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

Lep Course, Day 3

16 Aug 2011

Whew!  What a couple of days this has been!  The half day we had at the station on Sunday was pretty chill (and by pretty I mean extremely…) in comparison to Monday and today.  Heavens, all I want is sleep, but there simply isn’t time for that here.

We start our days bright and early.  Breakfast is at 7:30, so I’ve been getting up around 6 to look over some notes and things and mentally prepare for the bombardment of information that will accost my brain come 8am.  ***I’m going to have to start getting up earlier, though…I’ll need to start going around to the sheets and traps in the eeeearly, daaark mornings to hunt down the moths that don’t come out until later in the night.***  We have been doing a lecture or two in the mornings and then heading out for some good hours of field collecting (3-4hrs has been the norm thus far) outside of the research station grounds.  It’s been a lot of fun to drive even 20min and see an incredible difference in fauna and flora, not to mention terrain.  We eat lunch somewhere in there and then hit the lectures or field again.  Then there’s dinner and then maybe another lecture and, of course, the highlight of our day: major collecting!! 

Since the majority of Lepidoptera are nocturnal moths (though there are a number of diurnal or day-flying moths) the best collecting (unless you are hunting butterflies specifically) is at night at a light.  We use various different bulbs with white sheets set up behind them to help attract our moths…and of course anything else that sees our wondrous orbs and simply can’t stay away  ;)   There actually has been a fair bit of insect diversity which has been a lot of fun for those of us who don’t consider every order outside of Lepidoptera as “trash.”  I’ve seen a fair number of scarab beetles and tons of other beetle, ichneumonid wasps, caddisflies, mantid flies (!!), true flies, stink bugs and other hemiptera, leafhoppers and other homoptera/heteroptera, antlion adults (!!), and much, much more.  And, yes, I have most definitely snagged a few of those lovely specimens  :)  I even got a solifuge (I’ve never seen one alive – I totally let the cutie feed on a couple moths before I tossed it in some EtOH) and held a wicked awesome whip scorpion (this thing was as big as my hand – so sweet!)!!!  It’s been quite the exciting trip even outside of all of the lep awesomeness.  I’ve been able to collect a few members of my subfamily of moth, but none of my actual critters yet…it’s OK, I still have 4 more days after today to snatch some up!

We have been focusing more on caterpillars today which has been great fun – they’re such cuties.  It’s always remarkable to me how these creatures can often times go from a super showy caterpillar to a severely drab moth and vice-versa.  Not to mention the changes various caterpillars go through!  It’s like looking at a completely different animal at each instar (molt) for so many of these guys!  If any of y’all are interested in looking at some way pretty pictures of caterpillars check out Dave Wagner’s Caterpillars of Eastern North America.  It’s an incredible field guide…worth every penny.  And!  I now get to say that I have collected caterpillars with Dave Wagner (living the dream!!!)!!!  I feel super privileged to be able to say that.  He knows so much!  I’ve been blown away.

It’s been an intense day of lectures and collecting…and when I think about what else we have lined up for today I’m realizing that today (even though it’s 5:30pm here) is really just beginning.  After dinner, at 7:30, we go back to the drawing boards and embark on an all-nighter of lectures and collecting.  Meaning, we don’t even have the option of going to bed until 2am.  Yeeeeowzas!  Tomorrow is definitely going to be a loooong day, haha.  It’ll be worth it, but I’m definitely going to need to take a day or two to recover once I get back to the Tundra.  I’ve been crawling into bed between midnight and 1am the last two nights, but that extra hour of brain use pre-shower, pre-bed is going to be rough, y’all.  For knowledge!!  Haha.

Alrighty, kids, I’m off to snag a quick nap so I can study and begin processing the onslaught of info that has been the last 2.5 days before it’s rock’n’roll time again  :)

I’ll keep the updates coming as long as time and the internet allows.

Praying all is well!

Shalom,
~MW

What weekend...?

Happy Sunday, lovely readers.

Praying the Lord has blessed you on His day and that your weekend has been filled to the brim with R&R and maybe some productivity...maybe?  ;)

My weekend has been...looong...but good!

Friday
Friday got off to an early start as I finished my 3rd (and hopefully final) prelim exam for my program.  Once that bad boy was finished it was time to kick it into hyperdrive to finish getting everything ready for BioBlitz which kicked off at 5pm that night.

All of my gear, before heading up to campus to get the

nets, kill jars, etc...  {minus my magazine basket, of course...}

What on earth is BioBlitz?!  

BioBlitz is a 24hr survey of the biodiversity of a given area.  It's something I got involved with at A&M and I was very pleased to discover that SW is one of the big participants here in the Frozen Tundra - win!  Aside from trying to document all the different plants, fungi, birds, toads/lizzards/snakes, insects, mammals, etc...BioBlitz aims to involve the community in discovering and learning about the natural history of the area.  <-- This is one of my favorite parts of BioBlitz - the community outreach.  Love it!

