Service Learning - Freezing at Japanese Gulch - Anh

I participated in the Water Quality Monitoring project on Sunday (3/8/17). I volunteered for 4 hours, from 10 am to 2 pm. I chose to do this event because I thought that all lives depend on water and its quality. The purpose of this project is to ensure the water quality is in the appropriate range for organisms to live. In this project, we were doing some experiments to check the water quality of the Japanese Gulch stream in Mukilteo. We tested the pH, hardness, turbidity, and alkalinity of the stream. We also monitored for E. coli to see how much it was in the water.  Kacie, the project leader, also showed us some plant identification as we went on the track. We hiked for about a mile before getting to the stream. As we were doing the experiment, we also recorded the air and water temperatures as well as the weather on that day since it might affect our data. Kacie wanted everyone to get involved so each of us (volunteers), in turn, got to obtain water samples from the stream, pipet solutions, and rinse the equipment afterward. I was assigned to pipet some solutions to test the water quality as well as transfer the samples between the test tubes as part of the procedure.

Here are some pictures of the gulch:

Volunteers were getting water from the stream to test the quality.

Box of equipment that needed for the whole procedure.

A lot of time when I think of volunteer work, it only means to help people. But this time, I actually learned things. This event gave me a chance to practically apply some skills I got from science classes such as pipetting and titrating. Also, I learned that we can actually test the water quality by doing just some simple experiments. There were some terms that I didn’t know beforehand such as turbidity (water cloudiness) and hardness (concentration of calcium and magnesium ions in water) and it was very interesting to find out how this would affect the fish. This project is important because we’re able to keep the salmon alive by monitoring the quality of the stream. It was an opportunity for me to take a closer look at the surroundings, not just the people but also other animals and plants.

In this course, we spent a lot of time talking about evolution and how it’s driven by the environment. The environment determines an organism’s fate, whether it thrives or dies off. It is found that a lot of salmon in Japanese gulch have died before they spawn after their return from freshwater. This is potentially due to water quality. Maybe the habitat at the Japanese gulch is different from where coho used to live so a sudden change in the environment could result in salmon pre-spawn mortality. If we didn’t monitor the water, after several generations, coho salmon in the stream would have evolved to adapt to their environment.

Here are some questions I have while joining this project:

What did they do to keep the water so clean?

How does the weather affect the quality of the water? It was raining and hailing on that day so I was curious about the effect of that on the collected data.

Why was there only coho salmon living in the stream? It was interesting that they only found coho that lived in this stream but in Big Gulch, there were also chinook and chum.

What is the next step after we had all the data? What steps need to be taken if the amount of E. coli or other coliforms in the water was too high? Even though our data showed that the bacteria was very rare in the water, which is good, but I was just wondering how they would treat the water to eliminate all the bacteria without harming the fish.

Contact information:

Kacie McCarty

425-640-1882
kacie.mccarty@email.edcc.edu