Co-written by GLWC ’22.
Early on a frigid January Saturday, we drove up and down Walsh Road three times, searching the snow-dusted, mile-long dirt road for our collaborators, and enough space to park the car. Most of our friends were still warm in bed recovering from a long week of classes or the previous night’s activities, but we were preparing trudge through snowy woods to Arms Creek, a half-frozen tributary of Southeast Michigan’s Huron River, to collect bugs.
People in Michigan like to say that you are never further than 1 mile from a body of water. The Huron River is that body of water for us at the University of Michigan. It stretches 130 miles long, entering the Detroit River just before it flows into Lake Erie. Additionally, 24 major tributaries make up much more of the story, as they add up to around 370 miles in length. In total, 1200 miles of streams and creeks make up this 900-square mile watershed and supply most of the drinking water for the city of Ann Arbor. Not all water treatment plants are equipped to handle certain contaminants that make their way into the Huron River watershed. Water toxins directly impact the health of the citizens of Ann Arbor and beyond, therefore it’s vital to monitor river health.
This is where the bugs come in.
Stoneflies — an order of aquatic insects with long, clear wings that closely cover their small, brownish yellow backs that are particularly sensitive to waterway pollutants — are an indicator species, counted by citizen scientists like us to measure water quality in local rivers. January’s reproductive season signifies the most active season for stoneflies, thus January is the best time to sample and count them. The more stoneflies: the healthier the river.
As students in the Great Lakes Writers Corps, a community-engaged documentary writing program, we are here to see the river’s health for ourselves, and while we are at it, assist the Huron River Watershed Council with their annual January stonefly data collection event.
Finally, we found an access point and joined the rest of our team. On Arms Creek, there are half a dozen of us volunteers participating in this annual citizen science even hosted by the Huron River Watershed Council. There are many teams out today, each led by experienced volunteer, a.k.a. “the Collectors.” Under these Collectors we volunteers serve as Counters and Recorders. Together, we began to unload our gear; sample trays for collection, picks for breaking ice, and (most prized by the event organizers we had met earlier) brand new L.L.Bean rubber waders, with steel treads on the boots’ soles for traction on the river bottom.
There was no clear path to the location and, slipping and sliding, we had to combat tree branches to reach the ice-edged creek. Near several scattered crawfish traps, we finally found a flat enough spot and set up camp. We lay out our tarp and arranged our gear around it: 5-gallon buckets, collection trays, sample jars, forceps, spoon sieves, a magnifying glass, and a thermos full of hot water. It was cold, cold enough to leave us disillusioned in the gloves and hats we once thought comforting. Despite the hot warmers in our gloves, the small forceps were almost impossible to grip. The hot water was to rinse the ice off of our equipment.
Often confused with mayflies and caddisflies, stoneflies belong to the order Plecoptera. According to Ascent FlyFishing, stoneflies are the “T-bone steaks of the trout world.”
Our Collector, Lars, got ready quickly. Lars originally joined these volunteer operations to help his teenage son, Thor, complete his service hours. Since then, Lars and his sons have avidly kept up with monitoring the vitality of the river, and work as Collectors, who introduce first-time volunteers as well lead stonefly counting initiatives.
After his sons helped him strap into the waders, and turned to them one last time: “You sure you don’t want to go in?”
No one did. The 10-degree Fahrenheit air was cold enough for the rest of us.
Shovel and sampling trays in hands, Lars took his first step into the running water.
We started a timer. This was for data control as well as Lars’s safety. For the proscribed time, he maneuvered his net on the river bottom, scooping up samples of muck and gravel. Meanwhile, we brought him empty trays to dump the samples onto, and carried these back to the tarp, where we picked through them for bugs. The bugs we found we placed in specimen jars to be analyzed by the experts back at the Huron River Watershed Council, and preserved as evidence for the future.
When we found them, the stonefly nymphs are very small, most were less than a centimeter. They have two long antenna and two tails.
While we sat and searched through the trays with pincers, complaining now and then about our cold fingers and toes, Lars mentioned offhandedly that there was a slight tear in his waders – the brand-new ones everyone back at the gear pick-up had raved about. It was only later when we had packed everything and had made our way back to our vehicle that we learned just how much water inhabited Lars’s boot: when he removed his waders, water poured from his right pant leg. While he stood on one leg, his son slowly retrieved the towels. Then Lars squeezed out his socks, put his shoe on a bare foot, and walked off.
But what impressed us even more than Lars’s stoicism was the ease with which we had contributed to citizen science, and how significant that science can be. Sure, a January Saturday is hard to sacrifice to the brutality of Michigan’s cold. But other than that, we were able to be of use to a data collection that would be impossible to perform at such scope without volunteers willing and able to brave the elements for the good of the water, our river, our community’s health, and a little two-tailed nymph that is born in the ice and reveals information that we cannot see otherwise.