A bunch of us packed up and headed on out to the Katharine Ordway Natural History Study Area (try saying that one 10 times fast!) to get light traps and overnight traps set-up before taking to the woods and fields to try to collect any insects we came across while it was still daylight/dusk.  Sadly, we had a cold front blow through this weekend, and Friday night proved to be pretty poor collecting conditions...the pickins were slim, to say the least.  We DID, however, find a gorgeous mating pair of Spilosoma virginica (a tiger moth - arctiid) and closed the night around 11pm with the capture (With my bare hand! I'd already packed up my gear for the night!) of a handsome male Ctenucha virginica (another type of tiger moth) - such a gorgeous guy.  It was very exciting and made getting drenched while collecting in the rain well worth it  :)

Saturday
Started the day with another early morning and headed back out to the Ordway Area.  We had much more success collecting insects on Saturday than we did on Friday.  This was great, except that we had to spend a good portion of our day collecting so we didn't have as much time to ID and curate...made for a bit of a time crunch as 5pm approached quickly.  STRESS!  And, since I still haven't recovered from the trip to TX (no time to sleep!) my body was fading fast...and I quickly lose nearly all patience when I'm tired...no bueno, friends, no bueno.  Fortunately, Corey the Dynamo was there to help keep me sane  :)

There were a few kiddos who came out and wanted to know lots of things about bugs and wanted to show us all of the insects they had collected.  So great!  There was one little boy who was probably about 4 and he kept bringing me all these little rocks and mosses along with insects...it was so fun.  Another little girl, maybe 8 or 9, brought a lady beetle (ladybug) and a mirid (plant bug) and wanted us to ID them for her.  The bug was one we hadn't collected yet so she let us keep it.  I showed her how we put the insects in our special jars (kill jars...glass jars with plaster paris in the base that is charged with ethyl acetate...basically euthanizes them) that put them to sleep and then they die so that we can put them on pins...if we put them on pins when they are still awake it doesn't feel very nice and their little legs will move all around.  So I walked her through that process and she was so excited to see the art of insect pinning and thought her little bug looked very nice on its new pin, all set to go into the collection.  Before she left she surprised me with the biggest hug...I nearly died.  It was just what I needed - I was starving at that point and wanted nothing more than to go home, eat, shower, and sleep...she granted me a pleasant distraction from ID'ing and pinning at record speeds to teach...and blessed me with a hug.  So precious!

The rest of the day was non-stop pinning and ID'ing and....databasing...my faaaaavorite thing eeeeeever....not.  But, we got it done, with about 105 morphospecies to report!  Which was good, considering the weather conditions!

After cleaning everything up and loading up the cars and trucks and things everyone cleared out and my crew and I embarked on our "roadtrip" back home (OK, so it was only a 30min drive...) so we could drop everything back off at campus and actually go home.  (We found out a little secret about our building, too!! BONUS!)

I ran by the Rainbow and grabbed some essentials...yes, cut flowers are essential from time to time  =)  Popped by RedBox, grabbed True Grit and headed home to settle in for the evening.

Dynamo and CashSmock came over and joined me for the rest of True Grit and Corey had fun riling Jakers up every time he had settled down...he thought it was fun  ;)  Then it was BED TIME.

Sunday
Woke up with quite the migraine that I've been fighting all day...I reckon that's a testament to my exhaustion and need to stop.  If you won't find the time to stop when you need to...your body will force you to stop.  OK, body, OK.  So I took today easy and didn't do much of anything - it was nice and much needed.

Finally decided I should make a real meal of sorts around dinner time...but since I only picked up the bare essentials from Rainbow I had to use my throbbing noggin to figure something out.  So, what did I come up with??

Chickpeas + diced tomatoes + onions + a bunch of spices 

+ a side of rice = quite a tasty dish 

(and pretty good for you, too!)

I tossed my onions in the pan first with some sesame oil, once they went translucent I added in my tomatoes, chickpeas, spices, and covered it in water and set it to boil.  Then I simmered it all until the liquid evaporated off some and thickened some.
For spices I used ground cumin, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, chili powder, ground red pepper, and salt and black pepper.
Spooned some of the chickpea mixture and sauce over a bowl of rice and voila! you have a cheap, easy, tasty (filling!) dinner.

I was hoping that eating something substantial would help kick the headache, but no such luck  :-/  It's starting to dull now, though.

So, my dears, with that, I am going to leave you and am calling it a night.

Blessings upon you as you tackle another Monday!!

Shalom,
~MW

P.S. - GO MAVS!!!