The Pine River was running around 300 cfs so the rescheduled Insect Survey went off without a hitch on June 5, but also without participants other than the leader.
Still it was a great day to be wading into the Pine at the three locations collecting macroinvertebrate samples to get an idea of stream quality. Identifications have just been completed and the results are these for Stream Quality Index (SQI) [Poor <19, Fair = 19-33, Good = 34-48, Excellent >48]:
- Silver Creek, SQI = 29.2, FAIR
- Elm Flats, SQI = 37.8, GOOD
- Peterson Bridge, SQI = 36.1, GOOD
The quality was not as good as I hoped for. In contrast, the three sites we sampled earlier on the Platte River scored EXCELLENT.
The samples lacked a high level of diversity, reflecting the lack of diverse habitats at those locations, though sampling was done in all habitats at each site. Other notable observations
- The number of biting flies; snipe flies, black flies and an occasional deer fly, are far greater than what we see in samples from the Platte and Betsie rivers.
- A may fly family, Ephemerellidae, is quite diverse on the Pine River. While on other rivers I sample it is usually represented by one genus, at least three distinct genera are present at all sites on the Pine.
So, there you have it: the first semi-quantitative sampling on the Pine River that will go into the MiCorps database.