
CAROLINA LABSHEETS
Clean, noncontaminated water is an essential natural resource for all living organisms—animals and plants. Assessing water quality provides students the opportunity to gather and analyze data, construct explanations, and establish cause-and-effect relationships. Water quality analysis is often a two-prong endeavor. One prong includes taking abiotic data such as temperature, dissolved oxygen levels, flow rate, and a chemical analysis for substances like nitrates, phosphates, silica, and heavy metals. The other prong is a biotic approach that requires sampling of the macroinvertebrates in a body of water.
What is a macroinvertebrate? They are organisms that are large enough to be seen with the naked eye and lack a backbone. Examples of aquatic macroinvertebrates include insects in the larval or nymph stages, crayfish, mussels, clams, worms, and leeches. Most aquatic macroinvertebrates spend a portion of their life span attached to logs, rocks, or vegetation in the stream. Macroinvertebrates can be found in cool, fast-moving mountain streams to broad, muddy, slow-moving rivers.
The ideal approach to water quality testing is to locate a nearby stream or pond and have students perform abiotic and biotic tests on-site. For many reasons, this approach may not be possible, but simulated testing can be a viable hands-on alternative. Bring a variety of water samples to class for abiotic testing and use macroinvertebrate cards to simulate the living organisms captured at the site. The Carolina® Aquatic Macroinvertebrate Card Set has the added advantage of including the organism’s common name, group, biotic index, and pollution tolerance value so that the water quality index is easy to calculate. This activity may be used as an introduction to macroinvertebrates prior to stream sampling, as a review, or a formative assessment.
Science and Engineering Practices
Crosscutting Concepts
Disciplinary Core Ideas
Determine stream water quality based on a macroinvertebrate inventory.
No PPE required. No chemical disposal.
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