Ok...I did do something cool yesterday! My students have been participating in water testing for a program call the Phytoplankton Monitoring Network (PMN) that is a part of NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Think of phytoplankton as little water animals that you can't see with your eyes! During the school year, there have been 3 primary student investigators (Jan, Michael, and Caroline)...they have detected 2 confirmed "blooms" in our river. This is how it works...we get a sample of the river water, we analyze it under the microscope by determining how many and what phytoplankton is in our water sample. We then report our data into the official NOAA PMN website. We are considered an OFFICIAL TEST SITE...cool beans! If there are a bunch of the little animals in the water (over 9,000) we have a BLOOM. Blooms DON'T mean toxic or bad. They can...but they don't have to be bad. Ours have not been "bad."
Yesterday, Mark (a former student from Northeastern University, chem Major...awesome science nerd!), Jan, and Jan's brother Jeff, came to school to do the analysis (geniuses!). We also met with Matt the NOAA guy we report to and his assistant Andrew. Matt and Andrew came from South Caroline! Joining the fun was Ms. Kristy (Butterfly Princess!)
We spent some time by the river talking about the process with Matt and Andrew. Then after they left we went back and got a sample and proceeded to analyze the water. We had a BLOOM of oocystis...which is not toxic but we also had some other cool guys in the water...we had Pleurosigma, Odontella, Ditylum, Entomoneis and Coscinodiscus... The Coscinodiscus is super cool looking...it looks like a beautiful pizza made up of little circles with a hole in the middle. Unfortunately, I was not nice to a Coscinodiscus...when I discovered one under the microscope I got so excited that I wanted to focus and get closer to it...and got so close and so focused... that I squished its guts out...now it looked like a pizza with its sauce spilled out on the outside. Sadness! You should do a "Google image search" to see these interesting animals! Any way, Mark, Jeff and Jan were much nicer to their little animals...right before we threw them all out! Mark, Jan and Jeff worked hard, for about an hour on one slide grid...did I mention that the grid on the slide is about 1/2 inch square in total area and contains 64 squares within it? And that they have to count each type of animal in each of the 64 squares? Pretty intense work !!!
Anyway, we got our numbers entered it into the NOAA database and then had pizza in honor of the Coscinodiscus! Now I'm off to the pool...next testing in 2 weeks.
