Project Date: ongoing - January 2017
Project Description:
Students visited Marsh-Billing-Rockefeller National Historical Park in September 2016, to learn how to collect dragonflies and how to identify them.
Students visited Marsh-Billing-Rockefeller National Historical Park in September 2016, to learn how to collect dragonflies and how to identify them.
This is part of the Mercury Project, originally started at Acadia National Park in Maine. Hartford High School, under the leadership of Science teacher Meghan Wilson, has been involved for the past three years where Hartford, Woodstock, Claremont and now more schools from the NH and VT collect dragonflies to test the amount of bioavailable mercury in different local bodies of water. After learning how to collect dragonflies, the students from Hartford collected dragonflies from Dotham Brook in WRJ, Dewey’s Pond in Quechee, a small household pond in Norwich and a Beaver Pond in Norwich.
Due to the wind-patterns of the US and the fact that there are coal plants (which emit atmospheric mercury) in the midwest Northern New England is a hot-spot for mercury contamination. Our class is adding to the literature by looking at local bodies of water and seeing which bodies have the right conditions to have bioavailable mercury in them.
