Service Learning - Water You Doing During Break?! - Leah Koung

For my service learning, I worked on the Water Quality Monitoring project in Mulkiteo, WA, led by Kacie McCarty (kacie.mccarty@email.edcc.edu). The event was about two hours long, beginning at 10:00am and ending around 12:30pm. The goal of this project was to monitor the quality of the water in the Japanese and Big Gulch streams, testing for the presence of E. coli, as well as the pH, alkalinity, and hardness of the water. This is important because if the quality of the water gets too low, it could affect the wellness and survival of the surrounding plants and animals, possibly killing them off. If the plants and animals get killed off through the quality of the water, it would be an example of the bottleneck effect, as a large majority of the plants and animals that rely on the stream for water would be killed, with only a few survivors.


The Big Gulch Stream

To begin the project, we first tested the amount of E. coli present in the Big Gulch stream, pipetting the stream-water into a gel bottle, then into a petri dish. While waiting for the gel to solidify, we went on to test for the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water. For this test, we took two bottles filled with stream-water, and added a chemical to the bottles to stabilize the concentration of oxygen in the water. In order to successfully perform this test, we had to wait for all the solid in the bottle to dissolve, so we moved on to our third test: turbidity. However, we were unable to test the turbidity of the water due to the increased difficulty. After, we tested the pH of the stream, dropping the  indicator in, and comparing it to the pH standard in order to derive a value. We then tested the hardness of the water by obtaining a stream-water sample, dropping a chemical in until the sample turns pink, and recording the number of drops it took for the color change to occur. Once all these tests were completed, we went back to check on our dissolved oxygen bottles, as well as our E. coli plates. All the solid in our dissolved oxygen bottles had dissolved, and we titrated our samples with a chemical until the liquids turned clear, and recorded the number of drops. Our E. coli plates showed that the amount of E. coli in the water, and gave us a glimpse of the amount of sewage and waste being drained into the stream, and when we were finished with our observations, we returned to school.


Collecting stream-water from the Big Gulch stream

I found working on the Water Quality Monitoring project to be a memorable and valuable experience, with learning about the Big Gulch stream and its importance to the ecosystem being very intriguing. I enjoyed doing tests on the water, as it felt like we were doing a formal lab, but outside. I was able to use techniques I had only used in the lab, such as titration, in the real world, which was really cool. Four questions that arose during my service learning experience included:
    1. If the water quality of the stream gets too bad, will we be able to fix it?
    2. If the water quality is able to be fixed, how will we do it?
    3. How often is the stream monitored?
    4. Does rain affect how accurate the tests are?