Each school chooses a site for deploying the sampler. We recommend that teachers contact a power or water treatment plant and arrange to place the devices on their property. That way, plant officials can monitor the sampler during the summer months when school is not in session. Also, we have found that the samplers tend to disappear, due to either vandalism or natural causes, when they are not placed on company property. Every two or three weeks, the students revisit the site and inspect the PVC plates for zebra mussels, which are usually very small and may appear only as bumps.
Some classes bring along a dissecting microscope to aid in onsite identification of mussels.
The students also remove the glass slides from the bottom PVC plate and take them back to school, where they use a microscope to examine them for small mussels and veligers. New glass slides are put in place, and the device is lowered back into the water. The samplers have provided an unexpected, but welcome, additional learning opportunity - at certain times of the year, they may be covered with other organisms, such as mayflies, diving beetles, and caddisflies. We have also found Hydra and Planaria . Students can take these specimens back to lab and identify them with the help of charts.