The Malaise Trap at Elmvale District High School is slowly filling up with bugs. On Wednesday, two mantids were taking advantage of the trap to make their search for food easier. Our class is not sure how many insects that were on their doomed path to the alcohol bottle were consumed by the mantids. However, the mantids themselves seemed to have themselves been added to our catch volume.
It is a beautiful, sunny, warm and windy day. The bugs are half up to the first line. We can’t wait to see the week 1 totals. – EV, JE, MW, TD
Our class (Mr. Stormes’ Class) along with Mrs. Joslin’s Class set up a Malaise trap on Sept 22 in the farmer’s field just outside of Barrie, Ontario. Hopefully after two weeks we will have some new insects. The Malaise trap is designed to trap flying insects and after two weeks we send our results to the BIO lab for research. After a bit we will receive the info of if we discovered any new species. If not, we still get to see what we caught.
How the Malaise trap catches flying insects is simple. The insects will fly threw the trap that looks like a tent and avoid bars that look like obstacles to the insect, then it will go toward the sky and hit screening and go into the collecting bottle. We’re hoping to catch a lot of flying critters.
Onanole school has begun. We had staff from our Neighboring Riding Mtn National Park help us get our trap set up.
Hello #bioSMTP participants,
We hope everyone is having a good first week of insect collecting!
This email is a reminder to remove the collection bottle from Week 1 from the trap by the end of tomorrow (Sept. 25). Be sure to secure the cap back onto to the bottle and store it out of direct sunlight (cool, dark, secure place). Remember to install the bottle for Week 2 on Monday, Sept. 28th (no collecting will take place over the weekend).
ALSO! – At some point tomorrow, don’t forgot to let us know how your collection is coming along. Refer to the tick lines marked along the side of the bottle to give us an estimate as to how many insects you have collected so far as well as how the weather has/will be for your area. If the insects fall below the first tick line, please try to do a rough count of the specimens if possible.
Please feel free to blog about your collection volume in order to share your findings with students from across Canada. You may also tweet/blog pictures of your collection bottle @SMTP_Canada. Comments are enabled on our blog so that you will be able to respond to other school’s posts!
Great work so far & happy collecting!
Sincerely,
The School Malaise Trap Program Team
I saw that there was a big spider in there today. There was also a big black fly. There were a lot of little tiny insects in the trap today. Our trap is in the back corner of our field, near the border fence and the trees. It was a really cold day this morning. But by lunch it was warm! Everyone everyday there are people who come to visit the trap and ask questions.
We had been expecting to find lots of Stinkbugs, considering every classroom in our school seems to have tons of them! So far, though, not a single one has made it into our Malaise trap. Talking with the Grade 5s today, we thought maybe our trap wasn’t cozy and warm enough for them in the shady forest spot we chose.
Today is a beautiful day. It is nice and sunny with a little breeze. Our Malaise Trap has been undisturbed so it is good to know that our location is secure. We have collected about 1 cm of bugs so far. We can see that many of them are ladybugs! We can see ladybugs crawling on the trap as well. -Kiera, Laura, Erika and Abigail
Hi everybody!
This is the class 5/4D at Father Scollen reporting in. Our trap is up and running as planned and we wanted to share our experiences so far.
Last week, before we set up the trap, everyone in our class wrote down five insects that they thought we might catch in our trap. Mr. Drew (our teacher) made a Wordle out of it. The larger words are words that came up the most in our estimates. You can check out the wordle, as it is attached to this post!
On Monday, the students here in our district unfortunately had the day off, as it was a professional development day for teachers. Because of this, our students didn’t get to see Mr. Drew fumble with all the poles and stakes while erecting our Malaise trap. It was a two person job for us, as our grade 3 teacher assisted him (and probably did all the work).
On Tuesday, may of us noticed the trap was set up as we were walking to school. The trap is located near the corner of the school and is visible from the sidewalk many of us take when we are walking to school. It reminded a lot of us of a camping tent. We had an awesome field trip that day in which we got to go to a real life wetland located right here in Calgary. As a result of the field trip though, we didn’t really have the opportunity to go out and look at the trap closely during class hours. Many of us did check it out for a closer look after school though.
Today (Wednesday) we finally were able to go out as a class to examine the trap, see how it works, as well as witness how many bugs we’ve captured in our bottle so far. We were all pleased to see that there is already quite a few creepy crawlies in our collection bottle. We estimated that there may be around 50-100 in there, but it is very difficult to tell.
We will be sure to check out the trap tomorrow around the same time to see how many more specimens have been caught and we’ll be sure to keep you updated.
Father Scollen 5/4D Over and Out!
