Summer Fun!

by Melanie Cheney
Americorps Stream Team Assistant
Missouri River Relief

Well June was packed full with fun summertime events. The weather was fine & the highlights are many. My favorite ed event was with hundred's of cub scouts at our local city park, Stephens Lake. Groups of 20 would come through our booth every hour on the hour, for 8 hours! It was such a pleasure to work and play with these kids, they were so intelligent & well behaved! Ann Koenig (Forrester for MDC) plays the Macro-Mayem game with the scouts

Many of them were definitely "gifted" and sometimes my lecture on water quality and Stream Teams would get turned around into Q & A's, ranging from scientists studying parasitic twins to why old people shrink, after that last one, I quickly saw that we were getting way off track & returned to our discussion on macro-invertebrates! The next day, Steve & I were off to celebrate Stream Team's 20th anniversary down in Waynesville! We participated in a float on the Big Piney, mingled with fellow stream teamers, listened to old time bluegrass, ate BBQ & together shared our fondest memories during a heartwarming documentary on the program and it's success'. Here's a link to watch the 20th anniversary documentary: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=02D5F418F1519949 Steve & I on our float (top)

A beautiful mayfly I rescued out of the water and set to dry on my paddle (bottom)

On Sunday, I attended some really great workshops on terrestrial insects and fly fishing. It was a blast!

Lastly, Missouri River Relief ended June with a big splash in Sioux City, IA. For the second year in a row, we helped local Siouxlanders clean-up their stretch of river. There wasn't all that much trash to be had, but the experience of working with the "Sioux Crew" was priceless. We even got to take a tour of a wastewater treatment plant! Check out over a hundred photos we are posting of this event on our Flickr page http://www.flickr.com/photos/8478409@N03/. What a great month it has been, Missouri's streams & rivers have once again left me full, yet ready for more.

Earthday Ed Events
Prarie Fork Conservation Area
April 22, 2009

Well April was full of educational Earthday events. The one that really topped my list for the month however was an Ed Event at Prarie Fork Conservation Area near Williamsburg. The Natural Resources Conservation Service, Missouri Department of Conservation & University of Missouri (I'm guessing here) teamed up to organize around 650 4th-6th graders from area schools. Groups of 20 kids each went around to booths with educational/hands-on topics in Praries, Woodlands, Wetlands & Streams, to Soils. It was awesome!


The day started off when fellow Stream Team Assistants Pam, Katrina & I got an early start and headed to the nearby Whetstone Conservation Area to catch some live macro-invertebrates for our booth. It was a beautiful clear Spring morning, and I must say, the Whetstone C.A. was just amazing! There were Bluebells & Wild Sweet Williams blooming in all they're glory, Ferns, Wild Ginger, & huge swaths of Blood Root growing along a clear & cool babbling stream. I was in heaven.

We started doing the riffle dance in various locations along the stream trying to get the biggest diversity of critters possible. Katrina moved us to a larger section of the stream. Her mission was to find the biggest crawdads to put in the little kiddie pool we brought so that the kids could pick them up. We got tons of great bugs out of Whetstone including the biggest Cranefly Larvae I have ever had the pleasure of seeing (& touching). They are super squishy and I got a kick out of getting the students later that day to pick it up.

We rolled into Prarie Fork to set up amonst 20 or so other exhibitors, luckily I dropped Pam & Katrina off with all of the stuff for our display before I got River Relief's big ol' van stuck in the mud. I was way out in the middle of this field away from everyone where they told us to park, luckily a really nice guy from MDC came along and helped me out of my pickle. It took us about 20 minutes! But I made it back before the kids arrived and got to our booth.


Pam, Katrina, Lea & I ended up having to set up 3 different stations with the live macros because these were the biggest groups of kids (20 at a time) that I have ever had to deal with! The crawdad pool is always the most popular, and the kids just loved getting to play in water and with live critters in general. There were a few screamers, but mostly just inquisitive kids having fun. I think I just about had as much fun as those kids. What a great day!

