CAROLINA LABSHEETS

Overview

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.

NGSS Standards

Science and Engineering Practices

Crosscutting Concepts

Disciplinary Core Ideas

Objective

Determine stream water quality based on a macroinvertebrate inventory.

Materials

Carolina® Aquatic Macroinvertebrate Card Set

Safety and Disposal

No PPE required. No chemical disposal.

Teacher Preparations

  1. For each student pair or lab group, prepare a simulated stream sample macroinvertebrate collection of 20–30 cards. The stream samples may be the same or different for each group. The Macroinvertebrate Card Set contains 280 cards.
  2. Review the calculations and formulas with students.
  3. Five simulated samples with calculations are included below.

SAMPLE 1

1 Flatworm, 1 Fly larva, 2 Tan snails, 1 Midge larva, 2 Water mites, 4 Fishfly larva, 5 Segmented worms, 4 Leeches

Biotic Index and Pollution Tolerance Values

Sample 1:     3.55 very good     1.6 poor

SAMPLE 2

5 Segmented worms, 1 Fly larva, 2 Flatworms, 1 Tan snail, 2 Crayfish, 1 Mussel, 1 Damselfly nymph, 1 Scud, 1 Dragonfly nymph, 4 Black fly larva, 1 Beetle larva

Biotic Index and Pollution Tolerance Values

Sample 2:     3.2 excellent     2.64 good

SAMPLE 3

2 Leeches, 2 Flatworms, 6 Tan snails, 2 Water mites, 1 Midge larva, 3 Red snails, 1 Sowbug, 1 Crayfish, 1 Damselfly nymph, 1 Dragonfly nymph

Biotic Index and Pollution Tolerance Values

Sample 3:     4.9 good     2.3 fair

SAMPLE 4

8 Alderflies, 4 Scud, 2 Water mites, 6 Beetle larva

Biotic Index and Pollution Tolerance Values

Sample 4:     7.3 fairly poor     3.0 good

SAMPLE 5

2 Caddisflies, 1 Snail, 1 Damselfly nymph, 2 Crayfish, 2 Scud, 2 Beetle larva, 1 Fishfly larva, 1 Midge larva, 1 Mussel, 3 Clams, 2 Water mites, 2 Leeches

Biotic Index and Pollution Tolerance Values

Sample 5:     6.05 fair     2.5 fair

References

*Next Generation Science Standards® is a registered trademark of Achieve. Neither Achieve nor the lead states and partners that developed the Next Generation Science Standards were involved in the production of this product, and do not endorse it.