Water Quality Testing at Benewah Creek

Today we were taught how to conduct water quality testing at a creek setting.  Marie has these great water quality kits that can be loaned out (if you teach locally) to show your students how to do field work that really matters.  The project at Benewah Creek has a purpose, to create healthy habitat for native Cutthroat trout.  We learned how to use the kits to test for a variety of water quality parameters.  First, we took the temperature of the creek and determined that it is great for the fish we are working with.  Second, we took a reading with a transparency meter.  It is a tube with a secchi disk in the bottom that shows the clarity of the water.   Of course, our creek was very clear.   We did chemical tests to find dissolved oxygen and pH.   Measuring the creek is a big part of the lesson, but we skipped it because we all know how to measure.  One really cool thing we did was to use a Wolmonator ( sorry if I got the name wrong) to determine the size of rocks and sand in the river.  Kids would LOVE to do this because they get to cross the river picking up rocks with every step and measuring them on the Wolman scale.  Students should find 50 rocks in a good study and keep tallies of the rock sizes they find.  This determines the type of sediment in the river.   The last thing we did was to find invertebrates in the river.  We were allowed to use really cool little magnifying cups that enabled us to view the invertebrates from all sides.  We used a dichotomous key to find the species.  It is truely amazing to know that kids can identify invertebrates that are environmental indicator species for the health of a river.  It was a really fun day.   Josh is writing about some of the other things we did.