Another drizzly, cloudy, cold day.
We spent the day inside counting our samples from yesterday's field work. The infall cups for flying insects are easy - it's mostly just the two kinds of midges, big and small, and a few kinds of flies. Pitfall cups for walking things are more difficult, since you've got to identify spiders, mites, beetles, "true" insects, scale bugs, and a few stray midges and flies that fell in, as well as pinpointing the type of spider, mite, beetle, etc. The first cup takes a very long time and involves a lot of calling a grad student over to make sure you've got a crab spider and not a wolf spider, or if that tiny thing is a leafhopper or an aphid. But after awhile you get the hang of it. I'm getting more and more desensitized to spiders, although the dead ones don't scare me as much, even if they do look nasty under a microscope. The idea of this experiment is to measure the biodiversity of a location and see if it correlates in any way to the midge count.
In other news, I figured now was the time to get an Icelandic sweater! I got it at the handmade, local craft goods store in town. It's a gorgeous hand-knit piece, and it is very warm! Perfect for dreary days like today.
We spent the day inside counting our samples from yesterday's field work. The infall cups for flying insects are easy - it's mostly just the two kinds of midges, big and small, and a few kinds of flies. Pitfall cups for walking things are more difficult, since you've got to identify spiders, mites, beetles, "true" insects, scale bugs, and a few stray midges and flies that fell in, as well as pinpointing the type of spider, mite, beetle, etc. The first cup takes a very long time and involves a lot of calling a grad student over to make sure you've got a crab spider and not a wolf spider, or if that tiny thing is a leafhopper or an aphid. But after awhile you get the hang of it. I'm getting more and more desensitized to spiders, although the dead ones don't scare me as much, even if they do look nasty under a microscope. The idea of this experiment is to measure the biodiversity of a location and see if it correlates in any way to the midge count.
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