Bugs

We were blessed with beautiful weather for our mapping section of this section. It was only fair that Mother Nature would pour down on us for a couple days. Today was a pretty special day for me. I had been working since November with Devon developing a stream assessment using benthic macroinvertebrates in acid mine drainage streams. In particular, we designed a lab for the Fisher Creek, which drains on the western side of Henderson Mountain.

Today was the day that all of our hard work paid off. With the exception of the weather, the sampling and identification of our "bugs" went beautifully. We wanted to see if the remediation efforts were paying off, not only in the water chemistry, but in the biology that lived there. It was rewarding for me to be able to help people understand and get excited about this type of work and its ties to what we had been doing all week.