Our mission today was to sample bacterial mats in the caves of DeLeon Spring located in Central Florida’s DeLeon Springs State Park.

The dives began today with Jef Frank and Terrence Tysall navigating the Wekiwa Springs main vent collecting bacteria and water samples, and preliminary exploration. This is the main spring, but remains relatively unexplored due to extremely high flow.

Our sampling site today was Apopka Blue, a sinkhole managed by the City of Apopka. This particular sinkhole is especially unique and important to understand because it is the farthest known upstream location of Rock Springs Run.

The plan for the day was to sample Island Spring, a small submerged spring in the middle of the Wekiva River. Island Spring is a 3rd magnitude spring discharging an average of 5 million gallons of water per day.

Today’s collection site, the Blue (Jug) Hole at Ichetucknee Springs, carried with it some slightly different logistics, so our day started with a walk to the dive site to evaluate water (and dive) conditions, as well as what it was going to take to get all the diving and science gear down to the site - a half mile walk over wooden plank hammock trails and sandy, tree rooted pathways.

Today, the Cambrian Foundation made its way to Rose Sink (an offset sinkhole) which is part of Ichetucknee Springs State Park. After setting up shop and getting the gear ready, the first dive team descended below the surface of duckweed and into the cave. After about an hour under, the dive team surfaced and brought back water, invertebrate, and bacteria samples.

Our team packed up and headed to Gainesville, FL, for an event at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Today, we set up five stations in the central gallery. The five stations were called Gear Up!, Accessing the Dark, Biospeleology, Finding Your Way, and Down Under.

Friday June 25th started the first of a four day sampling and educational extravaganza including three new sampling locations in North Florida. Today, our team entered via the Catfish Hotel, an offset sink that is almost completely covered with a thick matting of the floating aquatic plant duckweed.

All four divers then traversed the cave to retrieve water samples and bacteria samples from each of the remaining five stations. The team of expert divers also established permanent sampling sites within the Deleon Springs cave so that Rima can monitor the changes in bacteria growth over time.

Bundled up and caravanning to the main entrance of Wekiwa Springs State Park just after 9am, we filed into our unloading zone and set up for what was sure to be a long day of sampling and exploration. Our first goal of the day was to grab a set of water and bacteria samples from Wekiwa’s main vent.