Part of our outdoor science education program includes learning to identify benthic macroinvertebrates. Macros are good bioindicators of stream health because they can spend up to two years living in the water in their nymph and larval stage! The scud pictured here is a macro that has some tolerance to water pollution so even though it’s one of my favorites, its presence in a stream cannot rule out the possibility of pollution. We would have to find pollution intolerant or pollution sensitive macros such as stonefly or mayfly larvae to be able to determine good water quality.
Our macro identification is possible each year due to our partnership with the North Olympic Salmon Coalition (NOSC). Every year they send restoration stewards to our classroom to work directly with students. They bring in samples of water from our neighborhood creek and teach students how to identify the macros, bugs, in the water. Kids use a Macro Identification Data Sheet to score our creek and make an analysis of its potential water quality based on the bugs present in our creek. Adding this to our water quality data collected earlier this year, allows students to see how well our community is doing to keep our creek healthy for the salmon. I was so happy to be able to invite NOSC back into our classroom. Here they are working with my 6th graders as they identified different species of benthic macroinvertebrates:
Data Scoring Sheet
Kids enjoyed themselves and they are getting to experience multiple aspects of our freshwater ecosystem!
