Day 2 of Playing in the Pond

Ahhh, the Proctor pond, the center of our campus, a gathering place, a landmark to give directions. This beautiful oasis is most importantly the center of our campuses ecosystem. Everything we do around campus leads to the pond, the turf field, storm drains in the roads and sidewalks and roof runoffs. The oil from cars, the gum we spit into the storm drain, the turf pellets that find there way off of the synthetic turf may all end up in the pond and playing a part in the ponds story.

Runoffs into the Proctor pond

Drainage pipes such as these run into the pond throwing who knows what into our ecosystem, we need to get to the bottom of this and how they may affect our beloved pond.




For the last two days we have been investigating the life and health of our pond by field testing and sampling for pond life (biotic) and sampling things such as water temp, ph, phosphate and turbidity (abiotic).

Today (10/22/15) was the first day of sampling the pond for abiotics. It was very cloudy at the time of 11:30 and a previous rain shower earlier in the morning. Wind was non existent and a temperature of about 60 degrees fahrenheit. We tested for Turbidity: approximately 5, Phosphate: 1.5, and PH: 6.5. All of the readings today were at a healthy stage but what was surprising was the biotic life in the
pond.

This was taken on 10/20/15

Because of the weather I believe the "creatures" didn't want to come out and play. The previous sample day we were catching tadpoles, salamanders, frogs, and many nymph species. Today on the overcast cloudy day we caught one frog, one water boatman and a couple small snow fleas. I have concluded that the weather does play a major role in the diversity of what we see in our pond on campus.














I hope to see one more warm sunny day that we can sample on so that we can get one more set measurements on all of the biotic life before the pond freezes over for the winter and it turns into a hockey rink.

Yes we have found evidence of direct human interactions with the pond.

All photography taken by Eric Bonewald