1) Environmental bulk samples often contain many taxa with biomass differences of several orders of magnitude. This can be problematic in DNA metabarcoding and metagenomic high throughput sequencing approaches, as large specimens contribute disproportionate amounts of DNA template. Thus a few specimens of high biomass will dominate the dataset, potentially leading to smaller specimens remaining undetected. Sorting of samples and balancing the amounts of tissue used per size fraction should improve detection rates, but this approach has not been systematically tested. 2) Here we tested the effects of size sorting on taxa detection using freshwater macroinvertebrates. Kick sampling was performed at two locations of a low-mountain stream in West Germany, specimens were morphologically identified and sorted into small, medium and large size classes (