What is the value of water?

• The abundance and diversity of biological organisms is essential to the health of the waterway.
• Macro-invertebrate populations, along with fish populations and microorganism populations can serve as bio-indicators that can indicate the health of the waterway.
• The stream community, the riparian buffer, the wetlands and forests are ecologically interdependent.

Abundance and diversity are key indicators of a healthy stream. Students will use real world data and research findings to analyze the health of stream communities and illustrate the concept of ecological interdependence.

Students will explore the idea of interdependence by creating a community web.

Directions are described on the unit slide deck.

This exercise starts by assigning each student a role in the community and slowly connecting each one of them to each other to create a web of interconnected people using a ball of yarn.

After the web is created, now students will see what happens when one by one community members begin to “leave town” dropping their hold on the yarn as the web starts to fall apart.

Can anyone come up with a way to stay by adopting a new role or adapting their current role?  You can decide– depending on how a student describes how they may adapt, you may ‘allow’ them to remain in town on the web.

Visit The Mighty Mussel website:  https://mightymussel.com/

Focus on the main graphic on the homepage.

This graphic shows many of the living things and organisms that live in the Schuylkill River.  Clicking on the little (+) on each element opens up information on that specific organism.

Have students use THIS WORKSHEET to explore and answer questions about a living thing/organism that they are interested in.

Have students share some of their findings. Prompt students to find how the organisms/living things they researched are connected to each other.

Then ask:

What happens if one member of the river community is gone?

The slide deck concludes by asking the students to consider why it is important to protect the health of the river.

A Trophic Cascade

View How Wolves Can Alter the Course of Rivers.  In this video, George Monbiot poetically explains how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone National Park after a 70-year absence set off a “trophic cascade” that altered the movement of deer, sent trees soaring to new heights, attracted scores of new animals to the area (think: beavers, rabbits, bears, bald eagles and more), and stabilized the banks of rivers making them less susceptible to erosion.

Compare the re-introduction of wolves in Yellowstone to the return of the Shad to the Schuylkill.  How does the return of the Shad affect the ecology of the Schuylkill River? Explore how the loss of organisms have changed an ecosystem. (Example: Research how the loss of the buffalo affected the grasslands ecosystem.)