[water trickling]
- NARRATOR: Have you ever really looked at a
creek, stream, or river?
I mean really looked, up close, down at the bottom.
[water splashes]
This guy does that for a living.
Meet Dr. Archis Grubh,
an aquatic invertebrate biologist.
- Invertebrates are really great indicators of water quality.
Because if the water quality is going down,
those are the first ones to disappear
from the water.
- NARRATOR: His name is Dr. Grubh and this bug dude
studies the health of Texas Rivers by checking in
on the tiny invertebrates that live here.
- Beautiful.
I got an anthropod, let me see if I can catch him for you.
There's a damselfly larva, that one's super small,
oh this one's a beautiful caddisfly, green one.
I primarily focus on the invertebrates,
little small critters.
You see the black and yellow on it, love it!
Just beautiful creatures underwater.
You might think of some alien creatures,
pretty much right on the head.
[flowing water]
- NARRATOR: This is the Blanco River...
and it's Dr. Grubh's latest study site.
- It's very important because I'm studying
and finding out what are the diversity of these
invertebrates are.
And so I'm capturing a snap shot here,
and recording what all we find.
- ALANA STEVENS: I'm only getting point nine eight CFS.
We are measuring water quality now, which includes temperature,
conductivity, which is the salinity of the water,
um, how much oxygen's in the water.
I really like this site, it just has a lot of
different components to it.
So it's got big pools, where a lot of the water is flowing up
and the waters deeper.
And it's got riffles that are shallow with a lot of
cobble and a lot of stone.
Bugs like a lot of things to hold on to so a lot of debris
and vegetation, they really love that kind of stuff
so this is just a great site for that.
- ARCHIS: Here we go!
You are going to find tons of these bugs, most of them
are the nymph stage or the larval stage.
See those case builders right here.
There's a whole bunch of em here!
Oh wow, look at this a stonefly.
Yes, look at that!
That's the biggest hellgrammite for today!
You see it!
- ALANA: Very cool.
- NARRATOR: These two are here because of the floods of 2015.
- NBC ANCHOR: Good evening from Central Texas,
the scene of utter devastation,
a natural disaster of epic proportions.
[water raging]
- ARCHIS: These flood levels were really huge!
- ALANA: It was a 500 year flood event.
- Regular discharge on the Blanco River is about 90 cfs,
which is cubic feet per second.
And it peaked around 150,000 cfs.
- ALANA: Um, it came out of its banks, all the vegetation,
took down giant hundred-year cypress trees.
- ARCHIS: A lot of debris came through the system and scrubbed
the substrate clean.
- NARRATOR: The floods wiped out almost 90% of the
aquatic invertebrates.
So for the next several months these two will check
six different sites along the Blanco River.
- ARCHIS: We collect three samples, we just dump all
whatever we have, there's going to be tons of insects
packed in it.
- ALANA: So now that flows are back down to where they're
normal level, we want to see how the bug population
is reestablishing itself.
- ARCHIS: Which ones were most affected and how they
are doing now!
- NARRATOR: While the invertebrates make their way
back to the lab,
Dr. Grubh gets a break at the house,
- Hey Bucky!
How you all doing!
- NARRATOR: Sort of...
- This is Tivols, he's Pearl's rat.
- NARRATOR: It's a bit hectic on the home front.
- I really like the Beta's cause they have like
a really beautiful color.
- He has a little heart on his back as you can see!
- I haven't named this Tiger Barb yet.
- NAZERENE: He runs over here.
[cat hisses]
[laughter]
- NARRATOR: It's like the Wild Kingdom here,
with plenty of fish.
- This is a 250 gallon tank.
These are some Rose Line Sharks, these are from India.
Then we got some Clown Loaches over here,
those are from Indonesia.
- My husband lives, breathes, dreams, fish.
- ARCHIS: Yeah this is my planet aquarium, it's a 65 gallon tank.
I got the whole thing set up natural with live plants.
