Botany blitz and knowledge celebration
Eighteen students officially became wetland ecologists today! Completing a semester-long, field-intensive course in 3 weeks, these students have worked and played extremely hard. I am impressed by their perseverance, dedication, and engagement; furthermore, they have been an absolutely super fun group to work with. I have sincerely enjoyed getting to know them all, and I wish them all the best of luck in wherever life takes them next.
Pictures below were taken during yesterday’s botany blitz at Kingsville Swamp. Thank you all for being a great class. Stay peaty!
Trail cameras at Pymatuning Creek Marsh and Hartstown Swamp
This year’s wetland ecology class at Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology added a few more wetland inhabitants to the trail-camera highlights video. Can you identify them all?
Integration through delineation
The PLE wetlanders began the day by learning about wetland restoration and wetland-environment feedbacks. After a few in-class challenges about carbon storage and methane emissions from wetlands, the students then examined their macroinvertebrate collections from yesterday’s sampling at Pymatuning Creek Marsh. The diversity was extremely high, although there were a few groans about the leeches. This is why we save this activity for last – after everyone has spent multiple days slogging around in the marsh. 🙂
After lunch the students tackled the “delineation challenge” in Hartstown Swamp. In random groups, they laid transects from the swamp edge into the upland, traveling though areas of possible wetland along the way. Their task was to collect whatever data they deemed necessary to to determine the distribution of wetland along their transects (hint: vegetation, soils…). They returned to the lab and worked on analyzing their data, and creatively plotting their data supporting their interpretation.
From Bogs to Bugs: Macroinvertebrates of the Marsh
By Tea Treherne and Anthony Bucci, PLE Wetlanders
After the long weekend, it’s safe to say we were all eager to begin our final week of wetlanding at PLE. Before we could get started, Bob guided us all through the midterm exam. Despite a few road bumps (namely ecosystem services and the collective confusion about what an idealized hydrograph might look like), it seems like our class is set up to be on a great path towards the final this upcoming Friday. Lecture consisted of freshwater swamps (don’t worry, we’ll remember the white cedars!), the importance of riparian wetlands, functional guilds (FFG, RCC, CPOM, FPOM… acronym central up in here), flood pulse concept (FPC- okay, we get it!), and… Humpty Dumpty? Anyways, these discussions ultimately dealt with the interactions that drive productivity, biodiversity, and ecosystem processes in these wetlands – providing a much-needed funnel into our biota-centered afternoon out in the field.
Since we established that vegetation type and water depth fluctuate greatly across the wetlands we have visited, we found ourselves curious as to how this might change the composition of aquatic macroinvertebrates (spineless organisms that you can see without a microscope) present. Slipping into our chest waders, we headed out to Ohio once more to venture into Pymatuning Creek Marsh. Here, we grabbed nets, jars, buckets, sieves, and tweezers as we set out on our mission: bringing back as many of these water-loving bugs as we could catch – within an hour, that is! Divided into three sampling categories (spatterdock, arrow arum, and the shallows), we wasted no time wading in and start whacking the stalks of our respective plants in search of these little critters. While this was going on, Bob managed to finagle the cameras and wells we had placed out there back when we were just wetland newbies! After an hour of falling into the (biodiversity-rich) muck, we secured our jars and set sail back towards the classroom.
With waders hung to dry, we put the sieves to action – sorting out damselfly nymphs and diving beetles from duckweed. This process brought to attention the scale of differences between the macroinvertebrates we had collected. Although their size and body shapes differ visually, speculation as to the functional feeding guilds they belonged to (shredders, grazers, collectors, or predators) occupied our minds further. With the collections now complete, we dunked our little friends into ethanol (RIP) so that we may continue to study them another day – hopefully finding the answers we are looking for. Until then, may we all blissfully imagine the dragonfly nymphs as peaceful grazers amongst their aquatic neighbors…
Seeds through time
By Addie and Mina, PLE Wetlanders
Despite extreme physical exertion in the bog yesterday, Bob jumped out of his night-time waders to wake us up with highly animated morning lectures on peatland paleoenvironmental archives and wetland change over time. Excitingly, he discussed his own research examining how vast datasets on modern communities of testate amoebae (protists) in peatlands can be used to reconstruct past peatland water levels. This is done by using the environments that the species live in today along with the fossil record to predict the environments that they probably lived in hundreds and thousands of years ago. We also learned about the phenomenon of “bog bodies,” which are found human remains that display nearly perfect preservation of physical features like skin and hair (the bones dissolve in acidic bog conditions). Overall, our minds were truly bog-gled.
After lecture, we dug into our floating mat bog-rittos, careful to keep the soil cores away from Bob after he declared “ohh this is making me hungry!” We sieved and then examined layers of peat and sediment from depths ranging down to 10 meters under the dissecting microscope searching for anything with discrete boundaries: seeds, leaves, sedge remains, etc. Bob provided careful instruction as always: “the important thing is: don’t drop your sample in the sink”. We found lots of fun stuff preserved in the peat including more Sphagnum moss than you can imagine, cranberry leaves, water-lily seeds, white pine needles, and something identified by Bob (possibly misheard) as “white pine butt scale”.
We look forward to a challenging and bog-uiling final week with our fentastic Bob!!!
Among The Stately Trees 