in the Griswold Senior Apartments complex.

(MI) Detroit Free Press - One of Michigan’s most successful commercial fishermen is suing the state to try to overcome a decades-old ban on catching walleye in the Great Lakes.

By Rachael Gleason
You can locate some of the Great Lakes’ shipwrecks thanks to this mashup.
The interactive map features about 120 nautical disasters — although Great Lakes historian Dave Swayze estimates more than 4,000 ships have been lost to the lakes.

By Eric Freedman
Nov. 30, 2009
LANSING – The Edmund Fitzgerald is the best-known of the Great Lakes’ doomed ships, but the freighter’s demise with its entire crew off Whitefish Point in the Upper Peninsula is by no means the state’s only such maritime disaster.
Andrew Kantar, a Ferris State University professor, tells another such story, that of the ill-fated freighter Daniel J. Morrell. It sank in 1966 off the tip of the Thumb in Lake Huron, northwest of Harbor Beach.

By Nick Mordowanec
Nov. 29, 2009
A university intends to measure Lake Michigan’s potential for offshore wind power with a $1.4 million federal grant.

By Emily Lawler
Nov. 28, 2009
LANSING, Mich. – Forget letting the bedbugs bite – even having them in your home is a danger.
The entire United States is dealing with a resurgence of these pesky parasites, which feed on human blood.
“They can cause red itchy lesions,” said Kim Signs, a zoonotic disease epidemiologist with Michigan’s Department of Community Health. She studies diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans.
It’s especially bad in neighboring Ohio, where a bedbug-targeting task force has formed and legislators are calling for the Environmental Protection Agency to …

(IL) Chicago Tribune – Lake Michigan can be an angry beast in late autumn, when icy winds whip across its surface and thrashing waves lay siege to the receding shoreline.

By Mehak Bansil
Nov. 27, 2009
LANSING—Lake sturgeon, one of the oldest surviving species from prehistoric times, is making a small comeback in the Great Lakes region.
“They’ve increased about a couple of percent since their lowest numbers,