Midge Memos: Buckets of Dead Spiders are Always Impressive

We've been pretty busy doing science and not so much sightseeing the past few days. That and the weather hasn't been all that great - rainy and cold, more like what you'd expect from Iceland. It's gotten in the way of at least one experiment: vacuum sampling. Vacuum sampling is a way to see what arthropods are in our plots. What we do is take a leaf blower that has been modified to work in reverse and suck up everything in a given area. Then we put everything into a canvas bag with a mesh in the middle and a little baggy of ethanol at the bottom. That canvas bag gets hung over a light bulb - the arthropods will crawl away from the hot light, fall off the mesh, and end up preserved in the ethanol. It's a good way to get just the bugs without all of the leaves and dirt that is inevitably sucked up along with them. The only problem is that we have 40 light bulbs, and 150ish plots to sample, and the samples need to hang on the light bulb for 48 hours, and we can only sample on a perfectly dry day. It will probably take a few weeks to get everything done, but luckily we only have to do this once a summer. All the canvas bags hanging on light bulbs actually look quite beautiful, like a lantern festival or something! I didn't have my camera with me for the first round, but I will be sure to get pictures next time.

The drizzly weather means I've been doing a lot of bug counting. The highlight was when a neighbor and his daughter asked me what I was doing and I had a nice full cup of dead arthropods, mostly spiders, to show them. They were suitably impressed/grossed out. Here's some of the stuff I've been looking at - actually, these are the bugs I took pictures of because I couldn't identify them. Hopefully I will get help with that tonight!