Weds. Sept 13th 7:00 pm: First club meeting of the year at Queen Mary Park Community Hall. This is primarily a social get together to catch up on news, get reacquainted with other members, find out who's been catching what, where and how, etc.
Also at this and the next couple of meetings you'll have chance to fulfill an ambition of a lifetime - pick up a FREE rock snot collection kit!
Leslie Peterson, TUC biologist, needs our help. She's looking for more data on didymo (rock snot) distribution in Alberta, particularly north of Red Deer.
"Basically," she says, "we are looking for folks to take a Discovering Didymo Distribution sampling kit with them when they are hiking or fishing along various streams. We had a few members of the chapter participate in this program last year and I'm hoping to get some more samples this year. To collect a sample, you use the little scrubby pad in the kit to scrub algae off rocks then put the pad in the vial which contains a preservative. We then collect these kits at the end of the season and send them to the UofC to analyse under a microscope to assess whether or not didymo ("rock snot") is present. This helps us understand how widespread it is and ultimately better understand what may cause nuisance "blooms". The volunteers are also asked to fill in a data sheet or use an app called Epi-Collect 5 to fill in the data fields about where they are, what they observe, etc. There are instructions in the kit about how to take a sample and additional resources can be found on our website: https://tucanada.org...o-distribution/ "
