I'm Cynthia Connolly. I am the Special
Projects Curator for Arlington County, Virginia.
Behind me, you see the Arlington Art Truck.
The Arlington Art Truck is a curated mobile toolbox for artisan residents to engage
the public from April to October in
interactive art projects designed
specifically for Arlington residents. You
will find the truck at farmers markets
and festivals here in Arlington.
The artists and staff are always present
so you can ask them directly about the
project you see,
which could be an interactive sound sculpture
to learning about our native plant species through a watercolor project,
all designed by both the artists and I in a
collaboration to support a message
from a Community Partner, usually an
Arlington County office or non-profit.
This summer, "Greetings From Our
Microbiome!" by Arlington artist Shelly Smith
was moved online as a social media project
where you were able to request postcard packets illustrated, by Shelly,
showing cartouche of biological creatures from five of our waterways in Arlington.
The Office of Sustainability and
Environmental Management
is our Community Partner for this
project, and each postcard contains a tip
on how we can do our part
on a daily basis to protect our waterways.
We hope the Arlington Art Truck might get
out onto the streets in the fall 2020
bringing a special project you can take
home and make yourself,
called "Flight," by artist Greg Stewart.
Find the Arlington Art Truck on Instagram at @arttruckarlington,
or the Arlington Arts Instagram at @Arl_ArtScene,
or check us out at arlingtonarts.org.
Thanks a lot, and here's Shelly Smith!
Hello everybody, welcome to the Science Sketch-Along
I'm Shelly Smith, and I am the summer
2020
June and July Arlington Art Truck artist-in-residence.
Today, we're going to be doing a Science
Sketch-Along
so we'll be looking at images of
microorganisms
I found in water samples throughout
Arlington County
and then sketching them. This is meant to
be informal,
relaxing, and introduce you to some of
the wonderful
microorganisms that live in our
environment.
So make sure to have your favorite art
supplies on hand
and paper, whatever you'd like to use,
and we'll chat a bit as we look at the
really wonderful biodiversity that we
can find in our community and we'll
learn a little bit more about my project.
As I mentioned, my project was originally
going to be part of
events in various locations throughout
Arlington County
in June, July, and a little bit of August,
here at the
Arlington County Fair in 2020.
Due to the pandemic, we've moved
everything into virtual format,
and I'm extremely lucky that my project
lends itself well to home participation.
I'm a citizen scientist and an artist.
My work is based on microscopic life
found in water and soil samples
all around the world.
What I did for my project is I took
water samples from a diverse set
of water sources around Arlington County.
I then looked at those samples under my
microscopes that I have
and made postcards based on the
microscopic life that
I observed in the water samples.
We then produced souvenir postcards,
you can see them on the slide here,
they're both full color as well as black-and-white ones
that you can color for yourself.
Free postcard packs of my artwork are
available through order
by signing up through the Arlington
County website.
At the end of our Science Sketch-Along
today, I will have
a link to the place where you can order
your postcards. You can also check out
Arlington Art social media accounts, like Cynthia mentioned.
so Arlington Art Truck (@ArtTruckArlington) and Arlington Arts (@Arl_ArtScene).
They have links in their biographies
that you can
also go and order postcards today.
All right, excellent. So let's go ahead
and let's get sketching today. So we're going to
have sort of an informal sketching
session there'll be
a warm-up and then we'll have five total
sketching sessions.
This will actually cover the postcard locations.
Each will be about four minutes long. I'll keep time, and I'll have like an alarm on my phone.
I encourage you to be creative.
Be creative with colors, be creative with
materials, and that sort of thing.
This is all about relaxation and learning about our microbiome.
All right so we're going to go ahead and we'll start with a warm up
to get our creative juices flowing.
What we have here is a water flea.
This is a very common multicellular microorganism.
What we'll be doing is we'll draw this for 1 minute, and then 30 seconds, and then 10 seconds.
10 seconds goes by very, very quickly.
What I am going to go ahead and do is I'm going to set the alarm for 1 minute,
and we'll go ahead and we will get started .
All right, so pencils up
All right, so this water flea was
actually found
in Four Mile Run. These are very, very
common microorganisms
A water flea is a small
aquatic crustacean.
They live in a wide variety
of environments.
I've found these little buddies in
extremely hostile conditions, like in
alkali, water sources in highly tannic or acidic water sources.
