Aquatic field studies

During science 9 we have been working on water quality tests, we have been going down to the oxbow pond and the Coquitlam river to collect water quality information such as the ph and temperature change. So far the water in both are good, the oxbow pond has a water quality index of 80.2 and the Coquitlam river has one of 89.95. My favourite part of this is looking at the bioindicators, bioindicator is using the plants and animals in the water to determine the quality of the water. What we do is one person goes out into the river/pond  When we looked for the creaturs in the oxbow pond my group only found 1 insect a waterboatman but as a class, we found a good amount of interesting things several dragonfly larvae, riffle beetle larva, mayfly larvae, damselfly larva, mayfly nymph, water boatman (what my group found) and the most interesting thing a predatory diving beetle.

Unfortunately, when we did our invertebrate sampling in the Coquitlam river as a class we found almost nothing. Only 2 groups found stuff large enough to identify, a mayfly larva (one of two things found alive) and the other group found dead stonefly nymphs. The only other thing found alive was tiny fly, everything else was too small to identify. There are multiple reasons why this could me.1 we didn’t go out far enough, during the past week we have got a lot of rain there for the river is running faster and wider, so it would be unsafe for us to go it to the middle of the river where more creatures would possibly be. 2 the water quality is consistent, possibly  the water quality overall changes but we happened to test it a  moment where the quality was higher.

 

Now that I have talked about what we found I probably should talk a bit more about the proses we used. The first thing we did was to partially fill a basin with water. The next step is where it varies slightly from the river and pond. When we collected invertebrates from the oxbow pond we simply used the net to scoop out water and leaves and hope we grabbed an invertebrate, But when we went to the Coquitlam River, one person held the net using their legs to support it the other person grabbed rocks from directly in front of the net, then they would proceed by scrubbing the rocks to attempt to knock off anything clinging to the rock and letting the river sweep in to the net. The final step would be to dump the net out into the basin before scrubbing any leaves in there for more life forms. We would follow this by observing the basin for movement.

Personly I think learning how to do environmental studies in this way is extremely effective. For I believe, yes theoretical knowledge is important, but If you never use any of the knowledge you learned through a textbook it will become one of those things that you learned to pass before forgetting. In my opinion, if you learn by doing the practical use is clearer to you then if you hade just read about it in a textbook.