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Aquatics is one of those things that can be very regional specific and it's kind of hard to avoid doing that so I've lots of the questions that are included and lots of the the concepts I try to make Universal and I try to make it so it's not specific so you have to learn something mine you write if you kind of understand the vocabulary you kind of understand the general idea hopefully they can understand the question find an answer or figure out an answer so you know the first one being in the main one and this presentation will kind of work from a large scale down from there so first one being watershed it's the basic concept of everything that we're dealing with here right that's an area contributing water to a pond right surface runoff spring or stream fed you know and it's not only a pond per se right it could be a river a stream so on and so forth like that you know kind of the idea being the rain falls on an area where does that rain go that's a watershed you can define it further you know with rainfall in a specific Basin a specific site that falls into a sub watershed which then drains into a bigger watershed which then drains into a river basin so think locally you know for here for example rainfalls in Grand Island it enters in to strengthen try and think of a stream that's by nearby hits a local stream that hits the Platte River the Platte River drains into the Missouri River Missouri River drains in and the Mississippi River drains in the Gulf Coast right as it falls down so that's the general idea what happens with that water within that River Basin or within that watershed is important too and lots of the lots of the things and lots the questions that will hit technology let's see if we can make this work I want a laser pointer okay you know lots of those things deal with not only surface water but ground water in that exchange you know there's there's times groundwater supplies water to the surface and vice versa sometimes they're not connected at all and I'm not gonna ask you and it would be impossible to be specific about that but the general concept should be understood that there is an interchange between the two and it can go always so you know and then along those lines - you know that everything that goes on within this landscape affects the water that's found within it so water budgets kind of important to understand whether it be for a lake a stream or even groundwater right so you've got inflow plus precipitation plus runoff + stream inflow on one side on the other side that's all the inputs on the other side is all the outputs right transpiration evaporation groundwater Springs that it would outflow to a surface water and stream will stream out flow as well carrying it away probably the biggest point of all of this as far as water quality goes is point source understanding what point source and nonpoint source are so point source pollution is easily as defined as if it's coming from a pipe right if you can identify specifically the spot where it's coming from it's a point source of pollution so you know if I've got a hose and I'm draining you know whatever nasty pond I you know whatever nasty bucket I have that's a point source pollution whatever's in there is a point source that's polluting the water factories you know sewage treatment those all things are all point source pollution as opposed to non points to the point solution non point source pollution excuse me you can't identify a specific point where that is introduced nonpoint source pollution is things like general runoff of fields right general off of streets golf courses then all of those things are a non point source pollution there's no one definitive place where it's coming from the caveat to this is that you know if we drain tile a field that all goes one spot right there's a pipe at the end of that field legally speaking it is still a non point source pollution so that you may that that question may come up on occasion justice just as a thinker but anything else comes out of a pipe as point source yeah I think it covered this urban areas AG all that stuff is non point source pollution then as we kind of barrel it down into a little more detail here low tech systems low tech rivers and streams flowing water low tech means flowing water as opposed to len TEKsystems which are lakes ponds things that are more standing stream watering is important the concept of it is fairly important basically when you're ordering a stream the order only goes up when two of the same number meet so a one is a headwater right or a source the very start that are the smallest have the less wha have the least amount of water and I'm least amount of flow you know oftentimes these are fairly easy to think about in the aspect of a small mountain stream right that's where they start when two headwaters meet they form a second-order stream when two second-order streams meet they form a third quarter stream so as you get bigger and bigger it becomes harder and harder to identify and but we'll try to keep it simple because the concept is what's important here there's also a ephemeral streams which are streams that only run seasonally perennial streams that run all the time have water in them at all times a femoral runs seasonally so maybe they only run in the spring when there's runoff you know the stream will still be there but there's Waimea water in it so all the time yep and just this concept I don't think the details are important I think the understanding the concept is because you can kind of piece together the details after I understand the concept but the river continuum concept is is the thought that the higher-order stream you get the different the biology within that stream is and that only makes sense from the regard that like a mountain stream or headwater stream with very low flow very low volume it's going to be considerably different than what you find in the Missouri River and the Mississippi River right and the creatures that you find within them are different because a the amount of nutrients and the type of foods that are in those small water streams are just they're different so you know the concept being that as you move up in orders you're also going