Hi! St. Paul’s Collegiate is having a really good go product testing the Malaise Trap. We say that tongue in cheek as our conditions are nearly always very, very windy, and the durability of the trap is well-tested. It holds up well, though the collection bottle is tossed around incessantly. All of that said, there are numerous insects present. We have received many questions from interested staff and students who are not directly involved in the program but have otherwise become so via inquiry. It certainly gets mistaken as a tent with regularity!
Using scientific equipment and contributing to baseline data that drives research is a fundamentally important piece to any young person’s science education. This has certainly hit that mark. Then interest and inquiries will continue into Week 2!
Today is the last day of week 1. It’s amazing that all these different schools are participating in this project. Today is 15 degrees Celsius out. It was raining and was windy. It is important to run the project the same two weeks for all schools so that the season is the same for all schools and the bugs collected can be compared.
The weather in Fort Nelson, BC has been abnormally warm for September – usually we have snow and have dipped below 0 degrees! Students in Mrs Tofflemire’s Biology 11 class are super keen about our new project and always ask to check the trap to see what new insects have found their way into the sample jar. We have captured around 100+ insects this week. Fingers crossed that weather continues to be warm and sunny next week for even more sampling 🙂
Here in Menifee, CA it was blazing hot Monday morning when we put up the Malaise trap but then the clouds came rushing in. By the late afternoon a wind storm had hit and it was blowing our Malaise trap around. It rained through Tuesday and Wednesday and finally cleared up on Thursday. Today it was a pleasant 30C with no wind. We didn’t collect many insects this week, possibly because of the wind and rain, but we did catch a huge moth. I’m looking forward to next week and I hope the weather continues to be nice so that we can catch many more insects then.
Have a nice weekend,
Nick Reeves
Associate Professor of Biological Sciences
Mt. San Jacinto College
Mt. San Jacinto College first week collection bottle – Huge Moth!Mt. San Jacinto College students by our Malaise trap
Although the tent was a bit twisted up from our strong winds, our bug count still increased to an astonishing 95 insects. This amount of insects caught surprises us because of the decline in temperature, we did not expect to catch this many. Our conclusion for week 1 is that bugs are still here even when we think that it’s too cold for them.
Today was another windy, damp day. We have actually caught a fair number of bugs, but they are mostly little bugs and a lot of what look like the same bugs.
We think we recognize flies, maybe mosquitos, what we think are mayflies, and something like fruit flies.
We took a picture of the bugs we collected and looked at it on the SmartBoard. The flies are easy to recognize; the rest are harder to tell!
Our first week started out with a weekend with two days of snow and a down pouring of hail, frost on the ground and a low of -2. Our trap needed a few repairs but we continued with the project. Our aim was to hope the cold weather did not kill all our insects. We made a goal of 1…………. glad to say we got 8 mosquitoes and a small spider. YEAH. Students look forward to our daily checks!
Today, as a group, we went out to the trap to see how many insects had been caught and we checked for any disturbances. We think 120 insects will be caught in the first week. Compared to Monday when we set up the trap, we found that in between Monday and Thursday 50-100 insects have been caught. We think that weather affects the number of specimens caught because in hotter weather conditions, we believe that insects will be drawn to the shade where it is cooler. Under the tree, there is the trap which will catch the insects.
