Bioblitz Resources

As I have mentioned in a previous blog entry, in Northern Ohio we have the good fortune of having an amazing aquatic laboratory in our backyard. Ohio State's Stone Lab is the oldest aquatic field station in the United States and is located on Gibraltar Island to the west of Kelleys Island. I was lucky enough to take a Field Ecology course at Stone Lab in 2012 and was introduced to their printed resources. Several of these I have been given permission to use during the bioblitz for identification and would like to share them with you in case you happen to be out in the lake or its watershed with a net and find a little creature and don't know what it is!

The first are keys to macroinvertebrates that are commonly found in Lake Erie. This first page gives some great pictures of organisms that are found in "clean" water. Let's hope we find a bunch of these on Saturday! I will post the keys groups that I hope we don't find too many of on Saturday later this week along with the phytoplankton key. The phytoplankton key is one to watch out for as it has the dreaded Microcystis which is responsible for the harmful algal blooms during the summer. Let's hope we don't find any of this on Saturday!