Tayton Alvis holds a fish for a survey.
Students dive into water studies during environmentally focused internships.
By Audrey Smith ’10
Eloise MacLean’s interest in environmental work initially started with an appreciation for nature. MacLean ‘25 grew up in Pittsboro, North Carolina, playing in the Haw River each summer, and has loved to be outdoors as long as she can remember. During the school year, she spends a lot of time working in campus gardens.
Tayton Alvis ‘25 has a similar story. He began fishing regularly during the COVID-19 pandemic and has since become an avid fisherman, but, in his own words, “It’s not for sport, it’s a way to learn more about the fish.”
Both MacLean and Alvis spent this summer in environmentally focused internships that were funded by the Pavel Molchanov Scholars Program, an endowed internship program at the UNC Institute for the Environment.
‘Swimterning’ for samples
MacLean was an intern, or “swimtern,” at Sound Rivers, a non-profit that provides monitoring and protective services for the Neuse and Tar-Pamlico Rivers. The two rivers provide a significant amount of drinking water for North Carolinians, are habitats for important animals and plants, and are major recreation sites.
As a swimtern, MacLean managed a team of 15-20 volunteers and oversaw water sampling along the upper Neuse River. Her team collected weekly samples from 18 sites in the Raleigh area, stretching from Butner in the northwest to Smithfield in the southeast, plus the Lake Royale area near Spring Hope.
Eloise MacLean (front, right) and colleagues collect samples at a site.
Each week MacLean emailed her volunteers to ensure samples would be collected at each site. If any sites didn’t have volunteer coverage that week, MacLean drove to the site to collect the sample herself. She spent the bulk of each Thursday in the lab processing water samples. MacLean added a packet of E. coli “food” to each sample and then poured the water into a lab tray that was divided into a number of smaller cells. She then placed the trays in an incubator for 24 hours, to test each sample for E. coli.
Every Friday MacLean took the samples out of the incubator and visually inspected each tray. The E. coli “food” turns the bacteria luminescent so that the cells with E. coli glow under a black light. MacLean recorded how many cells within each tray glowed green, and then used standardized tables to calculate the probable amount of E. coli in the water at each site.
MacLean inspects sample trays in the lab.
“I loved the lab work. It was so cool to see the scientific process behind how we classify whether or not water is safe, and how applicable these things are to our lives,” said MacLean.
Sound Rivers used this data to update their website, social media and newsletter and send out text blasts. This information allows North Carolinians to make informed decisions about whether or not to fish, swim or otherwise spend time in the water at each monitored site.
Fishing for knowledge
Alvis also split his days between being on the water and in the lab. As an intern at Mainspring Conservation Trust, he was monitoring streams that flow from the Little Tennessee River. Alvis’ fieldwork mainly consisted of electrofishing excursions to survey fish and insects in the region’s various streams.
Each electrofishing outing required a team of about 10 people, most of whom were volunteers. The team would begin by setting up a seine, a long, bag-like net that gets staked into the stream with lead sinkers at the bottom and floats at the water’s surface. The seine created a selectively permeable wall which covered an area about 20 feet across, blocking fish and other organisms from moving downstream of the sample area, while allowing water to pass freely through the net. Then someone with a battery pack strapped to their back would push a button to send an electrical current through an electrically charged anode pole into a small section of the water. The current carried just enough charge to stun the fish, allowing the team to scoop it out of the water with rubber-handled nets, place it in a 5-gallon bucket and visually survey it before tossing it back into the stream. Stream insects were also collected and visually surveyed during these trips.
Alvis and Jenna Jordan hold backpack shockers during fish sampling at the Cullasaja River.
The team would tally how many of each fish and insect species were observed in the area, inspect them for signs of parasites and evaluate their health. This data gave important insight into the health of ecosystems. For instance, if the team saw a healthy balance of different trophic level species – or animals comprising different levels of the food chain and consuming different food sources – including top predators, that would indicate that a stream is healthy. Observing fish species such as gilt darter, Smoky Dace, and Black Redhorse, that aren’t as tolerant to siltation and nutrient runoff was another indicator of stream health.
