One of the chemical water quality parameters
that we measure on stream is dissolved oxygen. Dissolved
oxygen is really important for the aquatic organisms that
live in the streams.
Just like how we breathe oxygen, fish, stream
macroinvertebrates, they breathe oxygen through their gills,
but they breathe oxygen that's dissolved in the water.
So this is not the little bubbles
that you see like in your drink.
This is oxygen that's actually dissolved in this.
The more oxygen there is in the stream,
the easier it is for organisms to survive.
Think about when you go up a mountain.
The higher you go up a mountain, the harder
it is for you to breathe.
That's because there's less oxygen in the air.
In Utah, we have water quality standards
for dissolved oxygen. For cold water fisheries,
the one-time minimum value should never be
below 4 milligrams per liter.
The average over a 30-day period should never
be below 6.5 milligrams per liter.
For a warm water fishery, the numbers
are a little bit different.
The one-time value should never be below 3 milligrams per liter
and the 30-day average should never
be below 5.5 milligrams per liter.
Our tier one volunteers measure this
using a claw metric test similar to our pH.
This is a test that uses indigo carmine.
Indigo carmine will react with the amount of dissolved oxygen
in the water.
And then we'll compare it to a known standard.
The first step is, we need to go and fill up in our vial
25 milliliters of water.
So we go back out to our sample location.
Hold it right underneath water.
Fill it up once.
Dump it out twice, three times.
That way, we've rinsed it.
We know it's clean.
Hold it up.
Get it right below the surface.
And then you can come back out.
Most of the time, you'll have filled it up
a little bit too much, so you need to just dump water
until you get right at the 25.
Right within the arrows.
So right there.
And then the next step is to remove
one of your glass ampoules.
This is what contains the indigo carmine in it.
And as you can see, it has a very thin point.
What you will do is place it into the cup,
underneath the water.
And now I'm going to snap the tip off.
And the glass is under a vacuum.
It'll suck up the water.
So there you go, just broke it.
And now we're going to let it react with--
suck up some of the oxygen. And you can already see,
it's already starting to react with the dissolved oxygen
in there.
Leave it in there for 15 to 30 seconds
so we can pull up some water.
And then what you want to do is take it out.
And you want to mix the bubble upside down a couple of times
so we get a thorough mixing through the ampoule.
As you see, it's already starting to turn blue.
Now what we want you to do is wait two minutes
to let it fully react.
Now we've waited our two minutes,
so we've had time for the chemicals to react.
And now we're going to compare it
to our known color standards.
This color standard's going to scale from 1 all the way to 12
milligrams of oxygen per liter.
And you can see the one has a very light blue color.
The more oxygen there is in the water, the darker
the blue color it'll turn.
So what you do is, holding your test ampoule
in front of the standards, is to put them in front
and try to match them to the color, the closest color
that they resemble.
You can obviously tell that this one
is much darker than the one.
So just move down the line.
We recommend that you hold them in front.
If you put it down in here, it kind of creates a shadow
and makes it look a little bit darker.
So I will move this one along and I'll
try to hold this to see which color.
And now we have an 8 and a 10.
So this one could actually be maybe-- it's actually
9 milligrams per liter.
But for our tier one partners, we
ask that you just report it and match it to the nearest one.
And I'm going to say this one is 10 milligrams per liter.
So equal to this one here.
10 milligrams per liter very healthy amount
of dissolved oxygen in the stream.
This is a very cold water stream we had it at 5.5 Celsius.
So the colder the water, the more dissolved oxygen
that can be in there.
So this stream has plenty of oxygen for all the fish
and organisms that live in it.
So now that we're done our test, we
recommend just take your indigo carmine glass ampoule.
Just put it in a little plastic bag or something
you carry with you.
And then when you get home, put it in the trash.
We don't want to litter in these beautiful streams.