Preliminary Results from the 2024 Macroinvertebrate Survey:

A big thanks to all the volunteers who braved the cold and rain in order to help us collect data. Overall, we found a wide variety of macroinvertebrates in the creek. The area of riffle that was sampled in the town of Pike was roughly the same area of a tennis court. Over 50% of all insects captured where mayflies or Ephemeroptera. These mayflies were primarily Hendrickson (family ephemerellidae) and blue wing olives (family baetidae). The riffle density that we calculated for hendricksons were 2793996 and for baetis 165672. These are two make up a large portion of insects commonly seen during hatches. Kyle will be interested in seeing how chapter members observe hatch activity this season on the creek. Since this is the first year of the study these are the baseline densities generated so no comparisons can be made yet. Another insect we found in good numbers were rhyacophilid caddis nymphs or green rock worms with a density of 4226. This caddis is important overall as they indicate good quality water as they are very sensitive to pollution.

Kyle Glenn