Project:

Exploring Freshwater Ecosystems

Students:

Sait Coskuntuncel, Elaina Keller, Aubrey Capra, James Lukas

School:

Eastport South Manor Junior-Senior High School, Suffolk

Mentors:

Robert Bolen

Abstract:

Humans damage ecosystems in many ways such as altering land and polluting the environment with pesticides and fertilizers which reduces biodiversity. Biodiversity is the variety of life in an ecosystem and as biodiversity increases it results in stable overall environment, ecosystem stability, and cleaner water. Macroinvertebrate organisms collected from October 2021 in the Peconic river such as dragonfly nymphs, damselfly larvae, and other small aquatic macroinvertebrates such as amphipods and isopods will have their mitochondrial CO1 gene region DNA extracted and sequenced. The DNA sequences from this gene will be used to identify these macroinvertebrates species and to document the biodiversity of the Peconic River ecosystem. Some of these samples may be invasive species that can harm the native organisms by bringing new disease and disrupting food webs. We plan to identify these samples and determine the biodiversity of invertebrates in this location based on previous years’ data

Poster:

Team samples: