News

Pamlico-Tar Riverkeeper Katey Zimmerman was back in the field last Friday, on Round 2 of benthic sampling in Blounts Creek.

Teaming up with East Carolina University Water Resources Center’s Water Corps, Katey and the ECU crew were on the lookout for aquatic bugs in the headwaters of Blounts Creek.

“We had two nets, and we scoop up leaf packs and mud, dump that into sieves and sort through and see what kind of bugs are in there,” Katey said.

The goal is to get a good understanding of what type and numbers of benthic macroinvertebrates (aquatic bugs) live in the small waterway before Martin Marietta Materials begins operations at a 649-acre limestone mine. A wastewater permit recently issued by the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality allows wastewater from the mining process to be discharged into the headwaters of Blounts Creek — up to 12 million gallons per day — which could potentially threaten the creek’s entire ecosystem.

“The hope is to find a diverse and abundant population of macros now before the discharge begins, so that when the discharge does begin and, hypothetically, populations do dwindle, we’ll have that to point to, to show that the discharge is impacting the creek,” Katey said.

The bugs found last Friday were delivered to the Water Resources Lab where Water Corps members will nail down their species.

“It’s kind of a difficult area, low pH and really low flow, so it’s common in that environment that there won’t be a very diverse population,” Katey said. “But we found more this trip than we did the last one: arthropods and dragonfly nymphs and a lot of bugs that tend to be able to survive anywhere.”

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