to move up in the size and the dynamic of the food chain uh sort of another picture combining that ordering how do I do this here that ordering with it or to go sorry there we go there's stream ordering with that concept right so you'll have you know the the biology within this headwater stream is going to be things that are more adept at taking care of leaves in and bigger items you know the macro invertebrates would then they're gonna be shredders and grazers and things that eat larger larger pieces of organic matter consequently the fish in that are gonna be mainly preying on these types of macro invertebrates and as you move downstream when that stuff's all broken down the organic matter you're finding is much finer so you have a different set of macro invertebrates and your food chain is bigger so you're gonna end up with larger fish larger ten different types of fish within those so that's just basically the concept of it again the details aren't necessarily important it's understanding how it works moving on to Lakes Lake ecology it moves horizontally and vertically the littoral zone is that area within a lake where plants can grow there's still enough sunlight penetration to hit the bottom of the lake where you will get plant growth the limb medic zone is that open water area not a lot of plant growth it's concer bleed deeper you know and then throwing in that the photic zone usually when you move out of the photic zone is when you start losing that plant growth the photic zone is that depth that sunlight can penetrate and help things grow bottom of a lake is called the benthic zone that's where sediment is deposited that's not a very good slide you know and then you and then you add to all of that knowledge that the food web right so you've got these small critters that are living on organic matter along the bottom that organic matter on the bottom is important to invertebrates macro invertebrates so on and so forth fish dine on those bigger fish dine on those so on and so forth fairly fairly simple you know standard food web if you will right the idea that most of this organic matter within the bottom of this lake comes from outside of the lake itself right it's deposited either through a stream coming into it a river coming into it or from trees and organic matter that are outside of the lake so we have different lake types I'm gonna just hit those really quick seepage Lake it's a natural lake the water sources from the ground water or precipitation has very limited in a very small watershed right its watershed is only so far as the rain will run into it oftentimes that's could be a matter of feet all of the all of the exchange of water going in and out basically comes from the ground water these are very common in Nebraska in the Sandhills ground water drainage lake basically there is a water source it is a natural lake but there is so much water either coming through the ground water or the watershed that it has a stream that leads off so this could be a headwaters type of Lake drainage lake same same sort of concept natural lake streams coming in ground water coming in precipitation heavy runoff and has a stream outlet as well so there's an in and and out on the surface as well as ground water I'm an impoundment which is probably the most common you'll find in Nebraska really probably the most common you'll find in the Midwest it's just a reservoir right they dam a stream make a lake from sandpit lakes are man-made very similar to ground water fed Lakes except that we went in and dug them out in Nebraska they were created to make roads that's why they're all along the interstate and all along the major highways usually by sand and gravel bottom almost all groundwater fed and the oxbow lake ever been Carter Lake Iowa that is an oxbow lake missouri river used to flow around it the natural process of a river is that it deposits material on the inside of a bend as water as flows rise and fall so doesn't that deposition eventually it deposits so high it can't get it over it anymore and you're left with a lake and then you have a little tiny town in the middle and weird border laws so but that is Carter Lake there's a lot of them there's a lot of them particularly along the Missouri River the loop River meadow Platte has a couple but they're a little different these classifications do sort of vary but basically the general thought is is a you know an ornamental pond to something that's that's designed and built very very very small ponds are usually what more along the lines of what you think is a farm pond right may be created to provide a water source for cattle Lakes are greater than 15 acres and are natural that is an important distinction to make reservoirs are man-made calculating volume is very important when it comes to Lakes usually a lot of it can be done visually but it's the area times the depth really so calculating your surface area and then calculating depth with multiple depth measurements along the lake you can usually figure out a volume that volume is usually described in acre feet an acre foot is defined as the amount of water it takes to cover one acre one foot deep acre feet kind of writing the name deep Lakes their stratification in shallow lakes there's continual cycling why does this matter we'll kind of hit that in a little bit but but stratification when a lake turns over or when it's stratified deals with the amount of nutrients that are available to that lake and we'll kind of come to that but thermal stratification is very important we're to know basically a lake that's deep enough we'll have multiple ranges of water temperature within its depth if you go swimming at a sand pit you walk so far deep your chest is pretty warm and your toes are frozen water is heavier the colder it is so that cold water sinks to the bottom warmer water rises to the top and that actually will separate itself within a lake that band in the middle is the metal end on the up limb nam is the top sometimes in Nebraska that warm part is only this deep it it there there's a lot of factors go into that but it is important because that bottom section this hypo lumion oftentimes is devoid of oxygen so oftentimes you will not have fish or anything that are able to spend much