What Happens When Your Students Hunt For Unnamed Algae (And Find It)
The sink in my 7th grade science room was still full of soapy beakers from the day’s lab when Mia and Javi cornered me by the paper towel dispenser last spring. Their jar of pond water had leaked through the bottom of Javi’s backpack, leaving a damp spot on the leg of his jeans, and Mia was tapping a beat-up hand-me-down dissecting scope like it was a vending machine that ate her quarter. “Ms. Henderson, come look,” she said. “None of the algae in our field guide looks like this.”
I’d been teaching middle school science for 12 years, so I’m used to this. Every year, at least three pairs of kids swear they found something that “isn’t in the book.” Most of the time it’s just a clump of dead leaves mixed with common desmids, or a bit of pollen that got stirred into the sample. I dragged my feet a little, wiped soap off my hands, and leaned in to squint through the eyepiece.
It was tiny, maybe a tenth of a millimeter across, perfectly round, covered in short, sharp little spikes like a miniature cactus golf ball. I flipped through our tattered 1998 field guide to freshwater algae of the Midwest, flipped through the iNaturalist observations for our county, and came up empty. We sent a few photos and a drop of preserved sample to the botanist at the state extension office, just for fun, and I didn’t expect to hear anything back. A week later she emailed back: This morphotype hasn’t been recorded for this region, and it doesn’t match any described species currently in the database. Yours could be a new one, no one’s ever named.
Mia and Javi were bouncing off the walls. That weekend they went back to the ditch by the soccer field—you know the one, it’s got a crumpled Capri Sun wrapper stuck in a bush and a broken plastic frisbee half-buried in mud at the edge—and collected three more samples. They started showing up to my room every Friday after school, mapping where the algae popped up, noting how long the water had been standing, the temperature of the water that day. We don’t have a DNA sequencer in my classroom, obviously. We can’t afford the lab work to officially describe it, so it’s just… sitting, on a slide in our closet, unnamed for now.
That’s when I started noticing the shift, not just with Mia and Javi, but with the whole class. Before this, most kids thought “real science” was something that happened in a lab in California, or on TV, done by people with white coats and PhDs. They thought student science projects were just baking soda volcanoes or pre-written experiments that you copy from a packet to get an A. No one told them that 90% of algal species are still undescribed, that most professional biologists don’t have time to survey random suburban ditches, so there are thousands of new species right under our feet, in puddles and empty lots, waiting for someone to just look. The biggest barrier to kids engaging with real science isn’t lack of gear or lack of ability—it’s the belief that discovery is for other people.
I rearranged my curriculum this year, scrapped the old structured science fair that required parents to buy special supplies and often ended with kids copying projects off Pinterest. Now I do a 10-week local micro-hunt project, with three really simple, low-friction rules. First, whatever you study has to be smaller than your thumb, and found within one mile of school or your house. No ordering butterflies online or traveling to a nature reserve an hour away. Kids can do their work on the walk home from school, if they want. Second, you just have to record three things: where you found it, what it looks like, and when you found it. No fancy hypothesis required, no 5-page conclusion mandatory. Third, if you think it’s something that hasn’t been noted here before, we send a photo off to the state biodiversity database or iNaturalist, no exceptions. I don’t brush off small finds anymore. Instead of saying “that’s neat, move on,” I say “Let’s write that down and check what other people have seen.”
A parent emailed me last month worried that her son was spending three weeks just looking at garden snails near his house, not doing “real” work. I told her that’s exactly the point. He ended up finding that a species of snail thought to only live 100 miles south of us is all over the neighborhood playground. It’s not a new species, but it’s new information, and he’s the one who found it. He’s now putting together a map for the local parks department to use in their native plant project.
Mia and Javi’s algae is still unnamed. A lab at the local university said they might be able to sequence a sample for us next year, if they have extra space in one of their runs, but it’s not a guarantee. Even if it never gets an official name, I don’t think it matters much. Javi used to say he was going to be a mechanic after high school, same as his dad. Last week he told me he’s now planning to apply to college for environmental science. Mia started a small Instagram account for our class’s finds, and now other local science classes are sending in their own observations of weird little things they found.
I still keep that first slide with the algae on my desk most days. It’s easy to overcomplicate getting kids excited about learning. We spend so much time talking about test scores and college prep that we forget how small, unplanned moments can shift how a kid sees themselves and the world. Discovery doesn’t require fancy gear or fancy degrees. It just requires someone to stop, look at the ditch by the soccer field, and ask “Wait, what is that?” We still don’t have a name for our little spiky algae. But I know we’ll be looking again this spring, after the rain.
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