Lep Course, Day 5

18 Aug 2011

Why helloooo, there!

Ummm…wow…I canNOT believe that it is already Thursday!!!  How did this happen?!?!  Time is so fleeting, per usual.

Mercy it’s been a long week, though.

So, remember that time we were supposed to have lectures and such until 2am?  Well, that plan changed a little bit, but not in my favor.  The lectures got moved around and so we were left to collecting circa midnight.  At this point, I decided that I was going to grab a couple hours of sleep and get up at 2am to go hunt down some moths for a couple hours and then head back to bed.  And, that my dear ones is exactly what I did…well, sort of…

I got up at 2am, sans alam clock even!  How that happened, I have no idea.  Anyways, I went off hunting and actually happened across a fair bit of stuff that I hadn’t seen/collected yet, so that was super exciting.  But…haha….here’s where my plan changed…I ended up staying out until 6am.  Yep…6am, folks.  Dedication?  Maybe…probably more insanity  ;)  I was looking super intensely for some of my moths, but, alas, I did not find a single one.  I found a member of one of my outgroups…but no Euchaetes.  Booo….   I was not happy.  Especially when I realized it was 6am and was just going to bed – yeah, breakfast is at 7:30, ha! 

Needless to say, that made yesterday an incredibly long day.  I had to duck out during one of our wetlabs (it was dissecting…I’m solid there, but seeing other techniques would have been nice, nonetheless) to catch a couple hours of sleep.  Even after that I was a total zombie. 

Overall yesterday was a good day – lots of talk about morphology (my favorite!) and all that jazz, so it was fun for me.  It was also nice to have a little bit of a leg up to help out some of the other people here who haven’t done dissections or gone through the morphology all that much yet.  Yay, teaching!

Collecting last night was slow, but OUTSTANDING!!

Y’all, I caught a Euchaetes!!!!!!!!!!!!  Just one, and it’s the only one I’ve seen the entire time I’ve been here (5 days already!), but it’s a Euchaetes!!  Euchaetes zella, to be exact.  It’s one of my favorite species in the genus.  It’s a little more petite than most and has the super distinctive whit darts on the forewings which are a dusty deep chocolatey-almost-black-brown (I know, I need to come up with a more solid color description…it’ll get there), and pale white-cream hindwings.  The abdomen on these critters is gorgeous – it’s a strikingly vivid orange-ish red with the tell-tale-Euchaetes black spots running down the midline and the sides of the abdomen.  Ahhh…I saw that beauty fly up to the sheet and I just about peed my pants!  It is now safely pinned and stored away in my insect box.  The only sad thing about this story is that zella is a species that I have a fair number of representatives of already, but, fresh material is always exciting and it proves, in real time, that my guys are here…it’s just a matter of finding them  :)  I stumbled across a number of other pretty little things last night as well.  So overall, the diversity was up, though the numbers were low.

We all called it a fairly early night and was thrilled to jump in bed at midnight clean and satisfied with a good night of collecting.

Today has been a pretty easy day.  We had a few lectures this morning and then went on a butterfly walk and I was lucky enough to come home with a couple beauties to add to my collection and family representation count (we’re supposed to have a minimum of 25 families in our collections by the end of the course, I’m up to about 18-20, almost there!).  More lectures took up the rest of the day and now it’s just about dinner time (yay, food!!!)  After dinner we are heading out to the desert for collecting and then might close the night at the Rodeo Bar that is near the site we are collecting at.

Here’s to another night of good collecting and finding more Euchaetes!!

Hope all is well in your realms!

‘Til next time,

~MW