What Happens When Your Students Hunt for Unnamed Algae: A Teacher’s Guide to Low-Stakes Citizen Science
The fluorescent lights in my 10th grade biology room hummed too loud the week after state testing. Every kid was staring out the window at the oak trees swaying in the May heat, and half of them had already packed their backpacks for summer. I’d signed us up for a local freshwater algae survey on a whim—something to fill the dead space instead of re-running the same Disney nature documentary I pull out every year. We loaded into the school van, drove 15 minutes to the city lake, and spent an hour slipping on mud and filling half-pint jars with shoreline water and gunk. Mia, who sits in the back row and rarely raises her hand even when I know she knows the answer, dragged her net through a clump of decaying cattails and filled an extra jar, just because she said it “looked weird.” That was it. We went back to school, made slides, and started matching what we saw to the survey’s cheat sheet.
Mia tapped my shoulder at the end of the period, when I was already packing up to leave for a parent meeting. “Ms. Henderson, this one doesn’t match anything. Am I doing it wrong?” I leaned over her microscope, adjusted the focus, and stared at a lattice-patterned diatom that didn’t look anything like the 20 common types the guide listed. I shrugged, told her we’d send a photo and a drop of the sample to the university lab running the survey, like the instructions said. I didn’t think anything of it. I get a lot of “weird” samples every year, almost all are just cracked debris or overlapping algae that looks off.
Three months later, I got an email while I was picking up peaches at the farmers market. The lab had run genetic sequencing on the sample Mia collected. It was a new strain of diatom algae that hadn’t been documented or named by anyone before.
Before this, I’d have told you that discovering a new species is something that only happens in the Amazon, to researchers with PhDs and six-figure research grants. This whole project cost our classroom less than $20 for jars and preservative. I know less about algae than the average park ranger. Mia was pulling a C in my class that semester—she struggled with memorizing the vocabulary for unit tests, and always forgot to turn in her lab reports. What she did have was a habit of staring at small stuff: she brought pressed ferns to class in her notebook, and she’d stop on the way in from the field trip to point out snails no one else noticed.
A lot of teachers and parents ask me how we did this, like we must have had some special program or a gifted student. The truth is, there are hundreds of free citizen science projects right now that are begging for casual observations from kids and adults. Most ecologists can’t sample every single lake, river, or patch of forest in their region, so they rely on public submissions to fill in gaps. You don’t need a fancy lab: our microscope is 15 years old, and it came from a surplus sale when the local college updated their labs. If you’re a parent who wants to try this at home, you don’t even need a microscope for most projects—iNaturalist lets you submit photos of plants, fungi, and insects just from your phone, and there are local projects for freshwater algae that accept phone photos through a free app, too.
If you want to try this in your classroom or with your kids, start with one small step: Google “[your state] citizen science water survey” or check the extension program page for your local land grant university. Almost all of them have pre-made guides for student groups, and most pay for shipping if you need to send a sample. Don’t sort out which kids get to participate based on grades. Let every kid collect whatever they want, even if they just grab the first clump of muck they see. Don’t make them fill out a 3-page worksheet about what they “should” find. I just ask kids to write down where they collected their sample, what the water temperature was, and anything they thought was weird about it. That’s two lines of writing, max.
After the email came, the lab asked if Mia wanted to contribute to the formal description of the diatom. She said yes, of course. She meets with a grad student from the university once a month over zoom right now, helping sort through other samples they’ve collected to see if the new algae shows up anywhere else in the state. She still struggles with multiple-choice tests. Last week she failed her quiz on cell membranes. But she stays after school every Wednesday now, helping me process samples from the lake for the next year’s class. She brought two of her friends along last month, and they already found one other sample that doesn’t match the guide.
The biggest thing this experience taught me, that I wish more parents and teachers understood, is that most kids don’t care about science because of the big fancy breakthroughs they see in movies. They care when they realize that the work of science is open to them, right now, where they live. We spend so much time teaching kids that all the important questions have already been answered, all the names have already been given to everything. That makes kids check out, especially the ones who don’t fit the mold of the “good science student” who can memorize all the terms.
One small change I made this year is I set aside 45 minutes every other Friday for “unplanned observation.” Kids can bring in anything they found outside, look at it under the microscope, and if it doesn’t match any reference we have, we send it off. I don’t grade this. I don’t give extra credit for it. It’s just something we do. A lot of weeks, nothing comes of it. Most samples are just common stuff that looks weird to new eyes. That’s fine. It’s still practice looking carefully, and asking questions when something doesn’t fit.
We don’t know yet if Mia’s diatom will get a formal species name. The process takes years, and sometimes new strains don’t get full species status, just a note in a research paper. Mia says she doesn’t care that much either way. She likes going out to the lake every month to collect more samples, and she likes talking algae with the grad student. Last week she told me she’s thinking about majoring in environmental science in college, something she never would have said before this. Next week, we’re taking the new 10th grade class out to the lake. I don’t expect anyone to find another new species. But I know at least a few of them will leave that day knowing there’s still stuff waiting to be found, right in their own backyard.
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