33 On the drives between sites, my brother Theodore would handle the navigation with an Ohio atlas spread over his lap and Google Maps poised for the next time we might return to cell service. We would park at schools, churches, gravel patches beside bridges, and I at least would pray no one would take offense. Open the van doors and trunk. Collect: waders, trays, forceps, vials, kick-seine. Tramp down to the stream access point. In, out. At the fourth site, a police officer giving his dog a break from the car asked us what research we were up to, and Theodore talked to him about larval insects and stream health and his professor. I listened, smiled from time to time, and kept counting off midges. I would look more official that way, I thought. But never an angry landowner appeared, not so much as a shotgun, and always our Honda Odyssey stayed where we had left it. I thanked God. You can know the midge larvae by their movement, wriggling from the center outward as though your forceps were already pinching them. Within a few seconds, the head end will have faced every possible direction, whether they float free in the water, lie in the substrate, or squirm between the tips of the forceps. Sometimes they look like worms, sometimes threads, sometimes supple like insects as their body segments rotate or contract at the joints. They thrash like this to stir up the water around them when their oxygen is depleted, distinguishing them from the decaying plant bits. The black fly larvae look similar, but have thicker and rounder head and tail ends, tapering in the middle. They don’t float freely as the midges do. Instead, they attach silk strands to twigs or leaves or the sides of the white plastic collection trays, looping themselves forward like sideways inchworms. You might also mistake the unsegmented nematodes for midge larvae, especially the small ones, thinner and shorter than an eyelash. NONFICTION Midging by Anastasia Cook
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