Students Help Save Our Streams
Last spring, biology students put on thigh-high waders and went bug-hunting for a cause. State environmentalists had put out the call for volunteers to help them check the vital signs of area streams. Armed with nets, buckets, strainers and a GPS positioning unit, the students headed to area freshwater streams to look for aquatic insects, crustaceans and snails that hide under the rocks and logs and in the roots of trees and grasses lining the streams.
The frogs, fish and salamanders they found are just fair-weather friends. It is the mayfly and the dragonfly, and other microinvertebrates like them, that tell the tale of a stream’s health. “Insects are the standard indicators of the stream’s health, since they are not able to escape the effects of pollutants or excess sediments, factors that degrade water quality,” says Rosemary Ford, professor of biology. “Not all stream insects have the same tolerance to pollutants. Some, like the mayfly and dobsonfly larvae, are only found in good quality water, whereas the dragon fly or damselfly larva can tolerate both fair and good water.”
Members of Beta Beta Beta, a national honor society for biology students, and the freshman honors General Biology class comprised the two stream monitoring teams from Washington College.
Their efforts were part of the Stream Waders program, sponsored by Maryland Department of Natural Resources. Results of this survey will be used for reporting stream condition, researching the relationships between watershed conditions (such as land use) and the quality of the streams that drain them, and for water quality regulations. The Stream Waters program intends to sample more than 25 sites in each medium-sized watershed (about 80 square miles) in the state. In this last “round” of the survey, DNR personnel sampled an average of seven sites per medium-sized watershed.
For current information about the Maryland Biological Stream Survey, visit the Maryland DNR’s World Wide Web homepage at www.dnr.state.md.us under the heading Bays and Streams. _
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