How healthy is Sharon Springs’ Bowmaker Pond and its habitat? A group of SSCS 8th grade and high school Science students spent the day there October 2 with their teachers Alex Yorke and Nicholas Barbara and members of the SUNY Cobleskill Department of Fisheries and Wildlife investigating just that. The group is conducting environmental research at the pond as part of their studies collecting, testing and analyzing samples – searching for indicators of the pond’s water quality and fishery health.
The young scientists conducting these college-level experiments included Hunter Bolster, Kylie Rechnitzer, Devin Tissiere, Clayton Van Patten, Michael Gestone, Thomas Hemstock, William Kane, Trever Killenberger, Barrett Lynk, McKenzie Lynk, Joseph Pizza, Zoey Saltsman, Maison Scott and Cian Smith. Joining them were Professor Mark Cornwell and Fordham University’s Dr. Guy Robinson.
Bowmaker Pond is a local nature retreat just up the road from the school well known for its fishing, hiking and picnicking. The pond is owned by the Town of Sharon and managed and stocked by the SUNY Cobleskill Department of Fisheries and Wildlife.
On the Bowmaker Pond site, SSCS students climbed aboard small fishing boats and worked with the SUNY college crew to collect water and fish samples from a multitude of water depths. They later came back to shore with their samples and performed a battery of chemical analyses including determining the pond’s pH, dissolved oxygen content, alkalinity, hardness, ammonia content and turbidity.
While aboard the boats they used plastic buckets and fishing nets to collect plankton, organism and plant samples and study what they found. Using microscopes and other methods they were able to identify more than a dozen species of flora and fauna ranging from microscopic critters (midge larvae and water fleas), to macroscopic invertebrates (dragonfly larvae, fairy shrimp, sails and freshwater clams), to large-scale plants (cattails, coontail and floating pond weed).
