Early Departure this week! We leave at 12:30 PM from the McCook parking lot.
One way to rapidly assess overall stream health is to see what’s living in a stream. Freshwater aquatic macroinvertebrates are insects and other organisms that live in the sediments of streams and rivers. Many of these insects are in their larval and nymph stages before they “hatch” and become common airborne bugs such as mosquitoes, dragonflies and beetles. The diversity of different orders of macroinvertebrates, as well as the presence (or absence) of several sensitive types of macroinvertebrates, is very telling about the overall health of an aquatic ecosystem. These organisms comprise the base of the food chain for larger vertebrates such as fish. Fly fisherman who understand the patterns and life-cycles of macroinvertebrates will certainly know where the fish are! In fact many “flies” that fisherman use are made to replicate the various stages and species of different macroinvertbrates.
This project is a tale of two stream: The Mt. Hope River in Ashford, CT and the Park River in Hartford. We will collect and compare the populations of macroinvertebrates that we find in both rivers and construct a series of quantitative analyses that will aid in the accepting or rejecting of your hypotheses.
This week we will head to some property owned by Trinity in Ashford, CT and collect macroinvertebrates. To outline how we will do this please visit the EPA’s website on Monitoring and Assessing Water Quality. Currently (2016) the EPA website is under construction so you will not be able to access the normal web pages on how to sample for macroinvertebrates. I will give you all the information you need out at the river.
Therefore there is no pre-lab assignment other than making sure you have a pair of stream waders at least the DAY BEFORE YOUR LAB DAY. ENVS majors are expected to have their own pair. We do have some to lend but there there may not be enough sizes to accommodate everyone.