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Macroinvertebrates were part of last year's rules and are removed from this year's rules. You are technically not required to know them. There was even an official rules clarification on soinc.org that replaced the "analyze and evaluate comparative macroinvertebrates" to "indicator organisms" in the rulesheet. So technically, you are only required to know the ecologies, life cycles, and ID of the organisms listed on your rule sheet.

That being said, sometimes state supervisors may use a previous year's rules and they may include the macroinvertebrates. But seeing you're from the state of Illinois, which I assume has a well-organized SO program (it hosted nationals before) I don't think you'll have to worry about that.

As magicalforest said, you probably will not need to know the macroinvertebrates this year.

I think I'll just leave this video here. These shouldn't be that hard to identify.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk83FzJOc-U

I think you meant to post this in the Question marathon?

Anyway, those are Bumphead parrotfish in the video right?

Since the answer was in the link, I figured it would be a stupid question. I just thought it was cool.

Has anyone found a website that states the EPA requirements for the specific water quality tests? For example, sewage effluent can't go over ____ ppm of nitrates or drinking water can't have over _____ ppm of nitrates.

I'm not sure about the sewage number, but I believe that amount of drinking water can't contain more than 10 ppm of nitrates.
Below is a link that I found helpful when I did this event.
http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants ... itrate.cfm
Best of luck!

Godlike wrote:Has anyone found a website that states the EPA requirements for the specific water quality tests? For example, sewage effluent can't go over ____ ppm of nitrates or drinking water can't have over _____ ppm of nitrates.

Here is the EPA's page listing the Maximum Contaminate Level for a lot of stuff:

http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/

magicalforest wrote:Macroinvertebrates were part of last year's rules and are removed from this year's rules. You are technically not required to know them. There was even an official rules clarification on soinc.org that replaced the "analyze and evaluate comparative macroinvertebrates" to "indicator organisms" in the rulesheet. So technically, you are only required to know the ecologies, life cycles, and ID of the organisms listed on your rule sheet.

That being said, sometimes state supervisors may use a previous year's rules and they may include the macroinvertebrates. But seeing you're from the state of Illinois, which I assume has a well-organized SO program (it hosted nationals before) I don't think you'll have to worry about that.

I wish that was true (that Illinois would have a good test), but our state test had nothing from this year on new stuff. No coral reefs or indicator species. It had macroinvertebrates and the water quality index on it instead, and half the test had to be thrown out due to arbitration. It was kind of an insult, actually, because we spent all year studying and that was what we got. I hope the Nationals test will be better...

Did the committee post an official list for the invasive species we have to know? There is a list on the Wiki, but I am unsure where that came from. Can someone confirm it?