We went to the Pomme de Terre River to see what the river was like and to catch some critters. The critters are called macroinvertebrates because they don't have backbones. They live on the rocks and in the mud at the river. Mrs. Solvie and Mr. Pikal went into the river with a kick net and a drop net to get the water samples.

In the water samples we found a crayfish, caddisflies, mayflies, one clam, a scud, leeches, worms, snails, and one red midge. We brought the water samples back to our classroom and separated the living things from the non-living things like clam shells, the moss, and pieces of weeds and wood.

Next, we separated the living things into groups like caddisflies, mayflies, stoneflies, leeches, worms, and crayfish. Then we had to count how many of each living thing we had. We put all the data on a chart. We wrote down the pollution tolerance which told us how much they can stand of dirty water and clean water. Leeches can stand a lot of dirty water. Their pollution tolerance number is 10! Stoneflies have a number of 1! They can't stand dirty water. They like clean water. We found 13 stoneflies in our sample of 195 critters.

The river was pretty clean water. It's biotic index, which tells how clean the water is, was 3.29. Around the river it was pretty clean also. We found only one plastic pop bottle and one container from a fast food restaurant.

We had to look closely at the critters to separate them. The crayfish looked like little lobsters. Stoneflies had a V tail. Caddisflies had a fluffy tail and they curled up into a C. Mayflies have an M tail.

We are doing an evaporation experiment. We put distilled water, tap water, and river water in three gallon jugs and marked the water line. Already we can see that some of the water has evaporated or gone up into the air. We think it might take two or three weeks for all of the water to evaporate. We can see that the jars look different on the sides, as the water evaporates. Evaporation happens to a river, too. We had to dump the river water before our experiment was over because it stunk too badly.

We painted a mural about our river. We signed up for what part to paint. Some painted trees, the dam, wild flowers, tall grasses, milk weed plants, cattails, and critters.

Next we want to find out where waste water in our community is being dumped and we will try to find out why there were the number of critters and kinds we found in our river.

Where does your community dump its waste water? Can you tell us? Does it hurt the water supply for your community?