Getting Busy With Bugs: An ACRC Intern Experience
Hi, I’m Robbie Gabel. I am a fourth-year undergraduate student studying environmental resources at UAS. This summer I had the opportunity to work at ACRC through their internship program. I learned about this position from flyers posted around UAS and applied thinking that I’d primarily be sampling roadside streams for water quality. Which I did do... but I also got to assist with a pretty sweet variety of other projects: beaver projects, soil projects, fish projects, landslide projects, blueberry projects, glacier projects, and even my very own summer-long macroinvertebrate project.
With some guidance from USFS and ACRC folks, I conducted an abundance and diversity study on macroinvertebrates in Montana and McGinnis Creeks. The goal was to sample Montana and McGinnis Creeks upstream of their confluence (where they flow into each other) and look at how families and abundance changed throughout the season in these two related-but-different streams. Since our sampling sites occupied the same space, I spent a lot of time with UAF grad student Blake Toney helping with his juvenile salmon research.
Fish-wise, it was intriguing to think about how juvenile salmonids change their habitat use in response to different flow conditions. Bug-wise, I found some really cool asynchrony in abundance trends between my Montana and McGinnis sites and between macroinvertebrate families within the sites. The overall abundance of macroinvertebrates shot up rapidly in Montana Creek throughout the season while it dropped slowly in McGinnis Creek. But not all of the macroinvertebrate families followed that trend, which is so cool! Although sampling the macroinverts and seeing the data gathered from it was great, the days I spent picking bugs from samples of rock, dirt, twigs, and pine needles in the lab were a grind, but also totally worth it. I saw loads of unique, macroscopic creatures I had no idea about prior and learned a lot about benthic macroinvertebrate communities. With my data, I was able to follow trends in population and family richness (total number of families present) throughout the summer season, and I’m eager to learn more. Overall, while working through my project, I garnered some bug knowledge, major bug enthusiasm, and lots of bug appreciation.
Collectively, this has been a very valuable experience. I got way more out of this internship than I was expecting when I first saw the flyer at UAS. Seeing and participating in all of these different research areas firsthand has helped me hone in on my interests and reaffirm that I’m happy in my degree program. The idea of graduate school seems a lot more exciting and attainable now as well. I appreciate everyone at the USFS and ACRC who I was able to work with and learn from.