On August 10, 2019, JoAnna and I went to the Valles Caldera in northern New Mexico. We hiked about three quarter of a mile into an area called, “Hidden Valley”.
The guided hike ended in the Hidden Valley, where we put kick nets in the East Fork of the Jemez River and caught various creatures with the park rangers. We had several tubs and some field microscopes to look at them in detail. There were mayfly and dragonfly larva, various worms, and a few very angry crawdads.
To use the kick nets, you placed them flat against the bottom of the river, then had someone kick the stones around upstream to convince the critters underneath to swim away. We’d catch them in the net and then look at them.
Apparently, biologists do this to see whether a river is healing from pollution, as they look for certain marker species to appear.
An Engineer in the World 