They're very, very
common, and they're everywhere.
Water fleas are a favorite food of a variety
of larger organisms
including damselflies,
which are a species of larvae.
All right, got a few more seconds here...
[Alarm Rings] All right, so that is your minute!
Okay, excellent, all right. So let's go
ahead and try that same thing for 30 seconds,
so I am going to set the timer for 30 seconds.
So this will be a lot quicker, half the time, so let's go ahead and
get started.
All right, we're starting!
All right, so water fleas are very
sensitive organisms.
They're very sensitive to changes
in chemistry or environment,
so they're really good species to look
at for the health and quality of the water source.
I also love their big lights compound eye.
All right, couple more seconds...
[Alarm Rings] All right, excellent, okay, so that was 30 seconds.
Now we're going to do a really, really quick one.
All right, so let's try it for 10 seconds,
so just gesture drawing, very, very quick!
All right, go ahead and get started.
[Alarm Rings] Oh my gosh, it's already done!
Okay excellent.
That's great, that'll get us warmed up and kind of getting into the concept and idea of doing this.
So, all right, let's go ahead and go forward.
All right, so I'm going to set the timer for 4 minutes.
I'll also move myself down to the bottom
here, so that you can see all the 
different microorganisms
So let me go ahead and set a timer here...
All right, we have 4 minutes!
Okay, so you are now looking at microorganisms found in the Potomac River.
So the Potomac River
technically isn't in Arlington,
Technically, it's all in Washington, DC.
It's all Washington, DC's territory.
That said, the Potomac River is the major
waterway of our area
and it really defines the landscape of
Arlington County.
One of the essential ideas of my project
is to illustrate
a wide variety of waterways and
how they kind of define the natural landscapes here in Arlington.
So I sampled from the Potomac River at various locations,
so I've sampled under Chain Bridge Road,
I sampled at the bottom of Windy Run,
where Windy Run meets the Potomac,
I sampled near
Theodore Roosevelt Island on the Rosalind side
and I sampled all throughout the year because the microbiome actually
drastically changes throughout the year, and I wanted to kind of capture the variety that you
can find in the Potomac River.
On this slide, you're seeing a lot of different microorganisms
Primarily what you're seeing here is diatoms.
Diatoms are hard silica shelled single cell algae.
They're one of my
favorite microorganisms. They're very beautiful.
They are kind of known
as living sculptures,
and you'll be seeing a lot of different
diatoms during the session.
You'll also notice on this slide and, in
future slides, that some things are
labeled "possibly" or "probably" or
they just have like a generic thing that says "diatom" on it
I've done my best to identify the microorganisms, but I want to be as accurate as possible.
If the image quality simply wasn't
good enough for me to make a definitive identification,
I kept things on the generic side.
Also a lot of diatoms
can look very, very similar, so especially
specific species
so if you have any identifications
or guesses while we are doing this session today,
I would love to hear them or put them in the comments for that sort of thing.
I've pretty much only identified what I'm super confident in.
You'll also notice on the slide that diatoms have this sort of yellow color to them.
That is the chemistry, inside the diatom, of the photosynthesizing chemicals.
Diatoms are algae. They photosynthesize just like plants on the land, like trees, and grass, and that sort of thing.
Sometimes diatoms are bright green, some are red, some are blue, and
a lot of them are golden-colored.
So it just really depends on the specific chemistry of the diatom, as well as environmental conditions.
So yeah! You can see that there's a
wide variety of things.
The ciliated protozoan,
I'm not exactly sure which one it is,
but I think that there are just a lot of
different beautiful shapes here.
The one that is up here, that is kind of looking like it has tapered ends, I think that might be a fragilaria.
That's what I've seen others in the samples, so yeah.
All right, almost ready...
[Alarm Rings] All right, that is 4 minutes!
Excellent. Okay, go ahead and kind of 
finish up your sketch.
We'll go ahead and go to the next slide here.
All right, so I'll go ahead and I'll move
myself back up.
I'll be moving around!
All right, so I'm going to go ahead and start the timer again for 4 minutes, so let's go!
All right, so now what you are seeing is microorganisms found in Barcroft Bog.
Barcroft Bog is a really special place. It is what is called a "magnolia bog."
Magnolia Bogs are defined by the
presence of "Magnolia virginiana,"
which is a sweet bay or swamp magnolia
tree. That's the common name of it.
