Week 6:

A Change In Methods

I decided to change some of my methods within my project. Instead of doing phytoplankton as well as chlorophyll a, I am now just doing phytoplankton. I quickly realized that it takes over two hours to run only half of my chlorophyll a samples. It also takes me an hour to identify one sample of phytoplankton (of which I have 19 samples). So I decided to scrap the chlorophyll a part of my project and really focus all of my time on identification. 

Upon more research on the limnology and properties of the lake, it is very easy to detect what the range of chl a concentrations will be by using temperature and D.O profiles. 

I recruited my boyfriend to help me with identification

Here are some honorable mentions from my identifications so far:


Navicula - very common type of plankton, not often seen as much in my samples but really cool to look at
Tabellaria - frequent in unpolluted, circumneutral to slightly acidic, and poorly mineralized lakes, lots of these and in lots of different genus types.
Agmenellum - a type of blue-green algae that is a response to excess in nitrogen












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