What to collect!
Your team will collect biotic and abiotic samples from Flax Pond, a kettle pond formed 10,000 years ago by the retreat of a glacier in South Yarmouth, Massachusetts.
Your collective goal is to determine the relative water quality of the pond. You will decide if that quality is good enough to support a diversity of life in the pond. Your team must come back to D.Y. with six samples of water for testing in the lab. They include nitrates, phosphates, fecal coliform, total solids, and biochemical oxygen demand. Additionally, while at the pond your team will bring back data on water temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH and turbidity.
Lastly, the class will bring back buckets of muck to examine for and identify benthic macroinvertebrates.