time down there because most of the growing and most of the life goes up on here whether sunlight so yeah to a degree the ocean has a lot of different sources then then a lake does on the whole probably not Plus and we can back up here and actually hit it so so the difference being when you have a deep lake it does stratify right because you're only getting wind plays a big part in the Lakes life right it can stir it up and keep that top cycled the shallower the lake the less likely you are to develop that stratification because the wind is going to keep it mixed up and in oceans have obviously big currents and other things that are at play there to keep things moving so how does it work in the winter well you need sunlight things will still grow but you need sunlight to keep oxygen moving a lake will overturn in the spring and in the fall when those temperatures at the top shift right as you reach the fall and that that water out the surface the outside the ambient temperature becomes cold enough that it cools this water colder than what's at the bottom that Lake will literally in a matter of days flip completely over and it'll bring all the nutrients that we're on the bottom up with it and same thing in the in the summer it'll flip back or you know in the in the spring it'll flip back pretty important as far as growth in life goes within a lake so we'll just touch on some water quality things here Nebraska and in a lot of Midwestern reservoirs reservoirs sediment is the number one pollutant most everything you see as far as AG best management practices and things that you're putting in such as terracing and and buffer strips and all those things are intended to keep the soil where it belongs because if you don't you end up filling in your reservoirs I'm all reservoirs have a limited lifetime most of them are 50 or 60 years before the amount of sediment that comes down the stream lands in the reservoir and stops it and and it'll eventually just become a wetland and this actually happens to all lakes it just happens much faster with rest force because they have a much larger watershed it's not natural a natural lake will eventually fill in with enough organic matter and everything else coming into a lake you know where it arrests worse maybe 50 or 60 years a natural lake could last a hundred or 200 years but they eventually will all fill in if something isn't done so sediment is the number one pollutant in Nebraska and for like a lot of reasons bank sloughing is a big one but the biggest problem truly is that external source of sediment coming in off of the fields how do we measure that sort of thing why this slight is not good I'm sorry geez that's why I could never be a teacher turbidity turbidity is a measure of water clarity right we use for that a second disk is the cheapest and easiest way to do it it's not the most specific or scientific because it's user dependent but basically you take a black and white disc attached it to a tape measure or a rope drop it down and so you can't see it anymore at that point you measure it you pull it back up till you can see it and you measure that and then you half the two measurements and that is your sucky disc reading it's not a great measure to use when you're comparing Lakes it's a great measure to use when you're comparing the same lake to its own data because there's a lot of components that go into not being able to see into the water it could be dirt it could be organic matter it just could be the type of water so it's it's a very cheap and very easy way to measure turbidity and it is very common so if you want to get really scientific and spend money you can use meters that will that will do that for you too and that those measures then you can use to compare with other water bodies so the the
second disc is is good I haven't yet but I have had it out on display as an ID to identify it it's a little challenging to do it a contest to actually do it because you have to be out on the water I mean you could simulate it I suppose I have had it out just as a question to what is this you know or what what does this do I had to do it and they were given a little leeway sure now and that if we could have a doctor so I'm happy ideal I think the three state tests I've done I don't know if we've had a site where it would work at all okay and look down yeah I think you know I in like I said with all this stuff like just knowing the concept right I mean knowing how to take the measurement I I mean we could send anybody out to do that as long as you know it's not there's nothing super complicated about it just kind of understanding how to do it so you know and that that does bring up the bigger question of finding hands on things to do and it is tough with this subject because so much of it is done out in the water so if anybody's got ideas gosh I'd love to hear I'm gonna be great because I struggle it's I haven't figured out how to do it in a good manner yet so the other biggest pollutant that is associated very closely with sediment is bacteria we are a state that that relies on agriculture and with that comes cattle and livestock and what that becomes e.coli cities and and villages are also as much to blame as anything - so equalized found the waste products of all warm-blooded animals okay septic systems non functioning or malfunctioning septic systems water fowl and livestock runoff are all very big sources of e.coli they'll find their way into the water why is the socio a sediment because usually when you've got runoff you have sediment as well as e.coli I mean the waste product usually ends up on the ground so you're usually washing it in with with the ring or with the runoff in addition ecoli is very susceptible to sunlight as soon as sunlight hits it it doesn't survive very well so if you've got a lake or a stream that has has a lot of runoff is very murky and very dark and cloudy ecoli will thrive because it's not getting the sunlight that will kill it so usually where you have one sediment issue you've got ecoli as well health concerns I think we all know it ecoli will do to us but the big one is gastroenteritis flu-like symptoms you know other contaminants that we look at pesticides nutrients heavy metals atrazine being the most common