"WE found a clam, a baby crayfish, and its mommy!"
Fourth graders from Mill Street School in Naperville, Illinois, exclaim with delight as they pick bottom-dwelling water animals without spines—scientific name, benthic macroinvertebrates—out of nets spread on the grass. They place the animals in shallow, water-filled plastic boxes for identification. Later they will return them to the stream.
A Good Home The students are working with their teacher, three naturalists, and parent volunteers to determine water quality in the west branch of Illinois' Du Page River. They want to find a good home for ten small-mouth bass they are raising in their classroom.
Wearing waders, each group of four to six students enters the stream near the bank and sets up a six-foot-wide rectangular net (kick seine) facing the water flow. Each seine is provided with four-foot-long wooden poles at each end and reaches to the stream bottom.
Two students in each group steady the seine while the others, standing upstream, use their feet and fingers to stir up macroinvertebrates, which the current carries into the seine. After a few minutes, they lift the seine from the water, fold it like a purse, carry it to shore, and open it up on the ground.
Everybody loves the crayfish, which scuttle around, waving their fearsome claws. The kids quickly learn how to grasp them from behind—nobody gets pinched. Using a pictorial worksheet, they identify and count every animal they find.
The presence of these benthic macroinvertebrates provides a way to measure the health of this part of the stream. Scientists have divided the animals into four groups, depending on how much pollution they can tolerate. The pollution-intolerant dobsonfly (Group One) inhabits only very clean water. Nobody finds one, suggesting that there is some pollution in the stream. The crayfish, clam, and water penny (Group Two), which many students find, are moderately intolerant of pollution. Group Three and Four macroinvertebrates, such as the scud and bloodworm midge, survive even higher pollution levels.
With the naturalist's help, the class totals the macroinvertebrates it found in each group and uses a formula to develop a score for this site. The score of 2.75 suggests fair to good water quality. The naturalist then asks after the bass the kids are raising. One is swimming on its side, they say, and it probably won't survive. They've isolated it from the others so its sickness won't spread.
"Stream monitoring teaches patience and observation," says Jim Ronan, the fourth grade teacher. "I've been bringing my classes here for eight years."
Community-Driven Program All this learning and fun are part of the Du Page RiverCare Stream Monitoring Program, which serves upwards of 2,500 students--fourth grade through high school--in Du Page County, a rapidly-growing suburban area west of Chicago. The non-profit Conservation Foundation created RiverCare and associated programs over the past decade to increase citizen awareness of the Du Page River watershed and protect the stream through active community involvement.
The east and west branches of the Du Page River flow southward through Du Page County. With fewer businesses discharging chemicals into the river, today's leading form of pollution is storm-water runoff, which picks up fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, motor oil, and transmission fluid from yards and households all over the county. If river quality is to improve, thousands of people must change their habits—but how do you get them to do that?
People will act for the public good if you explain how they are creating pollution, and make it easy for them to cooperate, says the Conservation Foundation. The Foundation leads a coalition of 50 public and private organizations that monitors stream quality with adult volunteers, removes trash from the river, helps stabilize the river bank to stop erosion, distributes educational materials, and works in the classroom. Grants from public and private sources support these activities.
Bass in the Class To help students understand why water quality is important, the Du Page County Forest Preserve District (FPD) created the Bass in the Class program in 1995. After a class signs a Letter of Agreement with the FPD, it gets an aquarium with accessories and ten small-mouth bass fingerlings--they're 2.5 to 3.5 inches long, about the size of your finger.
The class cares for the bass for six to ten weeks, raises them, and releases them into the Du Page River. Depending on how long they stay with the class, the fish measure from five to eight inches long at release. The students must find a part of the river where conditions of water quality and stream structure allow the bass to thrive.
To do this, everyone reads books and views Internet materials. Most important of all, the children enter the river that flows through their town, monitor stream conditions, take data, and present all results in writing. Using sound scientific procedure, they make informed decisions about the fate of their bass.
An ancient Chinese proverb sums up the philosophy of this program: "Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Let me do it and I understand."
Nobody knows how long smallmouth bass live, but ten years is probably their maximum lifespan. Fishermen catch bass in the Du Page River and they are netted in sampling. Because of this, naturalists believe that the fish are re-establishing themselves.
The teachers get wet too—in demanding two-day summer workshops. They learn everything the students do, but in greater depth. Teachers must attend the workshops if they want bass for their students, Ronan explains. The program is so popular that demand for the fish exceeds the supply.
Scouts and local service organizations help spread the clean water gospel to Du Page County neighborhoods. They stencil storm drains with this message"DUMP NO WASTE—DRAINS TO RIVER"then give out fish-shaped door hangers, which explain that storm runoff does not go to a treatment plant.
The door hangers ask homeowners to sweep fertilizer and soil off driveways and walkways instead of washing it, minimize salt use on sidewalks in winter, and take other steps to prevent soil erosion and water pollution. The Conservation Foundation reports a very positive response. Many homeowners have thanked the Foundation for alerting them to the runoff problem and showing them simple ways to change their habits.
Everyone believes that river water quality has improved since 1995, but official data won't be available until 2002. Still, the prognosis is good. The State of Illinois recently surveyed the river and found 19 fish species thriving in the DuPage River. This says progress.
Victor M. Cassidy is a Chicago free-lance journalist who writes about the environment and culture. This is his first contribution to Connect for Kids.
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