Our stream team, lead by Frank Sanford, was in the Little Falls Branch below Mass. Avenue this past Saturday hunting for the macro-invertebrates who depend on the creek for shelter and food. They found 12 different species - including broadwinged Damselflies. We’ve seen the adults flying around, but not the larva, so this was quite exciting. They were also supervised by a very nice northern water snake. These snakes are non-venous and very common in our area, frequently seen basking in the sun on a rock.
LFWA surveys the creek quarterly to see how the benthic macro invertebrates population is doing. These little critters give us a good picture of the biological health of the creek. We look for diversity and numbers to create a BIBI score of 2.4 which gives the creek a “Fair” rating.
Notes from the Field:
Thanks to our faithful crew for a good day of monitoring - a little rain in the morning, but we had none. Again a steady stream of visitors and the digital camera helped give them a good view of some of our macro's.
The good news - 2 Broadwinged Damselflies, the two small root wads helped there, the bad news - invasives thriving and increased amount of surface trash. Again salt watch pretty high- 197 PPM
Cylindrical leeches - 3
Aquatic worms -2
Planaria -41
Asian clam - 1
Pouch snail - 1
Sowbugs - 9
Chironomidae - 2
Black fly - 17
Netspinners - 24
Fingernet - 1
Small minnow (Baetis) -4
Broadwinged damsel - 2
See everyone in the Fall
Frank
thank you
Thank you to our monitoring team who comes out sun, or rain or even snow to census the creek. The program is run in partnership with Nature Forward who submits the data to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. Learn more about our program HERE.