Taylor’s Recap - Week 6

Week 6 is officially over and this week was definitely the busiest so far. Saturday, a group of us went to Chicago for the weekend. We went to Millennial Park, saw the bean, walked up to the observatory, walked the Magnificent Mile, and ended the day with deep-dish Pizza. It was a lot of fun and I am glad that Mia, Alyssa, and Courtney were able to go since they had never been. Monday was the PALS outreach event and it went relatively smoothly. It was a good experience for me because I got to learn that things do not always go as planned and that you need to be flexible and make changes on the fly. It also gave me a really good experience working with younger kids. I have never done an event like that before so I gained a lot from it. Reece and I had the younger kids play the water cycle bead game and the older kids macroinvertebrate mayhem. The kids really loved making the bracelets and it was nice hearing from the other groups how the kids would show off their bracelets. I think the older kids liked playing the macroinvertebrate mayhem because they got to run around and play tag but I think they're favorite part was probably being able to get a piece of candy at the end!​

This week Reece and I ended up getting a crazy amount of work done. Tuesday, we went out to Martell pondand set the fyke nets,

took water quality samples, and took macroinvertebrate samples. We were originally going to do our second round of sampling for Indian Creek next week, but we decided to go ahead and do the fish sampling on Tuesday for Indian Creek as well. We decided to do this because we felt that still collecting data next week would be cutting it to close to the wire. Wednesday, we collected the fyke nets from Martell pond, set them at our sites within the Purdue Wildlife Area, and sorted through our macroinvertebrates from previous samples. We ended up getting four snapping turtles in our nets this time. I can now say that we are officially pros at getting snapping turtles our of nets. Avery, Mia, Jenny, Emily, and Lizz came out with us on Wednesday which made the day go quicker and smoother. Thursday, Reece and I started the day by going and collecting our fyke nets from the Purdue Wildlife area. We didn’t get any snapping turtle and we only got three fish. We then went back out to Indian Creek to collect our final water quality samples and macroinvertebrate samples. The rest of the day was spent sorting through macroinvertebrates. Friday, we spent the whole day going through the rest of our macroinvertebrate samples and taking counts. Next week we should be able to start our statically analysis and start putting everything together for our final presentation!