16 August 2011

Waterwatch Macro-invertibrates

On the 16th of August, Julie from Melbourne Water came over to teach us about 'Water Bugs'. After she had finished with the other grade, she brought in some trays and put two on each table.

Before we started, we had a talk about different species of water bugs. Julie showed us some pictures like: a dragonfly larva, damselfly larva, water mites, leeches, bloodworms and sea-snails. We also talked about the difference between: Macro-inverterbrates and Micro-inverterbrates. Our main focus was Macro-inverterbrates, which are water bugs that you can see, and don't have back-bones.

After the talk, we split up into groups of three or four. Maya, Parnian and Charlotte and I worked together to find bugs, which were in the trays that Julie carried in, using the a sheet which contained all the bugs we could find in the tray.

In the end, the four of us had found: 3 bloodworms, 3 fish-tiny tadpole looking fish, and lots of water mites. When Julie had tipped all the water and the water bugs back in a bucket, she gave all of 3/4A, rather large stickers. The picturse on the stickers were: frogs, snails, dragonflies, ladybugs and spiders. I thought that session was very fun and interesting, I can't wait untill our next lesson, which will be in 2 weeks time!

3 comments:

Selina said...

I loved the water-bugs session, it was really cool! I really liked the part where we got to search for water bugs, it was very fun and interesting!

Anonymous said...

Great to hear that you all enjoyed the session on Macro-invertebrates. It is really imprtant to remember that they can tell us how healthy or unhealthy our waterways are. As we found lots of different Macro-invertebrates do you think the water in our wetland is healthy or unhealthy?

Julie from Waterwatch

Maya W said...

Very Healthy as we found loads of macro-invetebrates. If the water was un healthy, there wouldn't have been as much macro-invertebrates.