Steamboat Johnny and the HES Field Trip- Overview

A couple days ago, we as the Environmental Science class went with students in middle school on a steamboat going down the Delaware River, in order to get an up close and personal look at the ecosystem within our own town.

A view from the side of the boat of the Delaware River

There was a cool, calm breeze in the air that day, with low moderate drafts and chills on the riverbank as we set off on our journey. It was smooth sailing, probably because the skies were clear and without much indication of rainfall.

The water was very clear, possibly the clearest I've ever seen in a while. The pristine nature of the Delaware, with hardly any trash or excess waste in the water, leads me to believe that it is maintained very carefully and under close supervision, so nobody can damage the fragile ecosystem that inhabits it.

We learned later that the water rises up in the wintertime and floods several parts of the lake that are easier to access in the summertime. The water itself was not that deep, and shallow enough for you to be able to see the bottom. According to the people who taught us on the Steamboat, the Delaware is constantly in flux every season, rising and falling with the temperature. If there's a drought, then there's a chance that the river will be even more shallow. This accounts for the ground's rocky bottom, with various branches and twigs littering the river bottom. Since the water level is always changing, it drags natural resources down with it, and enables the living creatures that inhabit that body of water to feed and take in nutrients from those resources that the river provides.

The bridge between New Hope and Lambertville

The creatures that inhabited the lake are fish (known as Shad) and certain species of waterfowl, including but not limited to ducks, geese, and the unseen egrets and other types of birds. The geese migrate every year, so there were not many of them, but there were some traces that they were around and were thriving on some percentage of the river's nutrients.
There is also a yearly Shad migration, as we learned, and it allows the Shad to move to warmer climes and reproduce, creating a cycle that carries them through the Deleware River into the Pacific Ocean. Later on, after settlers figured out the patterns of migration, they installed several fish ladders for helping Shad migrate easier, since they would swim up them and reach their destination much faster.

Sometimes, the Deleware River has suffered from population decrease, and this affects the whole ecosystem in a lake. Events like this can be caused by several different things:
-Dams and the early settlers controlling the way the water flowed across several parts of the lake.
-Oxygen block in the 1940s due to the raw sewage causing algae blooming. The more algae forms, the more it blocks off oxygen from the river, and so a large sewage dumping caused more algae to form up on the river and prevented any oxygen from seeping through the cracks and into the river where it is needed to sustain life.

We also learned a little more about pollution, and how it affects the Ph balance of the water inside of a lake. This is due to the oil factories creating waste that can be toxic and damage the quality of the oxygen in the water. When the water temperature goes up, less oxygen can be permitted through the surface of the water, and more oil waste can affect the temperature and the way heat is retained inside of the lake in a massive way.

To close off this report, the entire class learned a lot about how an average river functions, and we got a fun experience and interesting guides to show us the science and facts of the river's biological and natural structure. Now, when we look at a lake like the Delaware, we will consider more of what it might turn into without the natural ecosystem that it so heavily depends on.

Beautiful view of the entire river