Know Your Macroinvertebrates

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The purpose of this post is to put our Introduction to the aquatic “macro” Invertebrates of Southern, especially Eastern, Ontario on line  and announce that we’re working on updating it for publication as a book.


Our ‘macro’ invertebrates comprise fewer than a hundred species in total, and most are easily learned. These are big animals, and each species has as distinctive an ecological role as does any vertebrate, so it's a valuable asset for anyone to know them as species.... Crayfish use clawed legs and leg-like mouthparts and gills to be generalist predators, scavengers, detritivores, and even filter-feeders, of anything edible. The ciliated gills of Unionid Mussels, in their primordial abundance, stripped plankton, bacteria, and sediment from the water by repeated filtering, and oxygenated sediments by their burrowing. Their use of fish as larval hosts provides the big justification for interest in fisheries, and their life span of decades (perhaps centuries) provides stability to aquatic ecosystems. Short-lived Zebra Mussels have exploded to the primordial abundance of Unionids, and have clarified water in many streams and lakes by their filtering, while sealing the bottom off from oxygen, and providing a new habitat for benthic “meso” invertebrates in their beds of tangled shells, bysus, and pseudofeces. Aquatic Snails scrape surfaces and sediments with their toothy radulae, or, in a few cases, filter plankton from the water, and the giant Bryozoan Pectinatella magnifica… filter-feeding colonies, up to two metres in diameter, that disintegrate into floating dot-like statocysts to pass the winter, and germinate into new colonies in the spring.


Through the years we've worked to promote species-level identification of various groups. With reptiles & Amphibians, we were the only individual observers who contributed more than 20 thousand records to the Ontario Herp Atlas. Aleta designed and illustrated a laminated picture guide to Ontario Crayfish. We completed, with Robert Forsyth, the late Wayne Grimm's book about introduced species and native genera of terrestrial snails & slugs in Canada, and, with Kari Gunson, the species and circumstances of wildlife on roads.

Here is the Macroinvertebrate Guide in its present form. You can contact us to order the book when it is published. 



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