At the end of this course you will have an BIG ID quiz! If you are suuuuper confident about waterbugs, after you have identified all the bugs we found, you can also have a go at calculating a water quality score for that creek and gathering some actual scientific data!

Download and print this data sheet.

Once you have identified all the bugs in the BIG ID Quiz, you can tick them off on the sheet. Each waterbug will have a number next to its name called a ‘signal’. This number indicates how tolerant each bug is to pollution. The lower the number, the more tolerant  it is.

If you add up all the signals and divide that number by 10 (the amount of waterbugs we found), that is your water quality score! The instructions are also on the data sheet if you get confused.