There IS Lots Of Material In The Flint Driftnet Collections

Jeremy started to look at the material we collected from the Flint River. He quickly realized that there's a very high concentration of whole arthropods in it, more than we found at Estill Fork. One of the components of this kind of drift is exuviae, the shed exoskeletons of insect larvae. He proposed to ignore the exuviae, which Brittany has ID'd from Estill Fork, and only look at the intact animals in the sample. Given that we have five peanut butter jars each about 2/3's full of this material, I agreed, so that we can get some coherent information out of this in less than a year(!). He showed me the first 5 ml of the concentrated drift water he examined under a microscope and it had 7 or 8 intact arthropods, a very high count considering that they will have to be sorted by Order and then counted, out of hundreds and hundreds of milliliters of water in the jars. But at least we'll be bathing in data (if this doesn't drive Jeremy and others crazy first).