What you may miss by using a dip net

[SReynolds]

For the first year that I collected samples, I just used a wide-mouth pint mason jar to scoop up a sample of the substrate, most often sandy-gravel. I would then go through it under my stereoscope before any organisms in the jar died, and this method had some advantages over the method I'm using now, which is to collect using a 500 micron dip net, and preserve the sample on-site. The big advantage of the mason jar / live sample method is that I found things that would have gone through the dip net, and that I saw things in the live state, like the beating of gills on mayflies, that you miss when dead. The downsides are several - I was looking at a lot of substrate and fewer organisms, photographing live subjects is more difficult that dead, glass is not a good container to be carrying around rocks for risk of breaking, processing the sample before things died put time constraints on my work. An example of a benefit is shown below - I found what I thought were some kind of egg in samples collected in the upper reaches of the Middlebury River, and, on the advice of a friend, set them aside to see if/what would hatch - and they turned out to viable stonefly eggs. There is an excitement to seeing this activity which can't be replicated looking at dead material. I collected these April 4, 2023, and they hatched April 30, 2023.

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