- RACQUEL: When we got married and lived together is when
I noticed he was starting to do all these set ups,
in our little itty, bitty apartment.
And I'm like, "That's cool."
I didn't know it would last and eventually the little
10 gallons would evolve to eight footers and I'm just like,
"OK, this is a little extreme."
- NARRATOR: They say never take your work home with you.
- So I really like the blue in this Cardinal Tetras,
light up really nicely.
- NARRATOR: But for Archis, it seems like the opposite is true!
- Yah, you gotta do what you love right so it's good!
- ARCHIS: Let's see how it goes.
I really enjoy this every day when I come home from work.
I just sit here, chill out, take a break,
instead of turning on the TV, I just enjoy watching these.
This is one of the hardest parts.
[dramatic music]
So these are some of the bugs we just collected
from the Blanco River.
This part typically takes quite a lot of time because you gotta
look through the bugs.
Different parts of their bodies, legs, the claws,
the mouth parts, to figure out which ones they are
and go through this key,
and shows you what you are looking at.
This is a case builder, these guys build their cases
with twigs and sand particles, and as they get larger,
they abandon the old shell, and build another case.
Yeah look at that, dude!
He's attacking my forceps.
The Hellgrammites, you'll find them only in
clean water systems.
They are an indicator of good water quality.
Now I'm here on the microscope spending hours, days,
and finally enter all the data,
and after that, upload it on the computer,
and that's where the fun begins, that's the stuff I really enjoy!
- NARRATOR: It took well over a year to sample and analyze the
aquatic invertebrates of the Blanco.
- All of this information from all of these
species goes into one dot, so you take all these samples,
all these dots and run different matrices.
- NARRATOR: Then math magic happens.
And what looks like flying shapes is some serious science.
- And finally, you condense all the data,
and this is what you get, the product.
You know, we are able to see the trends.
[rushing water]
- NARRATOR: Archis' data showed that indeed for several weeks
after the flood, aquatic invertebrate numbers
were way down.
- Yah, the numbers were like almost nil!
- NARRATOR: But his data crunching shows that as
time went by, the aquatic invertebrates returned.
- The numbers come back and stabilize,
at a certain level, at each of these sites.
The whole habitat is destroyed, the flood just takes off 90%
of their population, and still there are able to come
back and just go to stable conditions like it was before.
That's just amazing!
[dramatic music]
- ARCHIS: Ah, look at this!
- NARRATOR: For Archis, now he gets a chance to show off his
life's passion to his kids.
- We go out to the river and go swimming and all!
Hey look at that!
But right now when they are flipping those rocks,
and they are seeing these creatures come out alive,
it is just amazing!
- Daddy what is this!
- Ohh! That's a Megaloptera!
Guys look, look!
- RAQUEL: Actually, out experiencing it!
- NAZERENE: He's awesome!
- That's the 100% goal,
is for them to be hands on and touching.
I mean they are genuinely interested in bugs!
It's great, it's great!
- NAZERENE: Man, I never knew water pennies could move,
they're so cool!
- NARRATOR: So whether it's taking the kids
to see them up close!
- ARCHIS: It's a riffle beetle, you see that
black thingy moving.
- NARRATOR: Or scoping them out in the lab.
- ARCHIS: Look at that, riffle beetle larva, oooh,
he just turned in nice!
- NARRATOR: It's easy to see Dr. Grubh's love for
aquatic invertebrates is pure!
- These organisms that we find in the water systems,
are really essential!
We do not want sterile waters, or polluted waters,
that's not good for the fish, the bugs, or us humans.
- PEARL: Ahh, let me see!
- ARCHIS: So what I want to do is, I want to be able
to leave these organisms in the river systems for my kids
and their kids.
I want to be able to leave the habitats in pristine conditions.
Oh, look at that!
You know not to be affected or impacted to the point,
where these critters are going to be knocked out of the system.
So, I want to do whatever I can to make a difference.
[water flowing]
- NARRATOR: This project was funded in part by a grant
from the Sport Fish Restoration Program.