Another trip to Wisconsin over the weekend and another chance to gather a few samples.
The Mecan River is a small meandering stream, clean and clear. Finding an obvious source of diatom material was a bit of a challenge. Could not find that characteristic brown/black coating on rocks and sticks, at least not at first glance. I pulled some submerged vegetation out of the water, and although it appeared clean, rubbing it between my fingers I could feel the slight grittiness that I had experienced in handling diatom rich water. So I grabbed a good size bundle of that plant matter and tossed it in the bucket.
The nearby Upper Fox River is a larger stream with a more turbid water. The material I found there was much easier to spot, as the recognizable coating was prevalent in may places. Again I chose vegetation rather than rocks to keep the mineral content down.
Finally, Green Lake, Located in the City of Green Lake, County of Green Lake....a bit redundant huh? A 7900 acre lake, and the second deepest in Wisconsin at 236 feet. I found a small protected niche that had a thick coating of diatom material covering everything that was easily visible through the wonderfully clear water. I snagged more vegetation from the bottom that was about 4 feet down.
Returning home, I separated the diatom material from the vegetation using the shake method, place the vegetation and some water in a jar, seal, and shake until the water in the jar shows cloudiness. Drain of and save the water and discard the vegetation.
All of the samples produced good diatom material with the Mecan sample being the least dense, but that was as expected based on the nature of the sample.
Under the scope, the wet slides all showed good diatoms. Here is a quickie afocal 20x snapshot of the Fox River sample.
- Fox River Sample 20x.JPG (233.8 KiB) Viewed 194254 times
All of the samples will be getting the cleaning treatment. More to come as the process continues.
One other development. As the weather cools and some of the water bodies have receding water levels, gathering samples had become a bit harder to do without getting wet or muddy feet. I devised a tool the extend my reach and used it over the weekend to gather the samples and it worked out really well.
The main component is an extendable pole designed to assist in changing light bulbs that are difficult to reach. It had been living in the garage for some time just waiting for a bulb to burn out. It is something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/Ettore-48450-Bul ... +bulb+pole
Mine is about 12 feet long fully extended. To that I added one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/Bond-1501-3-Tine ... cultivator
I got the cheap one at the local farm store, about $3 or so.
With a generous application of some good duct tape, the claw was attached to the end of the pole. I now have a reach of somewhere in the 14 foot range (counting my arms). At the lake, I was easily able to reach down 3 to 4 feet in the water and gather material from the bottom. On the Mecan, I stood on a low bridge over the stream and reached down about 8 feet and snagged my sample, and the on the Fox I was able to reach out around 10 feet to get the goods. All while staying high and dry.
The claw can also easily drag baseball size rocks to shore should that be necessary.
I am really pleased with it, thought some of you might be interested.