Youths turn creek into biology classroomNeighbors/Sacramento Bee; April 15, 1999
By Duffy Kelly
Neighbors staff writer
The water is high on Arcade Creek: It’s cool, brown and flowing fast because of the recent rain.
The grasses at the water’s edge are high, too. They sway as Amber Mahone walks along the creek.
Wildflowers are blooming. A magpie looks for food. A mallard floats. The songbirds chirp.
And the creek teems with hundreds of thousands of critters. To the uninformed, they are simply worms.
To Mahone and her science classmates at Mira Loma High School, Karin Carpenter and Brian Maurizi, the creatures are ameletidaes, the siphlonuridaes and the oligochaetas. And they are nature’s barometer of the creek’s health and vitality.
Arcade Creek, which flows just blocks away from the high school, has become the science department’s living, evolving textbook. It is a real-life laboratory that meander under some of the city’s busiest streets.
Asphalt, concrete and houses have restricted its flow, but urban development did not destroy the creek, said Mahone.
"I had never thought of Sacramento as having such a rural environment," she said. "But there are small creeks that run through the city, and they largely contribute to the American River and eventually make their way to the ocean. Even though this area is so urban, here is the rural, beautiful creek that’s so deeply affected by the urban life around it. That’s what we are studying: How does the urban environment affect a rural creek?"
The three students donned chest-high rubber waders to measure the creek’s depth, feel it sediment and collect critters from the random creek samples. They take the sample back to students like Sara Bakhtary and Ricky Wang, who wait in the classroom laboratories, microscopes ready, to inspect the daily catch.
Wang and Bakhtary count the ting clams, the microscopic worms, bugs, beetles, stringy insects and gooey sacks that are homes to invertebrates.
Mira Loma’s International Baccalaureate students work in teams to collect, analyze and learn about the Arcade Creek ecosystems. This is the first year of a program where students will collect and analyze data over time to uncover trends that may help environmentalists and scientists better protect and preserve urban creek life.
Teachers Cindy Suchanek and Dean Karagianes extended the classroom science lesson to the real world by setting up five monitoring site along Arcade Creek. Students are leaning to map and graph the riparian precipitation that affects the clarity and depth water. They study the chemical composition of the water and compare that with the types of critters able to live in the creek. They learn how pollution kills certain aquatic life. The information, Suchanek said, will be tracked over the next several years. The data will be presented to environmentalists so that measures can be taken to make urban creeks cleaner and healthier.
"My pie-in-the-sky idea is to have salmon run in this creek someday," said Suchanek.
Carpenter said the creek critter hunt has brought biology to life for her and her 130 classmates.
"In most biology classes, you are limited to what you can actually study," she said. "We get samples of things sent to us from faraway labs, but they are already dead. And if they are not dead yet, they are in very poor condition from the traveling. But we can come to this creek during school hours. It’s so close and we dip in and get living samples."
"It helps to get us interested in science because so many kids think science is just boring mathematics. But it’s really the study of the environment that surrounds us," Carpenter said.
Suchanek said the students are learning to be scienctists who can make a difference in the world around them.
"We decided to make out sciene project something important for our neighborhood and the community we live in," Suchanek said. "we can do something positive for the community, and kids can learn field ecology techniques at the same time. Our question is can you monitor the health of a creek by look at it over a period time, from year to year, season to season? We think the answer is yes."
Back in the lab, Wang, Bakhtray and Sepideh Mazloumi pick through trays of what looks like dirt. In an hour, each has been able to find more than 100 critters in each tray.
"The key is diversity," said Wang. He said variety is the key to a healthy environment.
"The project is a chance for each student to be part of a big whole. Small groups each do their own work, and each group feeds on information from the other. Nobody is working is an isolated vacuum," said Karagianes.
The students at Mira Loma have been honored by the Sacramento Urban Creeks Council for their monitoring program at Arcade Creek. They were awarded the Creek Steward Award April 9.