We held our first Aquatic Invertebrate workshop on Fri 23 May, led by local ecologist Phil Ward and in partnership with the Radnorshire Wildlife Trust. We had 7 meditators (as part of an Activities week) and 7 members of the local community, including an RWT officer and the CEO of the RWT, take part and it was great fun! We learned how to monitor the river water quality by studying the invertebrates in it.
The video shows no, not Phil doing a strange water dance, but a demonstration of kick sampling. It does look very enthusiastic (!) but he went out of his way to assure us that this won’t harm any creatures, and that all the samples taken were alive. We collected samples of creatures and took them up to the house to identify under microscopes. The weather was beautiful which meant that we could do this outside.
Here’s a list of inverts we spotted on the day, with an example of the scoring, although it was only an example and of course we can’t officially use the score as it wasn’t the exact survey method. But it does give a good impression of the water quality. Phil assures us that, however, there’s no doubt that the river would score higher than this if we did a full methodology survey on it. He expects it would fall within the very good water quality score area.
Phil managed to identify the leech we had down to species level. Interestingly, it is an ectoparasite, found only on freshwater fish, especially salmon & trout apparently, but other fish as well, and is a common leech species. This must indicate we have fish in the river too.
A very enjoyable day was had by all and we intend to hold more days like this involving the local community.
Superb! Glad it was that sort of Ai 🤣
Brilliant!