University Daily Kansan, June 26, 1985
Page 13
Straining at gnats aids water pollution studies
By Carol Stephenson
Staff Reporter
It wasn't tales of academic excellence that brought Leslie Ruse to the University of Kansas. Rather, what did bring the biologist from England,England, to KU were bitten midges, commonly known as nognats.
Ruse was one of about 100 people from the United Kingdom to be awarded a traveling fellowship by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. He was the only fellowship recipient this year to come to KU.
"The purpose of the fellowships is to provide the opportunity for all men and women, no matter what their occupation is, to gain knowledge and experience which would make them more effective in their work and in their community," Ruse said last week.
Applicants selected a topic from a list of categories and proposed a project related to their job. Ruse, who works in Cambridge at the water authority, Anglian Water, chose the category of pollution control.
In Cambridge, Ruse had been
monitoring the rivers, checking how industrial pollutants affected them
Historically, Ruse said, people always had turned to chemists to determine the effect of pollutants on rivers. He said the findings of chemists weren't reliable, however, because the chemists hadn't developed any one method for testing the course of the river.
"A chemist takes his sample only once a month," he said. "He's basing his findings on 12 one-liter samples, and is literally a drop in the ocean."
Ruse had heard of a new technique thought to be more accurate than the one used by chemists. So he proposed another research in the United States.
"The study is based upon the idea that any organism living in a freshwater habitat wouldn't be affected by just one section of the river, but by the whole spectrum of the river," Ruse said. "So the idea is to get the living organisms to monitor the river for us."
Ruse said gnats were chosen because of their abundance in every
type of fresh water habitat. Also they were easy to identify because they left their skins on the surface of the water.
"The skins drift no farther than one kilometer from their point of origin," he said. "Also, after two days the skins decompose and sink. So when we find these skins in the river, we know they have arrived there within two days and that they haven't come very far."
Ruse chose to do his research at KU after learning of similar research being done by Leonard Ferrington,
courtesy assistant scientist in entomology.
Ferrington has been working for the Kansas Biological Survey since 1980, studying species of gnats and other them to evaluate the water quality.
Kansas has proved to be a good research site, Ruse said, because it has features similar to East Anglia. East Anglia is the flattest part of England and is heavily agricultural. The rainfall is comparable to that of Kansas, and there are fields, he said.
Italian tour success for KU group
Staff Reporter
By Carol Stephenson Staff Repertoire
The San Fedele, a Renaissance cathedral in Como, Italy, carried musical sounds to the top of its vaulted ceiling. For a seven-member ensemble from the University of Kansas, it was the perfect place for making music.
The KU Collegium Musicum, which performs music from the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods, was one of four groups invited to perform at a musicology conference June 5-14 sponsored by the Antique Musicae Italicae Studios in Como.
Other groups attending were the choir from the Cathedral of Milan, the boys choir from the city of Rho and the central group from Como, all in Italy.
The invitation to perform was a result of a musicology conference in Como that Daniel Politoske, director
of the KU Collegium Musicum and professor of music history, had attended two years ago.
"met some Italian musicologists and began telling them about our Collegeium Musicum and they commented that there were few groups in Italy that performed early music," Politiske said. "They were interested in the group coming to Como, so they sent us an invitation and offered us some funds."
The groups performed in the northern Italy cities of Como, Mozzatte and Castiglione Olana. The program that the KU group presented was titled "Music in the Lombardo-Padana Area of Italy from the Beginning to the Middle of the Seventeenth Century," and consisted of sacred and secular music by Italian composers from 1600 to 1650, said Stephen Anderson, associate professor of rombone.
The tour was sponsored by the Antique Musicae Italicae Studiosi in Italy, and KU's office of academic affairs. The tour includes Fine Arts and department of music.
Politoske said there was only enough money available to take six members.
"I wanted to take a group that could perform a good, varied program," he said. "So in choosing whom to take on the tour, I looked for performers who could do two or three different things such as sing, play the keyboard instruments and percussion instruments."
The group consisted of Politokis, Anderson and five graduate students. Those students were Nancy Elliott-Hodge, Kansas City, Kane; Sue Ostrom, Storm Lake, Iowa; Stephen Parsons, Vienna, W. Va.; Sue Snyder, Topeka; and Randall Wilkins, Calyde.
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