They're native to this part of the world (Arlington, VA).
There are actually less than 24 of these bogs left in the entire world.
They're almost exclusively found in the
Mid-Atlantic region, right here,
most being in DC, Southern Maryland, and
Northern Virginia.
These are particularly prevalent along
kind of the drainage basin in Arlington, VA and Alexandria, VA.
This particular bog is located in a secluded area of Barcroft Park.
There are many plants in Barcroft Bog that are only found in Barcroft Bog.
They are not found anywhere else, aside from similar magnolia bogs,
and are really, really unique to Arlington County.
Barcroft Bog is actually a system of waterways.
It's created from seeps, springs
temporary pools, tiny creeks, and drainage from the surrounding communities.
Waldo McAtee, he was a prolific ecologist who studied habitats,
first described these as white sand and gravel bogs, as part of the U.S. geological survey in the late 1910s.
These areas used to be
very common in Arlington and Alexandria,
but have greatly diminished due to
development, as well as population growth.
Barcroft Bog was actually rediscovered in 2003 by the Arlington...by...um, I forget actually who discovered it specifically,
but the Arlington Parks Department has restored this habitat that we have today.
I believe all of the diatoms that we're seeing here are probably some various species of pillularia.
Although, as I've mentioned before, in the interest of accuracy I've only labeled the ones i'm confident in identifying.
Pinnularia are primarily found in
freshwater environments,
but I found them in saltwater -- tide
pools, in seeps, and springs as well. Just a wide variety.
Pinnularia are some of the most common and widely distributed diatom types
and they even live in soil.
I thought that was very, very cool.
What's really interesting about
pinnularia is that they store energy as fats .
You'll be able to see in further slides pinnularia that have like really big lipid deposits in them.
You can see the sort of bubbles in their
shells sometimes and those are stored fats.
The diatom in the, right here, so like in this area and kind of the upper-right of the screen
has like the little globules in it, and I think that's like a really good example of showing how the fats are stored.
So, there are a lot of different pinnularia types found in this bog.
Of all of my sampling locations,
Barcroft Bog was the most consistent over time.
I wonder if it's because of how unique the ecosystem is or if there are other factors.
All right, we're almost ready
[Alarm Rings] All right, that's 4 minutes
Okay, go ahead and finish up
your sketch. We'll go ahead and we'll go to the next sketch.
All right, I'm gonna go ahead and start the timer for 4 minutes. Here we go.
All right, so what you are seeing is you are seeing Carlin Springs.
So Carlin Springs is a very interesting place. It's a natural freshwater spring so it's actually a series of springs.
When you visit, you'll easily see what is called the "improved spring."
So you can see the structure in the lower left-hand corner here, that is the improved spring.
It has the structure built over it, but
there are several smaller springs around the site as well,
so you'll see just water kind of trickling
out of the rocks in that area.
This particular location is pretty easy to spot because it has a historical marker, first of all,
and it also has vegetation that's very
different than the shores along Four Mile Run and other places.
So Carlin Springs has had evidence of
use and habitation for a very long time, hundreds of years.
Arlington County has several natural spring sites that still exist today.
Many of them have long historical usage associated with them, such as the first peoples or homesteads of the first settlers in the area.
Carlin Springs, in particular, used to be a rather extensive resort. So it was a big, big resort.
It had a dance hall. It had a restaurant. it had a swimming hole.
It had an ice cream parlor. It had a pavilion.
It also had a train line from neighboring communities that ran directly there.
So it was kind of this fancy resort space.
As we all know, DC summers are notoriously hot and humid.
We're in the middle of one right now.
And Arlington, especially before it was extensively developed, had provided locations
for folks in Alexandria to escape the low-lying areas and the heat associated there.
There's a road called Vacation Lane here
in Arlington,
and it's in the sort of Cherrydale-Donaldson Run neighborhood
and it kind of speaks to the history of
folks using Arlington as an escape from
 other locations.
So this slide is a little bit different than the other ones that you'll see
because there are no diatoms on this one.
What I'm showing you here is a
variety of other types of microorganisms.
Carlin Springs changes a lot over the
seasons depending on light source as well as temperature.
So there was a lot of different things depending on when I sampled.
There's an arcella. That's in the upper-left corner, and this is actually an amoeba.