A huge thanks goes out to the organizers. Having done big Ed Events with Missouri River Relief in the past, this is one of the best organized events I have ever been to. An even bigger thanks goes out to Pat Jones for donating her land as a conservation area so that people big & small can come out and learn about Praries, Wetlands, Lakes, Streams, Woodlands, Savannahs & Soils.

For more fun photos, check out our photo gallery.

Melanie Cheney
Americorps Stream Team Assistant
Missouri River Relief

Thousands of baby caddisflies!

Water Quality Monitoring

February 8, 2009
Club Medfly, Missouri River, rivermile 170

text by Steve Schnarr, data collection by Melanie Cheney & Jen Courtney, photos by Melanie Cheney & Amy Jungclaus

Later this year, the Missouri Stream Team program will be turning 20. Since 1989, 3,860 citizen groups have formed across the state, each focused on monitoring, restoring and educating others about their adopted stream. The program is collaboration between Mo. Dept. of Conservation, Mo. Dept. of Natural Resources, Conservation Federation of Mo. and thousands of citizens.

Missouri River Relief is Stream Team #1875. Our adopted “stream” is the Missouri River within the state of Missouri (several other stream teams, luckily, have adopted various stretches within that reach). Typical River Relief grandiosity!

One of the greatest benefits of Stream Teams is the free water quality monitoring training and equipment that is offered. They get right down in the stream with you, showing you how to sample the critters that live in there, show you how to test for several simple chemical attributes and teach how to record data on the physical changes of your stream over time.

Much of what we learned in these classes is in a completely different context on the Missouri River. Turbidity levels considered alarming in some streams are considered clear on the Missouri. Families of critters usually associated with clear Ozark creeks have their members that are adapted to the turbid, muddy and sandy water of the Big Muddy.

At this point, we are just experimenting with monitoring the big river, learning what we can and adapting to its erratic levels.

One of the tools for sampling macro-invertebrates on big, fluctuating rivers is an “artificial substrate basket”. It’s a coated wire cage that you fill with rocks, tie a very long line to, and toss in the current. The critters that like to live in rocks move right in. You pull the thing out three weeks later with a fine mesh net and count everything that lives in there.

Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

In the fall of 2007, we tossed a basket. The line wasn’t long enough. Soon after, the river came up, covered the rock we tied the line to and that was the last we saw of it for most of the year! When the river dropped enough to show our rope, we’d try to yank the basket out, but it was stuck under rocks moved by the floods.

This January, though, the river was at the lowest it had been in a few years. I could wade out and dislodge the basket. So we invited Jen Courtney and her kids over, pulled the basket and checked it out.

The basket and the rocks inside were completely encrusted with caddisfly larvae cases – this messy, gooey mix of mucus, organic particles, sand and mud that the little wormlike larvae use to protect themselves as they develop. And there were countless thousands of the larvae. Dragonfly and massive stonefly larvae came crawling out of the mess. A clawless crawdad scuttled in the net. Melanie carefully tallied up the critters.

Jack and Liv were fascinated – plopping insects into an ice cube tray, spraying them down with a bottle.

Then we headed back to the river, using a kick net to sample from overturned rocks in the swift current below Cooper’s Landing. We also used a D-net to sample from a larger area of rocks.
Two days later, the river jumped again, dropped back down, and now it seems will be high for the rest of spring. Who knows?

(also check out our flickr photo gallery of the day...you too could have this much fun! Start your own Stream Team)

Thanks to Barry Poulton (USGS River Studies), Mark Van Patten, Amy Jungclaus and Chris Riggert (MDC) and Priscilla Stotts (DNR) for sharing their knowledge of sampling and ID. Amy and Barry teamed up on the beginnings of a digital Missouri River macroinvertebrate reference guide. Barry is supplying specimens of characteristic Big Muddy macros, and Amy is taking close-up, ID quality photos of them. We are posting them on our flickr site as a set. Thanks for sharing your awesome work, Barry and Amy.

Here's a picture Amy took of the caddisfly larvae that we found in such abundance that day, Hydropsyche orris. I think its common name is a spotted sedge fly.

photo by Amy Jungclaus, MDC. Specimen provided by Barry Poulton, USGS River Studies.