Surprisingly good results are coming from our Malaise trap. Although the weather is not ideal for insects, we trapped over double the amount that was previously captured the day before.
Daily Archives: Tuesday September 20th, 2016
Trap is set … in the Garden??
Up and running here at Highlands School in Edmonton. Had to make some tough choices about where to put the trap … ended up deciding it stood its best chance at staying undisturbed in our vegetable garden area. Hopefully we don’t capture all our pollinating insects.
Trapping insects has begun here in Yellowknife!
Even with below temperatures over the weekend, the weather has warmed up and we are catching insects!
Day 2, Looking Blue
We are so surprised how few bugs we have caught so far! We predict that by the end of this week, the bugs won’t even reach halfway to the “1” on the scale. It was great to see the tent looking undisturbed and sturdy and we hope this keeps up for the rest of the project. Our group also noticed a number of bugs flying near the top of the tent, but not going into the bottle. We hope the number of bugs we catch starts to rapidly increase soon!
-Aaron, Elisa, Renee
Bugs, Bugs, Bugs!
Wow, there are so many bugs! It is so cool how our Malaise trap can gather the bugs in such a scientific way. While we were observing the Malaise trap, we had the opportunity to observe a bug get trapped in the net and fly up to the container. We are ecstatic with how well the trap is working. We already have a catch volume of 0.25. We can’t wait to see what we will trap next!
-Ashlyn, Sarah, Nic
The Trap is Up in La Loche!
The Biology 30 students at Dene High School (formally La Loche Community School) set up their insect trap in our Admin Assistant’s backyard on Friday. It is conveniently located right across the street from the school on the lake shore. We have had some pretty cool and rainy weather, but we are hoping that some insects make their way into the trap! Stay tuned for our week one results on Friday!
Day 1 Challenge
Below is a photo that we took on our way home from school. As you can see way off in the distance, part of the trap fell down in strong winds. Because we are collecting on a nature reserve, the tarp is behind locked gates and we won’t be able to fix it until the next morning.
Now, it’s the next morning and it’s raining. We’re in such a drought that we haven’t had rain in a long, long time and it picked a really bad time to come back. As soon as the reserve management says that we can go in, we bought new stakes to replace the aluminum ones and we’re sure that this will take care of our issue.
Our Blog from Southern California
Our school has been preparing for this project for some time now. We have been working with an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside and a biology professor at Mt. San Jacinto College to learn to use the trap, sort the insects, ID the insects, and collect DNA from the insects since the beginning of the summer. This School Malaise Trap Collection will be one part of a bigger project for us that we hope to publish in a journal eventually.
We started blogging about our adventures on a separate blog site. As the project goes along, we will continue putting detailed blogs on the other site about our overall project and we’ll post updates about this specific part of the project on this blog.
Here is a link to our other blog: http://wcamalaisetrap.blogspot.com/
And here is a photo of our trap set up for this collection:
The trap is up!
Got our trap up last week and we’re catching bugs today!
Day 1: A Bad Start
When we went out to check the Malaise trap this afternoon, we discovered that the back part of the trap had caved in. It was a disappointment because there were few bugs in the ethanol bottle. We managed to fix the back part of the trap and hopefully in the days to come there will be more bugs caught.
-Simon, Justin and Jordan