These types of amoeba have hard shells
made of chitin,
just like shrimp and crabs. The shell
protects the soft amoeba inside
and it provides a little bit of resistance to drought or like wet-dry conditions.
You're also seeing -- I'll move my thing here --
so you're also seeing a
cyclopoida, which is (I hope I said that right) a copepods.
Copepods are tiny crustaceans,
and they're found in all kinds of
varieties of water sources.
They are a major link in the food chain
and are a food source for all kinds of organisms,
including lots and lots of
fish.
You're also seeing a couple kinds of ciliateds on the right side of the screen.
The one that's sort of bell shaped is called
a vorticella.
So, it uses its cilia, or its, like,
finger structures, to filter and look for food.
[Alarm Rings] All right, that is 4 minutes.
So go ahead and finish up your drawing,
and we'll go ahead and we
will go to the next one.
All right, so I will put myself
in a place here.
Okay. All right, I'm gonna go ahead and start our session.
Okay, starting now.
All right, so what you are viewing now is Bluemont Cattail Pond.
Bluemont Cattail Pond is located in Bluemont Park
and is along the Washington and Old Dominion (W&OD) bike and walking trail.
It's a very small wetland area,
and it represents a very important and often overlooked
water source,
which is called a "vernal pool."
Sometimes they're called "ephemeral pools."
Vernal pools get their name from "vernal" (spring)
because they have a tendency to form or really get larger and more apparent during the spring rains.
They're temporary or largely changeable ponds and wetland areas.
These type of pools go through
a wet-and-dry cycle,
and some of them often completely disappear during dry spells and droughts.
Vernal pools are generally defined
 by the absence of fish,
so they don't have fish in them, which
makes them really ideal habitats for
frogs, salamanders, amphibians, or things
that are are preyed upon by fish.
So Bluemont Cattail Pond, as far as I have
observed, never completely dries up, but it does experience cycles of drier and wetter periods.
If you've ever biked or jogged or walked by this area you know that it's extremely loud because of all the frogs,
especially in spring when the frogs are mating,
so there are tons and tons and tons of frogs and salamanders in this particular location.
So, this kind of wetland area that
has like a sort of cyclical nature to it
is very common to Arlington County.
These types of tiny wetland areas used to be extremely common
in the sort of Potomac / Four Mile Run flood plain area,
so Arlington County, Alexandria, and much of the adjacent Washington, DC area used to be
environments just like this. So what's
really exciting about Bluemont Cattail Pond
is that there's a wide variety of
microorganisms that it supports.
This is probably the location that had
the most variety that I sampled from, just throughout the year.
You can see where I am here in this square -- this is a more traditional amoeba,
so this is what we really think of when we
think of an amoeba, as like a big blob that kind of goes around.
It's a soft-bodied creeper,
and what it does is it usually surrounds its prey
and basically just absorbs it into its body.
In this image you can see that
there's like a little green dot.
I believe that's probably
a chlorella, and it's probably attempting
to absorb that chlorella to eat it.
So, you can also see another pinnularia on
here, and this you can really see
the big bubbles of fats that are stored in its body.
You're also seeing on this slide a
variety of desmits,
that's a particular type of microscopic algae,
closteriums, and cosmeriums.
I will chat a little bit more about desmids in our next slide.
All right... it's almost time
[Alarm Rings] All right, that's our 4 minutes.
So go ahead and finish up with your sketching here.
I'll go ahead and go to the next slide.
This will be hard for me to put myself
in a place where I am unobtrusive.
All right, so here I am now.
Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and
start our timer,
and, just so that you know, this will be our last full sketch of our session today, so we'll start.
Okay, so we're looking at
Four Mile Run.
So, Four Mile Run is one of our major waterways here in Arlington.
It''s a stream that begins with our neighbors in Fairfax County,
and ends with our neighbors in Alexandria.
And it flows as a tributary to the Potomac River.
It's actually not 4 miles, it's about 9.35 miles in total.
There are some various historical explanations for this naming,
but I think that this reminds me a lot of
the kind of speculative ideas around like
"How did [the town of] Chicken, Alaska
get its name?"
and the story is that they wanted to
name it "Ptarmigin," which is the state bird of Alaska,
but no one knew how to spell that. So they just decided to settle on Chicken.
So who knows?
There are probably multiple explanations for why Four Mile Run is named what it is.