pesticide out there used it's one of the more persistent ones if we were ordering contaminants nitrogen and phosphorus are both very high on that list as well as far as issues with in the Midwest leads a big one but Mercury's bigger it is important to understand how mercury finds its way into our environment the biggest and most common sources coal-fired power plants trace amounts of mercury within coal that's burned leave the stack it rises up into the atmosphere you see if I can use this fancy pointer again rising it's burned rise up in the atmosphere rain picks it up drops it into a wetland or drops it into the bottom of the lake where it undergoes transformation to methyl mercury when it becomes methyl mercury it is able to be up taken biologically so you know these little critters on the bottom are eating their food that's contaminated with Mercury with methyl mercury these fish eat the little creatures at each step up the food chain that becomes magnified more and more so this guy in the bottom only eats one molecule of mercury this guy needs d-10 of the little guys for a meal so now he's got ten molecules of mercury this guy needs 10 of these now you're at 100 so on and so forth and it doesn't go anywhere right just keeps cycling through the system so the big the big containment of the big contaminants that cause the largest problems probably our nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus the Gulf of Mexico hypoxia issue you know the the quote-unquote dead zone or red sea that that appears every year in the Gulf of Mexico is caused by too much nitrogen and phosphorus usually phosphorous is the main driver but you know they both have some somewhat equal sources right nitrogen is fairly naturally occurring but runoff whether it be from your lawn the golf course or you know some sort of agricultural field finds its way into the stream then finds its way into a lake or reservoir or the Gulf of Mexico and it drives all sorts of green things to grow you know a little bit as good a lot is terribly bad so other sources are waterfowl malfunctioning septic systems again or insufficient treatment facilities and you know less common but actually weirdly still happens is illegal dumping of ammonia ammonia is nitrogen we still have it and every few years we'll get at Nebraska the other big source is phosphorus of course that is a big one with fertilizer most detergents now are going phosphorus free because of this issue so it's pretty hard to find them now but but for a long time you know your your dish soap and your laundry soap I'll hide phosphorus and to help it clean and go anywhere except out the pipe down the treatment facility down the stream and then ended up in the Gulf of Mexico so why it matters why these things are bad well like I said they cause things to grow exactly like your lawn you know when you want your lawn to green up you lay down nitrogen and phosphorous it greens up you put enough in a lake it'll green up as you get too much algae those things will overtake the whole ecosystem and there they they prevent other things from growing then you throw in the whole respiration cycle or oxygen cycle these things will use up you know during the day they're producing oxygen at night they're using oxygen if you get too much and they're using timmons oxygen they will use it all up and during the night when Dunn's being introduced and every other living thing in that lake will die and that is sort of what happens in the Gulf of Mexico right they're using up all the oxygen within the Gulf there's none available for any fish or any other creatures so not a great situation to be and then you throw on the blue-green algae which I will touch on here for a second but elevated nutrients the term you're looking for and I'm sure will be on a test somewhere is eutrophication you know it's defined by excessive or extensive macro FIDIC growth which is green growth and algal blooms blue-green algae cyanobacteria also known as harmful algal blooms are those things that have made the news in Lake Erie because Lake Erie is a drinking source for town such as Cleveland and drawn a blank but number of those larger cities use Lake Erie as a drinking water source every summer they'll have a harmful algal bloom issue because like all the lakes in the Midwest and in Florida also has this problem Florida's been under this problem while some are they were in the news to me nutrients in the water they end up with these Sam bacterial blooms those Sano bacterial cells produce toxin Mike resistant is a hepato toxin liver toxin if you drink enough of it your liver doesn't fare well and you don't you're not around for much longer Anna toxin a is another another one very similar it affects your liver your kidneys everything else those BMAA and da ba if there's any chemistry teachers in the room can help me pronounce those long chain amino acids but they're suspected in causing neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's Parkinson's although all the ones that nobody wants to get their horrible it's a matter of fact downwind of Lake Erie there's a really high occurrence of those knew your generic diseases with the suspected cause being those two toxins there that's it's a good very very good question actually and two months ago I would have said by I don't know what you're talking about but I actually met I gave a presentation on harmful algal blooms to a health group of Nebraska lots of us that are involved in public health for when we all meet a couple times a year and the state health director afterwards had brought that particular subject up and that is something they want to investigate because apparently Nebraska in general has a very high rate of Parkinson's compared to the national average so right last year he was on the you know livestock judging team of the 20 people he was on the team with 18 that is insanely high number I would have suspect that the state health office is going to add this as a question you know because they have that data of those people that have Parkinson's so then they could do a study and say okay where do you guys spend your time what you know what do you have where do you vacation what do you do and try to determine if there's a pattern of habits or