Hi, I'm Jan McGowan with the St. Joseph County Parks.

I'm here at Spicer Lake Nature Preserve today near New Carlisle, and I want to show you a fun and interesting way to explore pond life.

Now, most people think of pond life as ducks, turtles and frogs.

But I'm going to take a deeper dive today and explore some of the creatures that live in the water.

Now, I don't need a snorkel or fins for this, which is nice because it's a little chilly out all I need is a kitchen strainer and a light colored dish tub filled with water from the pond.

Now what I'm going to be talking with you today about are aquatic macroinvertebrates.

Aquatic simply means that they live part or all of their lives in freshwater.

That can be a pond, a river, a lake or a stream.

Macro means that they are large enough to be seen without a microscope and invertebrate simply means they don't have a backbone.

They can be insects, worms, salbugs, crustaceans like crayfish or mollusks like clams or snails.

Now, to get them, find them.

You take your kitchen strainer and you head over to the edge of the pond.

Okay.

To find these critters, all I'm going to do is take my kitchen strainer and dig down to the bottom of the pond and pull up some of the matter down there.

Then I look in my strainer if I find something wiggling.

Haha, I found something here.

I carefully pick it up and put it in my specimen tray.

You don't have to worry so much about hurting these creatures.

Most of them have exo skeletons.

They're crunchy on the outside, so if you pick them up carefully, you won't hurt them.

let me try one more time.

I found one of my favorites, Dragonfly Larva.

So you can see I've found a lot of life in the pond today.

I'd love to Introduce you to some of my favorites.

So I just mentioned finding a dragonfly larvae here.

I have one here.

A dragonfly larvae is essentially a baby dragonfly.

During the warmer months, adult dragonflies lay their eggs in the water.

When the egg hatches, the little baby dragonfly is called a larvae or a nymph.

They're going to live in the water for depending on their species, anywhere from 1 to 4 years before they emerge to become adults as adults, they'll fly around for about six weeks hunting insects out of the air, down in the water.

When they're nymphs or larvae.

They are also very helpful to us.

They're vicious predators down there as well, and they eat mosquito larvae.

That's another one of my favorites is the Scud.

Let me see if I can pull one out of here.

A Scud actually is related to shrimp.

Now it's a little bit too small to eat, but they are really fun to watch.

Zooming around in my tray when they are down under the water, they're eating things like decaying material plants, algae and fungi, some really fun creatures.

I found today also are the back swimmer and the water boatmen.

These are actually air breathers when they're in the water and the way you can tell is when they flip over, you see a bit of silver on their abdomen and it shows that they're carrying an air bubble with them on their abdomen, which is where their breathing breathing apparatus is while they're under the water.

This one is quite the predator will eat just anything it can find.

This is a bit more of a scavenger predator, but they're both a very important part of the aquatic food web.

In fact, all of these creatures are an important part of the aquatic food web.

These become food for fish, amphibians like frogs and tadpoles, reptiles like turtles and water snakes, birds like ducks and even a few mammals.

And when some of these insects become adults and flying around in the air, their food for birds, bats and frogs, Now you can find your own outdoor elements by grabbing a kitchen strainer and a dish tub and bringing the children along as well.

Kids are very good at this now.

How are you going to know once you find these creatures what they are?

I have asked them to post on the Outdoor Elements website some resources from the Hoosier River Watch program.

This program is run by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, and these resources will help you not only identify these creatures, but also tell you how well these creatures tolerate pollution in the water.

Some of these creatures live well in polluted water, some do not.

So as you get acquainted with these creatures, you can also figure out how healthy is the water that you are sampling that day.

These creatures will tell you now, after you are done with these creatures, Please, please, please put them back in the water where they belong.

They have very important jobs to do down there.

You can find other outdoor elements at our website, lots of activities and interesting videos.

You can also check us out on our Facebook page and always go outside and find your own adventures in local parks and natural spaces Bye everybody.