This is what a day on the job looks like for biologist Chris Verdone.
"I'm gonna beat that. That looks really good. That,
uh, holly right there overhanging the stream, it's kind of short and..
that looks appealing." He's looking for this,
the adult form of an aquatic insect known as a stonefly. This one you're seeing here
is a new species. One that's being described and named for the first time. "If I were a stone fly
I might hang out someplace like this. So, right now, we have 11 undescribed species of stone flies
statewide two of them occur in this creek. Each species has a different pollution tolerance,
but for these ones that are undescribed, those are all unknown. But those are all pieces to
the puzzle. And if we can identify those then our picture gets a little bit clearer."
Chris is part of a team of biologists charged with monitoring water quality across the state
of North Carolina. They do that by collecting and cataloging insects that live in the water. They
also happen to be taxonomic experts so they're finding and describing new species all the time.
I think what they do is a really interesting mix of basic and applied biology, so I spent a few
days with them learning about how and why they do what they do. "All right, so to collect adult
stone flies I like to use what's called a beating sheet. Put your sheet underneath the vegetation
knock it and if you're lucky you might find something.
But sometimes it's easier said than done.
When they're hard to find you can always flip over rocks. They don't call them stoneflies for no good
reason. The stoneflies live in the interstitial spaces so what i'm going to do is disturb that
with my feet and dislodge them and then they will flow into the net. So, i've got a new species of
isoperla right here next to my index finger. So now we're going to get a riffle kick using
a kick screen. So he's going to disturb the substrate everything's going to flow into this
and then we can wash it into a bucket and sort it. So see we've got a crayfish climbing up here,
stonefly. All right so now we'll wash this into a bucket.
This bucket has a screen on the bottom of it so all the excess water can wash out.
I think we're good. Whenever we conduct a benthic sample this is how we pick the sample,
we do it on site in the stream in lawn chairs.
This represents a stream right here. This is at the end of the day this is what we come back with.
All of these or many of these aquatic insects we have developed what is known as a tolerance value.
The tolerance values are essentially a proxy for how that organism can withstand pollution.
If you look back here we have the historical record of water quality in North Carolina from
40 years ago to the present. We can track North Carolina's water quality
with this wall of bottles. And, we'll show you what's going on in here.
And if you come back here these are our rearing units.
The purpose of rearing these or the purpose of putting the bugs in here is to give them a
an artificia setting that is similar to the stream setting, uh, out in the field, in nature.
We'll dump those in there and you can see all those larvae swimming around here.
They go in then I will take this and essentially just put it in here.
Where they will live until they emerge. We now have one larva
that has emerged as an adult and it appears to be a male. So the really important part of this
is that the larval skin is still in here which means that we can now
take the larval pattern that we didn't know what species it was, but we also now have an adult,
and this adult is what we need to look at to figure out what species it is. For me,
water quality is is about the biological end it's about how the pollution or the chemicals affect
the stuff living in the water. What we do is important because it allows us to actively try
to protect water quality and to also protect and conserve many species that would be lost
by human activity. By documenting insect biodiversity this group of
researchers is protecting water all across the state.
As a bonus they're also giving names to some incredible undescribed insect species. Here's
one. This is a stonefly we set out to capture in the beginning of this video. It's a member
of the genus isoperla. We collected it as a larva in the field during the first part of the video
and the researchers you just met raised it into an adult in the rearing units you saw
in the second half. And this is what its flight looks like captured at 6,000 frames per second.
This video is sponsored by the experiment. They shared with me these two books which viewers of
this channel might enjoy. How Insects Work is a great introduction to the field of entomology.
If you've ever wondered about what makes insects so successful across the globe this book is for
you. Planet of the Ants is a book that focuses on the greatest group of organisms on earth:
ants. It's written by a colleague of mine whose research on ant behavior i've cited in my own
work. She paired up with a journalist to chronicle the astounding world of ants and here you'll find
leafcutter ants zombie ants and my favorite ants trap jaw ants. You'll find a link to these books
in the video description below. Thanks again to the experiment for sponsoring this channel.
This sponsorship, the ads, and any other income that comes in from this channel
goes straight back into this lab it helps fund student researchers. So by watching, sharing,
and subscribing you're supporting the work of this lab and students. Thanks for watching.
you