Crafts with the Stormwater team!

On Saturday, April 25th, our we made Caddisfly Cases with children at the Magical Hill event at the Chapel Hill Community Center.

Caddisflies are insects that live in creeks as larvae. They're important, both as food for fish and also as indicators of good water quality. They can't live in polluted water, so when we find them in our streams, we know the water quality is good.

There are several types that live here in Chapel Hill, and some of them use a sticky silk substance (imagine spider silk combined with double sided tape) to build themselves protective cases out of whatever is around them in the stream. They use pebbles and bits of sticks and anything else they can find.

At Magical Hill, we made the Caddisfly Cases out of colorful construction paper, and everyone got a caddisfly larva on a wooden craft stick to "live" inside the case they made. We decorated the cases with things like spare buttons, puzzle pieces, pom poms, rhinestones, and colorful tissue paper, as if the caddisfly larva had built its case out of what it could find around us.