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NWP Global Registry of Apprentice Ecologists - Meremac River, Saint Louis, Missouri, USA

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Meremac River, Saint Louis, Missouri, USA
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malay2008



Registered: December 2007
City/Town/Province: St. Louis
Posts: 1
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I have participated in Missouri Stream Team for five years. I was exposed to this program through my eighth grade science teacher Ms. Janovsky; she signed us up to clean the trash around a stream and to record the macroinvertebrates found in the substrate. As eighth graders, my friends and I laughed and were entertained after finding the most peculiar objects in the creek and on its banks: cement bricks, beer cans and even a bent hoolah hoop. This field trip was an exciting excuse to skip school for most people, but it changed the way I would be spending most of my weekends in high school.
Twice a year since that field trip, my friends and I have been involved in Operation Clean Stream. This picture is from one of the more recent trips. I also participate in Stream Team in other ways; starting my sophomore year in high school, I took four eight hour classes to become a qualified water quality monitor through Stream Team. As a senior, I still periodically check the status of Fee Fee Creek with a group of people and measure the water’s pH, electronegativity, turbidity, amount of dissolved oxygen, identify macroinvertebrates present. The types of macroinvertebrates indicate the quality of the water; the more pollution sensitive the macroinvertebrate is, the better it indicates a healthy stream. Unfortunately for us, instead of finding a stream full of mayflies and stoneflies, we find leaches and aquatic worms.
People don’t realize how the tiniest human actions impact entire ecosystems in our water. One day after it snowed, we checked the stream’s electronegativity, and it was off the charts. We soon realized it was because of the salt spread across the roads eventually found its way into the stream. And that same day, there were barely any signs of aquatic life.
Whether point source pollution or non point source pollution or whether it’s poured directly in the stream of from the watershed, pollution does not have a hard time contaminating our water. Take agricultural runoff from farming, for example. All of these nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) create a perfect condition for algal blooms, and when that algae dies, it consumes huge amounts of oxygen that aquatic organisms, like fish, need to survive. This occurrence, eutrophication, causes the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico and is connected to the food we eat at our tables.
I am not suggesting, of course, that we are all bad people for wanting to eat food grown near the Mississippi River, but I am suggesting that we have a huge impact on the environment from our everyday needs and wants. Even if you throw your beer or soda can on the side of a road, a rain storm could carry it to a stream or river. In this picture, the girl on the right, who I refer to as myself, is carrying a can of oil that I realized, after I felt drips of oil fall on my shoes, was leaking. Because of what I’ve found in the past five years in the creek and round its banks, I am not asking anyone to stop eating food, but after finding jugs of oil, broken toilet seats, car doors and countless other objects in an around streams, I do hope that people prevent what’s preventable.
· Date: December 26, 2007 · Views: 8457 · File size: 24.6kb, 108.1kb · : 448 x 604 ·
Hours Volunteered: 6
Volunteers: 15
Authors Age & Age Range of Volunteers: 14 to 50
Area Restored for Native Wildlife (hectares): 1
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