Sustainability and the Environment: "Water You Doing in my Home?"

Wednesday, February 24th, was the much-anticipiated sequel to Tuesday's water lab. On Tuesday, the adventurers had gone out tracing a stream and sampling the aquatic life that lived inside of it, hoping that these little critters would help give them a clue to the quality of the water in upstream and downstream sampling locations.  

Now since they couldn't just ask the macroinvertebrates what they thought about the water quality in the different spots, they were going to have to resort to alternative means of discovery. Consequently, Adam set up an in-class portion of the lab that had to do with microscopes and numbers and everything like that. 

Julia, Leah, and Aislyn are excited to look through some microscopes today

The first important matter they had to attend to was to check out the stats on the water sample that Mabel had taken earlier, in order to compare the upstream and downstream locations of this Monteverde stream to the river they'd tested down in La Carpio.  

Here's the stats in case you want to copy them down 

Mabel also revealed the results of her fecal coliforms test, which probes for fecal matter in the water source. The adventurers were super stoked to find out that there wasn't any fecal matter in their upstream testing site. They were a bit dismayed to discover that there was plenty of decal matter in their downstream sampling site. But they kind of knew that going in, which is why they wore their gloves and everything. 

The dismaying results 

Mabel shows the adventurers why it's not a good idea to drink straight from the stream 

Now what's interesting is that the chemical testing of the water didn't reveal all that much of a difference between La Carpio and the stream they'd gone trekking around in yesterday, or at least not as big of a difference as the adventurers had expected, having seen how polluted La Carpio was first-hand. 

So that's why the adventurers had to turn to trusty old bugs to help them understand the water quality. First things first: they had to identify the little critters. Good thing Adam had a bunch of cool dichotomous keys just lying around for the adventurers to use to identify the creepy crawlies.  

Meg, Emma, and Hannah weren't sure where the dichotomous keys were at, so Adam pointed at them 

She's not stabbing it to death, she's just using the little tack to move it 

Aislyn didn't know what kind of bug this bug was, so she decided to destroy the evidence

 Adam had this nifty magnifying camera toy that you could attach to a microscope and take super close-up pictures with, so the photographer got to experiment with taking pictures of bugs' eyes and stuff, so that was pretty cool.

This one looks like a Warhol print or something 

Bugs are really aliens 

Here's a look at the different mouths of these different aquatic fellows 

A handsome dragonfly larvae 

It's a good thing these guys aren't bigger than we are, isn't it? 

 It was a pretty interesting lab, and doing detective work to ID bugs is always a good time. The adventurers definitely enjoyed both days of this lab, but it was awful nice to not have to hose down their boots and socks when the lab wrapped up today. 

Bugs and questionable water systems-- what's not to love?