Muckraking Mendota: The Chironomid Connection

July 23, 2013

Hardly the glamorous deep-water adventure I’d imagined… perhaps bottom sediments should stay down there! Photo: S. Kuhn

by Emily Hilts “There is absolutely nothing graceful about this,: I thought as I swirled my hand through a bucket of mucky sediment. I was trying to filter organisms out of a hunk of sludge from the bottom of Lake Mendota. The sample was pulled up by an Ekman dredge, a contraption consisting of a metal box with spring-loaded doors. Ekmans are a basic way to study the benthos, or bottom sediments, of a lake, and have been around nearly as long as the field of limnology. Keep reading –>