Comments by Jeff Adams:

Great work as always! Kudos to you and your students. First, I love the crayfish shot. You can see the branchiobdellid worms all over its claws. They are commensal on crayfish and look and act a lot like a leech. They don't [harm] the crayfish, but it's the only substrate they like! The crayfish looks like our native Pacifastacus, which is good since there are a couple nasty invasives around.

The aquatic snail is interesting since it looks like a young one, but the shell is really corroded. Wonder what that might mean?

Comments by Jeff Adams:

The second golden stone is tough. The gills aren't well defined enough to be sure from the image, but I'll assume there were several little fingerlike gills in each clump. Some little yellow stones have a single fingerlike gill or a pair. To complicate matters, the younger the golden stone, the fewer finger-like gills until it's just a stump. :) ... Very pretty yellow stones!

Comments by Jeff Adams:

The two different genera of small minnow mayfly are Baetis (first two images) and probably Diphetor (third mayfly image).

Comments by Jeff Adams:

There is a good bit of diversity in the Ameletid mayflies, but at the species level. However, there is only one genus, Ameletus. I'm guessing you have two species, showing a lot of variation within each. I forwarded the webpage to an ameletid specialist to see if he has any additional information.

Comments by Jeff Adams:

The easiest is the last one, Drunella doddsi. It actually comes in a wide range of colors, but is one of the cooler spiny crawlers. It can hang on very tightly to rocks using suction created by a ring of very dense fine hairs around the underside of its abdomen. ... The other four are much tougher. You're probably right that the first is Serratella tibialis and the other three are Ephemerlla of some sort (maybe more than one species). Serratella is the only one that comes to mind with that light stripe, but Ephemerella species vary so widely that I could be forgetting or missing something. Sometimes it's hard to tell the two genera apart even while plucking mouthparts under a microscope.

Comments by Jeff Adams:

Boy, you pulled out some tough ones. ... 1) Rhithrogena; 2)Cinygma?; 3) Cinygmula; 4) Cinygmula?; 5) Cinygmula; 6) Cinygmula. There are acutally quite a few species of Cinygmula around and you might have two. The best way to tell is the sharp corners of the sides of the front of the head (most evident in 5 &6). It's actually the elbow of a mouthpart that sticks out beyond the edges of the head. In short, you have three genera - Rhithrogena, Cinygmula, and probably Cinygma.

Comments by Jeff Adams:

The caddis pupae is probably Glossosoma (saddle case maker). ... The second caddis is probably a member of the Lepidostoma pluviale Group. They are small with a fairly distinctive case. ... The last caddis is probably a young Dicosmoecus, but tough to tell. ... The netspinner is Hydropsyche. most of them are, but keep an eye out for slight differences (yellow stripe down head and thorax, clusters of stout black hairs on abdomen, yellow body, particularly large body). There are three other genear in the family that are common if not as abundant as Hydropsyche. ...

Comments by Jeff Adams:

Probably 3 different midge genera. I don't know them well, but it's a very diverse group and not unusual to find a dozen different genera in a sample. ... Dicranota is a common crane fly with a bunch of small prolegs, two "eyes" at the end of its abdomen (actually breathing pores called spiracles), and two long lobes just beyond the spiracles. The image catches it really well.

Comments by Jeff Adams:

Ah! I refer you back to my comments on the crayfish. Often when there are lots of crayfish in a stream, you'll get a few Branchiobdellida by themselves trying to find a crayfish to cling on to. I have a short video clip of a crayfish molting and the branchiobdellids trying to get from the old exoskeleton to the new one before it is fully emerged. Cool stuff! .... Keep up the great work, and thanks for the late night distraction. Cheers!

Once again, we'd like to thank Jeff Adams, Director of Aquatic Programs for The Xerces Society, for taking the time to look at and comment on the macroinertebrate images above. As author of the CD-ROM, The Stream Bugs as Biomonitors: Guide to Pacific Northwest Macroinvertebrate Monitoring and Identification, he has considerable knowledge in identifying aquatic macroinvertebrates and experience in using "stream bugs" as bio-indicators of water quality. If you'd like to hear more from Jeff about macroinvertebrates, check out a scaled down Internet version of The Stream Bugs as Biomonitors... CD-ROM at The Xerces Society website. Better yet, order a copy for yourself. (PC compatible only; many images won't show on a Macintosh)

We also have another set of images with comments from Jeff Adams: East Fork Lewis River at Lewisville Park - Spring 2005 | Upper East Fork Lewis River - Fall 2005 | Salmon Creek - Dec. 2005 | Lacamas Creek - Nov. 2005