Service Learning: Night Arthropod Survey
I volunteered for the Night Arthropod Survey that Gwen Shlichta (gwen.bugheart@email.edcc.edu) and Tom Murphy (tmurphy@email.edcc.edu) organized. The collecting trip was about 5 hours, approximately from 7pm until 12am and the goal was to collect moths from the Japanese Gulch Trail in Mukilteo to survey. White sheets were tied up to trees with bright light to attract the moths. At this project I helped carry the equipment back and forth between the collection site and I caught a moth for the survey!
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| Area we passed while looking for a place to set up. |
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| Area surrounding our set up. |
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| Zach attempting to fix one of our lights. |
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| Waiting to some moths to grace us with their presence. |
This experience affected my thoughts on the role of science in society because I had never done anything like it before and it made me appreciate how much time goes into projects like, and this was only 5 hours. To collect a lot of data even more time would be need to be put into the project. Surveys like this are important to the community because gypsy moths for example are an invasive species to Washington due to how much defoliating they can do so quickly because they don’t have any natural predators and their populations can get out of hand if not monitored. What we’ve been talking about it class lately really fits into this. While reflecting on my service learning, I keep think about the three concepts of Ecology that we are focusing on. We know events in the natural world are interconnected, nothing can happen without affecting something else and it makes me wonder about what our presence in the Japanese Gulch could have affected. The area seems popular and we saw quite a few people and there’s a dog park there too, and I wonder if we were further away from all of that if we would have seen more moths or other insects during the night. I imagine a lot of different types of experiments could designed for this: white sheets set up at different distances from busy parts of the trail, closer to the water/further from the water, etc. There are lots of variables to take into account, I think reading about the ecology chapter before doing this would have been beneficial, at least to me!
Ecology is interdisciplinary because so many other areas of study can be used in the experiments and are related to it. While studying the interactions between two organisms you may want to look into their genetics, or if pheromones come into play with their behavior that’s biology. If you’re looking at how eating a certain type of plant effects an insect there’s all kinds of areas of study that could relate to depending on how you narrow down your hypothesis or what you want to observe.
Questions:
- The night of the new moon is the most effective time to do moth surveys and we went a couple days after the new moon: how many more moths would have seen if we had gone earlier?
- Does the fact the Japanese Gulch is open to the public affect the insect population there much?
- Are there other moths like Gypsy Moths that can cause damage in Washington on the same scale?
- How would our data differ from collecting from Big Gulch instead of Japanese Gulch?
Nice post Gretchen, I would have liked to go on this trip but my schedule did not allow me to. How many moths did the whole group catch and what was the purpose of catching them? Are you trying to decrease the population of these invasive gypsy moths?
ReplyDeleteI thought the Big Gulch was the Japanese Gulch, I didn't know they were different. I also had a similar question about whether the people and dogs that visit affect insect population. I also wonder whether if using the mercury light would have attracted more insects/larger sample size.
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