things like that and a lot of these farm ponds have this issue right because they're it's a function for them right they don't necessarily care that it's you know not swimmable they use it to feed cattle or or whatever yep in this stuff you know the thought being that these two particularly become very dangerous from their air sliced right so if you're getting with it or you know whatever however means that it finds its way into the air yeah yeah so I I'm not a doctor a medical doctor you know so I don't know but that has that question has been brought to me regarding that because that stuff is pretty nasty and they are looking at it downwind of Lake Erie like I said because so many there there's such a high rate of those issues there and that makes sense something like here is huge there's a lot of wind in that direction and it has been a question in Nebraska so it's pretty nasty stuff and currently there's not a real way there's not a short term solution to the problem right improved AG practices help right yeah that this you know cyanobacteria has been around since the beginning of the world right the the theory the current theory is is that cyanobacteria is responsible for oxygenating the world it had you know through various evolutionary processes learned or adapted with other cells to photosynthesize it's more bacteria than it is not bacteria you know doesn't have a cell wall and things like that but it photosynthesizes so that's the hot process is that because of cyanobacteria it oxygenated the atmosphere so I mean it's been around longer than anything and it is very good at evolving you know what and it's always it's never it hasn't become an extensive problem until we started doing the things that we do right and so now that we understand that it exists and what it does you know we've only been looking at for 20 years now so there's a lot of research to go to understand it so I could talk for a few hours on that subject alone so I'll try to move on here that is what I do for most of my days actually is that particular subject so trophic State Index is important to know right so this is a measure to understand the health of a lake just using a few quick parameters one is the sucky disc one is the phosphorus concentration and the other one is the chlorophyll a a concentration you can use those three numbers combine them to give you a range of numbers that will tell you how your lake is so we learned eutrophic here on the last slide oligotrophic means there's probably not enough nutrients in that lake to be a super productive lake but that's not necessarily a bad thing me so trophic is kind of that middle ground you trophic you're starting to run into problems too many nutrients comes to green and hyper eutrophic which nebraska finds a lot of its lakes and reservoir has too many now Hey look I just talked about that alright we'll skip that slide it's like the first time I've seen this you know the other topic it would be species diversity and I I think maybe not the first time you've heard this sort of concept today but there there's two things to look at species richness and species evenness right having a lake that has 10,000 carp in it versus a lake that has 400 total fish but 25 different species right so it doesn't have as many fish but it has a whole lot more that lake with the more fish is far and away a better ecological situation to have than just to have a lake with a lot of one species right so that's what this diversity index sort of addresses by taking you know various species and their numbers right so you want something that's somewhat even along as well as having a large number of them if that makes sense a lot of different species with an even number of each that's that's what the that's what the diversity indexes tried to address there's different ways to calculate it I don't know if I would ever ask a team to calculate that but understanding what it is or at least understanding the results right understanding the concept of diversity and its importance is good a matter of fact I don't ever I do use diversity indexes but there's calculators online you just put everything in and it just gives you the number so just understanding what what the concept is is important so that's that those diversity actions be used for anything right fish plants you name it one that's a little more specific to water and streams is the EBT index and that deals with three families of macroinvertebrates the ephemera dress the blue copter is in the tricopter is those three families are usually indicative of a very healthy water or a clean water so using those three and figuring out the percentage of their abundances is usually a very good measure of a quality water or a quality stream so it's a fairly common way to do an assessment of a water and this one I think is important I think one of the things I've noticed with teams that are testing if they may know how to use a key to identify a species they may not most of them don't use it so stress to them to a learn how to use a key and be to use it I if we have a if we're asking them to identify a fish a key will be provided to them that has the answer in it so if they can figure out how to use a key which you know oftentimes it's a book that has all of the answers in it right the part the name of the parts they're looking for pictures of the parts they're looking for and how to get to the the actual species of fish so if they want to practice there's some very good books out there fish of Nebraska is one that's very new and very recent I think the Nebraska chapter of the FS tried to buy a book for every public library in Nebraska everyone should have access to it if you don't have access to one let me know we'll see what we can do to get you access to one but check your library either your school library or your county library that book should exist they're not that expensive if you have the funds to buy one together sixty seventy bucks but but that is a very good book and a good one to practice there's also lots of online stuff as so with that here we are my gratuitous large fish picture that is a paddlefish yep at the time I was working on the pallid sturgeon project though so and it's what we were looking for but that is paddlefish yes
