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Watery Dragons and Damsels and more!
1st June 2010
After a rainy start our quest to find some watery mosters began! We had plenty of children and their parents come to help us find them, as well as helping us to collect data for the National OPAL Survey.
The OPAL water survey will help assess how healthy a lake or pond is by seeing which animals and plants are living in and around it. By doing surveys in lakes and ponds all over the country, it can be assessed where water health is a problem. Doing the survey is very easy; all you need is a pond net, a tray, ID sheets (which you can download from the OPAL website) and the survey form which is also on the OPAL website.
Once down at the pond we filled our trays with water and started dipping from our dipping platform. Most pond creatures favour the edges of ponds, so as well as sweeping through the open water, we also sweeped the nets near the edges in amongst the pond weed. We found many different creatures including Damsel Fly Larvae, Fresh Water Shrimps, Pond and Rams Horn Snails, Tadpoles and Newts. Once caught the creatures were recorded on the OPAL form. Each creature gets a score and added up the total tells us how healthy our pond is. On this occasion our pond at Occombe gained a score of 28 which means our pond was quite healthy on this day. However a week later a school group surveyed the same pond and gained scores of 50-60 which is a very healthy pond. This shows that the types of creatures caught from week to week can change quite a lot, but does not necessarily mean the health of our pond is changing this much as well. The weather could affect what is caught from week to week, making it different each time.
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