2021. Invertebrate Inventory
December 13, 2021
Ever wonder what types of insects live by the river? Our scientists set out to discover what bugs and how many live around rivers. #buglife
by Alex Rubin
The Blind Brook here at Purchase College is home to a variety of species. Slow moving fresh water makes it prime real estate for land-dwelling insects, and because of that there tends to be a high number of them around that area. This can also bring in a number of predators such as spiders (there are a lot of spiders) to the riverbank as well. There’s also plenty of water-dwelling insects too. However, invertebrates are very sensitive to changes in their ecosystem, and can vary greatly in number and density based off of a variety of factors. As both students and scientists, we set out to quantify the effects of the environment on our spineless friends.
We chose to do this as out project because we thought that it would be fun and interesting to see how our interactions with the environment as humans can affect the number of invertebrates that we find. Turns out, we have a pretty big impact on them (who could’ve guessed that). In areas that would have a high amount of runoff from roads, such as the stream behind one of the parking lots, there were less invertebrates found. In more remote areas the density and diversity of invertebrates was significantly higher.