Jan writes:
Last Saturday our nature center had its annual Nature Day celebration and I
was working a "Life Under the Microscope" station. Mid-day, I took a group
of kids out to a small (6 by 15 ft) puddle of water in the woods where I had
set a light-trap the night before. It contained a sizable mass of Daphnia
and other water fleas. Volume of the plankton (out of water) was
approximately that of a a tennis ball. Its not uncommon to collect
zooplankton in light-traps (sometimes numbering in 100s or 1000s), but I had
never seen a mass of water fleas like this before. The kids were impressed.
They looked at the water fleas in the trap, under the scopes, and then fed
them to the sunfish and darters in the aquarium.
Pond contained a few chironomids, some crawling water beetles (Haliplidae),
and a few pond snails, but little else. It was on a moderately steep slope,
was a foot deep and completely shaded. Nutrent source was a thick layer of
leaf litter.
Details on light-traps can be found in the latest (Winter 2003) issue of
American Currents.
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