I noticed that I was talking about some water bugs last time. After a fall of chilly water temperatures, rainy days and about a million local fourth graders my bug knowledge expanded even more. The bugs I talked about last time were pretty common finds in our rivers this past fall. The Wisconsin Extension has a great link to a book called Wonderful Wacky Water Critters. It not only gives great drawings of the critters but life cycles and cool facts. They used to have hard copies as well but I'm not sure if they still do. I'll attach a link at the bottom to a pdf of this cool pamphlet.
But Kate, if you aren't going to talk about that, what are you going to talk about? I'm going to spend my time today talking about what this has to do with us!
While it's really awesome to be able to dig in the muck and dirt and find these creepy crawly critters, their presence or sometimes more importantly their absence, means a lot to us in the Natural Resources field as well as those who take advantage of a water source!
This is a photo of "my" beautiful river. When I take people, young and old, into our river to find these great macro-invertebrates there are three things that I stress.
1.) A connection that only comes from exploration and immersion into the resource
2.) The bugs we find are more than just cool to look at. They are a sign on what kind of water quality we have.
3.) We control the quality of the river even if we live a long ways away!
Many of the bugs that we find in our river in just a short 16 minute time frame are a litmus of the health of our river over all, for if we had poor water quality, we would not see many of them here which would affect the entire food chain!
Holy, that's a lot to take in right? A bug can not only teach us of water quality but the food web too? But we don't even like to touch them! That's alright, let's break it down a little more.
After we find the bugs and put them all in a bucket we can use a formula, also given to us by the UW Extension (link below) to break them into groups.
After they are broken into groups we plug them corresponding numbers into a fairly simple formula and voila! We have a water quality number. Blah blah blah right? Wait, this is where it gets interesting!
This may only be a number but it can be translated into what kind of water quality we have!
Now where I live we have great water quality so we have a ton of bugs that we find. Keep in mind though, that like humans, different bugs prefer to live in different places. Some like fast water with a lot of oxygen present while others like slow moving water with little to no oxygen. (Our friends at the extension have taken this into account in their formula)
Critters like dragonflies, damselflies, caddisflies and most of all stoneflies are very intolerant of poor water quality and would not be able to survive if our water weren't clean. SO what does that have to do with the people that don't live directly on our river? (Very few get to because it is a unit of your National Park System you know!)
I like to tell people that we all live upstream of someone and downstream of someone.
If we take care of the rivers where we live, those living downstream from us will have the same beauty to see as we do. Tributaries are small streams that flow into a larger stream. These are all excellent opportunities for pollutants to enter our waters. So even if we don't live right on the main water source, odds are we have an effect on it. Good or bad.
SO lets choose to do things that will help preserve and protect our waters. We want our grandkids and great grandkids to enjoy what we get to enjoy today.
That's my preachy-ness for today.
While I know it's chilly out, still try to find something to do and Take It Outside today!
UW Extension Website: http://www.uwex.edu/
PDF Wonderful Wacky Water Critters: http://clean-water.uwex.edu/pubs/pdf/wwwc.pdf
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