The collections bottles are sealed and back in their box, the trap itself is a sodden mass (currently drying in my classroom over the weekend), our class has said goodbye to the Malaise Trap, and we wish good luck to the scientists who now have quite a job to wade through all the specimens that start arriving back at the Mothership next week!
You can see in our pictures that one local arachnid was super happy to set up camp in the Malaise Trap. She looked very happy in there, but we encouraged her to complete the rest of her life cycle elsewhere.
My students pass along congratulations to all the schools, and a big thank you to the organizers for giving us the opportunity to take part in a cool experiment!
It’s Mr. Drew’s 5/4 class again. We are sad to announce that our collection is over. We had a great two weeks watching our collection bottles gradually fill up with all sorts of flying insects.
We managed to catch quite a few! We caught a lot more than some of us thought we would. At the same time though, some of us estimated we would be catching thousands of insects and we did not quite achieve that.
We did properly predict many of the types of insects we ended up catching. We caught what we think are some wasps, bees, mosquitoes, and many types of flies, though we are not sure what kind.
Overall it was very interesting and we are glad we got to be a part of such awesome research.
It’s hard to believe that collection time is over! It has gone so quickly. We’ve had a second sunny and warm week for our final collection. Maybe it’s a good thing that the collection has ended though – the snow is supposed to fly tonight. Looks like we’ve collected some pretty interesting specimens – and some different ones compared to week 1.
Now we await results! Excited to see what species we trapped and if there are any unique species in our collection bottles.
We thought today’s cold, wet weather would scare our bugs away but they found refuge in our trap! It rained yesterday, and today’s high temperature is only 14C, with a low of 3C. There still seems to be plenty of bugs flying around under the flaps of our tent. Although, we do not see a huge variety of bugs in our bottle.
We had the chance to attach a new ethanol bottle to the Malaise trap for a second week of insect collection. Hopefully we’ll do as well or better for variety and numbers of bugs, but cooler temperatures might affect what we catch. Weather conditions today were pretty much 100% cloud cover and light rain. Winds were calm, but both the caution tape and sign were down, suggesting high winds over the weekend. -Sam, Samara and Sawyer
Last week we caught what we believe to be perhaps around 100 insects (some are very tiny!). The weather today is rainy, and the rest of the week looks to have tumultuous weather, but we are hoping to see more bugs out there! The new jar was set up this morning around 8:30am.
Also, just for fun, we saw this super huge Crane Fly last week on our main building!
