SIGHTLINE

SUMMER 2001
Vol. 2 No. 1

AIR
The Acid Test

HUMAN INTERACTION
Back to the Future

WILDLIFE
Deviant Behavior

WATER
Aquatic Insects on the Frontline

INVASIONS
Big Hogs, Big Problems

VEGETATION
Managing the Land

BIODIVERSITY
Campaign to Identify Smokies' Species Continues

SIGHTLINE
is published on behalf of
Great Smoky Mountains National Park
by the
Energy, Environment and Resources Center (EERC)
at the
University of Tennessee.

EERC conducts research designed to promote real-world solutions to problems in the fields of energy, environment, technology, and economic development.

.

SIGHTLINE is sponsored by:

Friends of Great Smoky Mountains National Park

and

Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association

Photo courtesy of Glen Este High School Science Club

In Search of a Rare Caddis Fly

High School Students Help with Environmental Impact Study

BY KRIS CHRISTEN

Ongoing science projects in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park offer students the opportunity to learn science first hand. In fact, students have inventoried and monitored moths, beetles, snails, salamanders, and birds and tagged migrating monarch butterflies. But perhaps one of the most exciting projects involves a hunt for the elusive Neophylax kolodskii, a rare species of the caddis fly genus charted only twice in the Smokies and nowhere else in the world.

As story would have it, Chuck Parker, an aquatic research biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, was out working one night in 1987 along Sam's Creek, which is part of the Middle Prong of the Little River. Hanging a light outside his tent-the standard method of collecting insects-he collected some of the caddis flies attracted by the light's glow and later determined that six of the specimens represented a new species.

Using a black-light trap, another group later found two more specimens of N. kolodskii in the place where the first six were found, bringing the known world total to eight.

This same watershed is a proposed site for reintroducing native brook trout, but before that project can proceed, Park personnel need more information on where this rare caddis fly lives, how big its population is, and where its distribution lies. Parker happened to mention within earshot of Paul Super, science education specialist at the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, how great it would be to get a bunch of people to spread out in the watershed and search for N. kolodskii. Super knew the person to call for such a task-Jon Souders, a biology and environmental science teacher at Glen Este High School in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Souders, who has been bringing students to participate in Tremont science projects for several years, brought 15 students and four adults to the Park last year to take part in this environmental-impact study. Spreading out over a 9-mile-square area of the watershed, Souders and his crew collected some 220 gravel vaults that shielded caddis-fly larvae. Parker then raised these larvae over the summer in an artificial stream. He hoped some of them would turn out to be N. kolodskii, and he expected to learn something more about their habitat.

"Unfortunately, none of the ones we collected were that specific species," Souders says. However, the six species of caddis flies they found helped Park personnel to track the distribution of those species. Although N. kolodskii remains evasive, the students got a lesson in real science.

"Any time I can say to students 'we're going to do this and scientists all over the world are going to look at what we do,' they immediately give me a higher level of attention and concentrate more on what we're doing," Souders says. "It gives me a good chance to work with scientific method and data collection, teaching them how important it is that we collect data in a certain manner," he adds.

He and his students have vowed to return this year to tackle another watershed.

For more information on how students aged 13-18 can get involved in ongoing Park science projects, contact Paul Super, Science Education Specialist, Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, 9275 Tremont Road, Townsend, TN 37882 (865-448-6709), or access <www.nps.gov/grsm/science.htm>. See the Glen Este High School Science Club at work at <http://www.westcler.org/gh/soudersj/>.