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Clockwise, top left: This case making caddisfly only lives in unpolluted water. It makes its case out of sand grains.These students are sorting and identifying bugs.The “roach-like” stonefly is super sensitive to pollution and they were plentiful. Little Brook. Photos by Litle River Source Water Team.
Unofficial
thumbs up
for brook's
health
The students in Ms. Lovegreen’s ecology class at Woodstock Academy helped to document the water quality in Little Brook, a small headwater stream that flows through the Woodstock Academy South Campus.
Little Brook flows into Peake Brook, a tributary of Little River.
Using bugs that live underwater as bioindicators of water quality, they found a good diversity of pollution-sensitive bugs that can only live in good quality water needed to support them and the fish that need clean water.
This program, known as the riffle bioassessment by volunteers (RBV) was developed by scientists at Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (CT DEEP).
The data (bugs) collected by the students will be submitted to CT DEEP identity verification, but The Last Green Valley water quality monitoring coordinator unofficially believes the stream had the required biodiversity of pollution sensitive bugs to qualify the stream as meeting the state guidelines for fish habitat quality.
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