Back in the field: Sampling trip 2 has started

 

Brushfork Creek, OH

Round two of sampling began yesterday morning! I’m ~920 miles in and visited sites in Ohio and northeastern KY. When I did the original sampling, I was told that the site in Ohio received water from acid mining. At the time, Nigronia was one of the only organisms living in the stream. When I arrived today, the site looked pretty, but sure enough, there wasn’t a rich community of aquatics. I managed to collect a full sample of Nigronia, but I have no idea what they were eating. I did see a few terrestrial rove beetles in the leaf packs I disturbed and I *think* I saw one rove beetle larva in the leaf pack, so maybe Nigronia is eating them. I collected one larger Nigronia because I have a student interested in using DNA to identify gut contents and this seems like a good specimen to give them.

From there, I drove to northeastern KY. The site was… interesting. It was a small creek running past a farm. Most of the site was really shallow (< 2 inches deep), with only one deeper pool. There was a lot of bare bedrock, leaving nowhere for the Nigronia to hide from all the black-nosed dace (a small species of fish, but the older ones could definitely eat Nigronia). There were a couple places where the bedrock was broken down into cobble, and there I managed to find a few Nigronia. There was a much better diversity of insects here, with two families of dragonfly, one family of damselfly, two aquatic beetle families, one mayfly family, and a crayfish species. While I don’t remember much about this site, none of the sites I used in the original study had that little water. Whether the lack of water is a seasonal issue or whether there have been changes in water usage in the area, I have no idea. The Nigronia population is either much smaller than it was previously, or very very hidden.

I did have one surprise show up in my net and a few terrestrial friends along my way, here are some critter pictures:

 

 

 

Not sure which of us was more surprised when this friend ended up in my net while I was sampling for insects.

Today, I’ll visit a site in central KY and head to western KY to stop at a campground for the night.