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.
The wind and cold are picking up as we sit in the grass writing our blog entry. There is a good amount of bugs in the bottle. We think that there are some male mosquitoes and lots of flies. The tent is being dismantled as we write – we think this experiment was a huge success! – Nadine, Olivia, Mackenzie
Today was windy, cold and cloudy. The trap had to be tied down better. But, what affect does this have on our catch? It is so cool to be part of a big project like this. -Nathan, Logan, Andrew and Cohen
These look like male mosquitos!Logan is checking out the trap!