So, Four Mile Run is a very, very important waterway
and it was once the site of several mills and historic locations, homesteads,
and now it's one of our popular
trail system sites.
So -- excuse me -- the W&OD trail kind of just immediately follows a lot of Four Mile Run.
It provides critical habitat and drainage
for our community as well.
So, what I did is I took several samples
along Four Mile Run,
from where it kind of begins
at Benjamin Banneker Park, to where it kind of exits the county in Shirlington.
What struck me is that there's not only a big diversity in the ecosystem of Four Mile Run,
but also how different the stream could be depending on the location.
So, sometimes it's very, very small,
very shallow,
and sometimes it's quite large and deep.
So what you're seeing on this slide is a really wide variety of closterium.
They're roughly kind of moon-shaped.
They're so beautiful.
And they're part of the desmid order,
as I had said previously.
Desmids are primarily found in
freshwater, but they can be found elsewhere.
What's really fascinating is that we know from the study of these single-celled algae
that they are related to land plants,
so they're related to the things that now live on land.
So these are the ancient ancestors of
things like grasses and bushes and trees
and all different kinds of plants that
now live on the land with us.
So we also have stentors.
Stentors are trumpet-shaped single-celled organisms that filter feed.
They can actually be up to 2 mm long, and they're amongst the largest single-celled organisms available on Earth.
So you can sometimes see a stentor with your naked eye or with a magnifying glass,
which I think is pretty cool.
Stentors will occasionally secrete a
shell
it's called a "lorica" (I believe that's
how you say it ) and you can see that clearly here.
We also have a possible heliozoan.
These are known as "sun-animalcules," which I think is a cute name for them.
That is just a general term for things that are shaped kind of sunshine-like
Although what we now know as heliozoans are actually a very wide variety of organisms
that aren't very well-related to each other.
All right, so we are almost done
with our sketch here.
[Alarm Rings] All right, that is 4 minutes.
Okay! Excellent.
All right, so I will go ahead and move myself up here to
my location.
Thank you for joining us for scientific
sketching today.
There's also some resources i wanted
to provide you if you wanted to get involved
or wanted to know more about scientific art, citizen science, that kind of thing.
All right, so first of all, Arlington County has some wonderful programs that you can be a part of.
Arlington has a stream monitoring program,
as well as stream cleanups,
and a Virginia Master Naturalist Program.
These are all volunteer programs.
I have actually been a stream monitor,
and it's a lot of fun.
We do macroinvertebrate counts, so that means you can, actually...
macroinvertebrates are things you can
actually see with your eyes
as well as E. coli testing for the
various waterways,
and salinity testing in the winter.
So I highly recommend getting involved,
checking it out, adopting a stream, doing
stream cleanup
all those kinds of cool things.
All right and, as I mentioned, I'll go ahead
and move myself down here,
you can also color your own postcards! So
you can order postcards from my project
and color them yourself. Each one of them
has an environmental message on the back
that encourages folks to do some really
good practices that can protect our waterways
So here, without further ado, is how you order your free postcard pack.
So, this is while supplies last.
We've had hundreds of orders so far, so I encourage you to go
and order yours, if you want them, as soon as possible.
And these links are also available on the Arlington Art Truck website,
as well as the Arlington Arts social media accounts.
and Arlington Art Truck
Instagram.
I am on instagram as well at @studiocornix.
I would love to see
your sketches from today.
I would love to hear from you to see if
you thought,
had a particular thought about what an identification might be,
and we would just love to see what
you're doing and how you sketched during the session.
So please reach out to us, tag us, let us know what kind of, like, what you've done
and show your sketches,
share your sketches.
All right so that is all I have for you today.
so I'll go ahead and I'll go back, and I'll leave this up
so that you can just observe it here.
All right, so I thank you so much for joining me today for my Science Sketch-Along.
I appreciate it.
I hope that you enjoyed learning a little bit more about the microorganisms found in our community.
It's always good to remember that
microorganisms are very sensitive to
changes in the environment,
and they can tell us a lot about what
might be going right or going wrong 
with our environment.
Also, those microorganisms like it,
particularly like microalgae
are responsible for about 50%
of the Earth's atmospheric oxygen,
so we also owe a lot to our microorganisms for
helping us breathe,
helping our environment stay healthy.
All right, well, thank you so much everybody,
and I hope you have a good
rest of your day and a great time
at the virtual Arlington County Fair.
