A whole new world, a new fantastic point of view

It has taken about 2.5 months, but at long last, all vacuum sampled and frozen arthropods from Lizzie’s collection have been processed! There are a few minor tasks that I have left to do with them, such as comparing vouchers, but that will most likely be done in a short bit. 

Now, to say that I didn’t recognize the arthropods until more than halfway through the samples is an understatement. I had to re-familiarize myself at each sorting session what the types of arthropod were, and that in itself took a long time to become acquainted with. After many sessions of bug identification frustration, I finally decided that I was going to go and capture these bugs on camera and store them on my laptop when I sort through the rest of the samples. Here are a few pictures of some of the arthropods I caught on camera:

This is a one of a kind bug I found in the samples, though I'm not really sure what it is.

This is one of the many auchenorrhynchas (what a mouthful) that I saw while sorting. What a beauty.

There were many flies in the samples, this one I labeled as 'diptrs' for red stripes.

This one is my favorite since it reminds me of the alien from the movie, 'Aliens'.

I made note to take pictures of them from as many sides as possible, since I couldn’t be sure whether or not if a single picture was enough to help me identify future samples. As it is, I feel like my pictures, which made identifying arthropods much easier later on, are not as clear as they could be since they do not capture all the details on the insect bodies. I would also have trouble with the light on the microscope and in how I centered the camera lens on the microscope lens, since it required multiple minute tweakings of both camera and microscope lenses. I ended up zooming my camera lens to the max and the microscope to 3x the magnification and then centering the camera lens on the microscope lens before I found a middle point where I was satisfied with the quality of the photos.

But doing so did help me match up bugs closely, or at least, better than I did before. Now that Lizzie is back, and brought with her her vouchers of these little guys, I can match up my vouchers with hers and see how to better create a system for identification. Ta da!

Happy Friday everyone, and happy Sun God!

Yay for summer! I mean, um...

For weeks, I've been battling one of the seven sins...sloth. It's almost difficult to bring myself back to work, especially with the nice weather we've been having the past few weeks. However, I've finally been able to pull myself slightly back into a working mode and am now going to present to you a portion of what my ESYS paper will be talking about.

A majority of the data I've gathered for my paper is based off of work that involves bird exclosures experimentation. In the data that I gathered, they were 3 types of shrubs: exclosures, shams, and control shrubs. Another variable of this experiment was whether or not the shrubs were surrounded by low or high grasses. To better illustrate, here is a picture of an A. californica bush that Lizzie did her experiment on at Sweetwater NWR:

This is a low-grass bird exclosure shrub. Cute!

From these shrubs, Lizzie collected samples from the shrub itself and vacuumed arthropods pre- and post-experimental period. These samples are what I have been working with for the past few months (albeit slowly), and although there has not been much analysis done on the data gathered, in terms of herbivory, there is not much difference between the different treatment types (previous blog post). As for the post-experimental period samples gathered, I have noticed while sorting the arthropods that some shrubs would have a high quantity in the vacuumed samples. I'm not sure if this is due to the amount of actual foliage that was vacuumed, as some sample bags had more (or less) in terms of volume, but there should be more information about this answered as soon I'm able to enter in all the data concerning the types of arthropods I've sorted.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? ???

I have many of those, especially questions that starts out with, "What the heck am I writing and how?" In brief (and frequent) moments of confusion, I ask myself that, especially when I'm beginning to carve out my outline and tentative final paper. Like I've said in the past, I find it hard to get started until I sit down and actually force myself to think about the topic at hand...but even then, I find myself at a loss for words. So, in the best possible way, I will try to translate my mumble-jumble of thoughts and ideas and translate them to a semi-understandable and logical way. Here is my still-and-must-be-continually-edited version of an abstract/summary:

There is a top-down control on arthropod communities by bird predation which leads to trophic cascades that affect shrub biomass. In doing bird exclosure experiments, we can determine whether removing these large predators on arthropods will affect the size and quantity of arthropods present on experimental shrubs and if this in turn, affects the amount of plant biomass. We expect there to be differences throughout the three types of experimental shrubs; the control, sham, and exclosed shrubs should contain the least to the most amount of arthropods, respectively. With this expectation, we will try and predict if the following are true: (P1) California sagebrush shrubs in bird exclosures contain higher amounts of larger arthropods (past a certain size), which causes trophic cascades; (P2) there is a higher new to old growth ratio on control shrubs than on shams and exclosures due to higher amounts of arthropod predation by birds. The absence or presence of birds may be used as an indication of how temporal variations of coastal sagebrush habitat are affected by fluctuating seasonal temperatures. It is important to understand how these tertiary consumers will impact trophic scales down to the plant level to see if changes in migratory patterns of these consumers would affect consumer and producer interactions within the community.

As of this moment, I am still trying to further flesh out and rewrite my thoughts and ideas, but for the most part, this may be my writing at its most coherent. The more difficult part of writing this was trying to figure out how I can have my readers understand why they should be interested...I'm still working on trying to find the "Wow!" factor. This is a painstakingly slow work in progress, but in the end, slow and steady wins the race (at least what we're taught to believe in Aesop's fables)? Go brain, think! And go fingers go! Write!