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 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.
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.
Today we setup the School Malaise trap for the first time! The setup process was quick and easy, also almost instantly we caught an insect. During the setup we all took notes about the bugs, the trap and the weather. The trap is setup at Morning Star Middle School in the South corner of the field parallel to the fence. By the end of the setup we caught 3 bugs at 21°c with partial clouds. After we came back in we watched a live stream from the University of Guelph in which we learned more about DNA barcoding and got some questions answered. When we returned later in the day with the grade 6 Arts and Technology Program Students to give them a tour of the trap, the bottom of the bottle was covered with captured bugs, some other bugs such as wasp and mosquitos were flying in the bottle not yet caught. We hope that we continue collecting lots of insects and hopefully find an insect not yet DNA Barcoded!
What a great start! Within the first few hours, we have collected over 10 bugs in the trap! We witnessed a bug being lured in the ethanol bottle. Our trap is set up in a good location as it’s not affected too much by the weather. We are excited to see how many bugs will be caught in the next two weeks. -Erika, Carleigh and Jorja
The grade one, two and three students at Oyama Traditional School are ready to start catching bugs. We have found a great spot in the forested area of our school. We are happy to be participating in the Malaise program.
Added the collection bottle this morning! The trap is nestled in between forest (Goldenrods close by) and the Crabapple orchard. Although the nights are cool, it will be interesting to see what gets collected during the warm days.
Today is VERY windy and we had to fix our trap. We had to reposition the stakes and tighten the ropes because the wind was too strong and pushing the trap over.
We put in the ethanol chemicals today after we fixed the trap.
Today was also an exciting day at our school, because we got two exchange students from Colombia! They both have the same first name!! They are not in our grade though, they are in the grade 7/8/9 classroom.
These are our predictions for our insect catch today:
