Manistee Lake Trip

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      During the second week of my time at Au Sable campus my insect ecology class went on a trip to a part of the Manistee Lake. The drive up was around ten to fifteen and there was no track let alone any other motorized vehicles on the road. When we got there we unloaded all of our waiters, water nets, folding chairs, and the folding table and set up on the edge of the river. Professor David relayed instructions to us, we were to go up and down the stream with our nets typically on the floor of the stream to catch things. We would be going in groups of two, one would be holding the bucket we would be putting what we find in. After that we would put our buckets down and pour the contents out onto the table and see if anything was alive in it. If there were things that were living we would put them in a jar and after everything was gone we would dump the contents and move on to the next bucket. We all went up stream under the bridge to find anything that could be interesting. The stream at first looked shallow but there were some parts that must have been higher than my thigh and the mud on the floor made movements difficult and got some of us stuck. Two of my classmates found a rock with a group of what appear to be fish eggs though we couldn't identify it. 

(Matthew Brown)
   We eventually stopped heading upstream and decided to go back to home base and look at what we had found. I provided a jar to put living things in for one of the buckets and unlike the other jars, it was barely thicker than my thumb and was made out of plastic. Despite my observations it appears that there was stuff in the bucket since we found mayfly larvae and other aquatic insects(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayfly). The next bucket we looked through was much more murky and much more successful in the amount of insects in it. After a while I decided to head across the river.

(Matthew Brown)

    The depth of the stream was deep and I would have been neck deep. I made my way over the bridge and to the other side. There wasn't anything interesting on the patches that I went to, it was mostly mud and plant life with no signs of insects. The rest of my classmates decided to head up the river again so I decided to head down and see what I could find. Less than a two minutes down the path and I found a megaoloptera corydalidae larvae which meant that traveling down was a good idea(https://genent.cals.ncsu.edu/insect-identification/megaloptera/). I decided to walk to a patch of land that previously was beyond reach from us by the deep middle. Walking around I found a shin deep path that took right to the land, it was however hard to traverse due to it being entirely mud. I checked a bigger piece of land and found the surface to be just like the river floor and tripped in it which resulted in mud splattering my jacket. Eventually I went to a small piece of land that was solid dirt and found an albino crane fly, thinking fast I caught it with my net. I eventually returned to the others and took off my waiters and headed for the van we came here in. While waiting for the others, a group of elderly asked if we were fishing in the lake. I said that we were insect fishing and told them we were insect ecologists in training. The old man gave a friendly chuckle and wished me a good day which I returned back before anyone else arrived. 

                                    

(David Hoekman)

                                                                References

"Megaloptera" Agriculture and Life Sciences(NC State University), https://genent.cals.ncsu.edu/insect-identification/megaloptera/

 "Mayfly" Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayfly

First and second photos belong to Matthew Brown 

Third photo belongs to David Hoekman

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