Alvis enjoyed the hands-on nature of the fieldwork and learning how to operate the battery shocker for electrofishing. “You wouldn’t believe how closely everyone listened to me when I was holding that battery,” he joked.
Gaining mentors and building networks
Alvis’ supervisor at Mainspring, Bill McLarney, led the fieldwork trips. Now in his early 80s, McLarney was in the water with the team, running the shocker at times, and doing math by hand before the survey data was entered into the computer.
McLarney has created one of the world’s largest fish biomonitoring databases of its kind. For two decades now, he has split his year between Costa Rica, where he founded conservation and sustainable development organization Asociación ANAI, and Macon County, North Carolina, where he directs Mainspring’s biomonitoring survey of the upper Little Tennessee watershed.
“Working with Bill has been a great experience,” said Alvis. “He has been doing this work for 30 years, is working with data collected before I was even born, and knows this area well. I’ve been able to learn so much from him as a colleague and a person.”
Alvis records measurements during his habitat survey at Darnell Creek.
MacLean also gained mentors this summer.
“I haven’t personally known many women who are scientists, but most of the staff at Sound Rivers are women,” said MacLean. “It has been really inspiring to me to connect with these impressive women and see how knowledgeable they are, what important work they’re doing, and how they’ve built really wonderful lives for themselves working as environmentalists.”
Both MacLean and Alvis had the valuable first experience of leading volunteer teams this summer.
“As a college student, I spend most of my time with people my own age, whose lives look pretty similar to mine,” said MacLean. “Working with a mix of people of different ages, backgrounds and beliefs has really benefited me. Even things as simple as learning how to communicate well with older volunteers, who might write emails very differently than my peers, has taught me a lot and felt like good preparation for the future.”
Broadening perspectives
Beyond their day-to-day work, MacLean and Alvis were both able to work on special projects this summer, too. MacLean led a number of trash pick-up days with volunteer groups. She also worked on an educational mailer to residents near Craven County’s Slocum Creek, which has consistently failed water quality tests for high levels of Enterobacteriacea, which is commonly referred to as entero. Entero is a gut bacteria which is closely related to E. coli, but more easily measured in saltwater areas. Over the past three years, sampling has found Slocum Creek to be as much as nine times over the standard limit for entero, and its water has failed quality tests roughly 90% of the time.
MacClean volunteers on trash pick-up day.
“The team concluded that the water issues are being caused by human waste leaking into the stream from outdated septic systems in the nearby Greenfield Mobile Estates community,” said MacLean. “We wanted to educate the community about the health risks of septic system leaks and do so with a lot of care, because it’s not their fault that this is happening in their community, but it is presenting a very real health threat.”
Alvis had the opportunity to work on other research projects, like small mammal surveys, at the Institute for the Environment’s Highlands Field Site, where he lived over the summer. He also made significant progress on his honors thesis, which is being advised by the senior aquatic scientist at Mainspring. He will evaluate abundance trends for the Smoky Dace fish species, plotting the data on a map of the region. He hopes this work can help assess potential conservation needs for the at-risk species.
“I could have gotten the data from previous years and worked on this from a library in Chapel Hill, but I think if you’re going to publish research about an area, you should be in the area to broaden your perspective,” said Alvis. “Living and working here this summer has made my research better, because I’ve been able to notice things while out in the field and recognize, ‘I should explore this more in my research.’”
Being Molchanov Scholars
The Pavel Molchanov Scholars program is a collaboration among the UNC Institute for the Environment and environmentally-focused small businesses, non-profit organizations and government institutions in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. Each year undergraduate students are matched with an environmental internship where they gain hands-on, professional training. Each Molchanov Scholar receives a $5,000 stipend to support their summer experience.
Seven Molchanov scholarships were awarded this year; a total of 24 have been awarded since the program launched in 2019. This summer, in addition to Alvis and MacLean, two scholars served at NC Clean Energy Fund, and one each at NC Conservation Network, Joules Accelerator and Strata.
“The main reason I would recommend applying to be a Molchanov Scholar is because it’s a very personalized program,” said Alvis. “If you just take a class or work over the summer, you probably won’t get this kind of one-on-one experience that is matched to what you want to do.”
Images submitted by students
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