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Sunday, September 13, 2009

Art & Science on Cayuga!


Special Thanks to today's eco-cruise feature guest- Camille Doucet. We had a great time practicing out nature illustration techniques, as we focused on live specimens fresh from the lake- Coontail, Elodea & even some zooplankton!

Along with artistic endeavors, we did our weekly clarity tracking (Secchi Disk tests) of deep water areas near the south end of the lake. It looks like our end of the lake is still going through an especially productive phase. Clarity is running at about 2 meters- its lowest point for the year. Samples reveal that a tiny diatom (photsynthetic plant) called Fragilaria (pictured here) is still densely populating the water. You could call this an algal bloom.

Expect a change in the coming week, however, as the plankton population in the lake adjusts itself. Some of our younger visitors noted numerous copepod larva (nauplia) in our plankton net samples, and they are like responding to the availability of food. We'll see what happens....

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