This was the week of hot field work. I worked with Lauren Smith, a PhD student who is one of my bosses, and Keelie. We went out to Boardman, OR to capture bees and spiders at The Nature Conservancy on Tuesday and Thursday. At this location they have different areas that are either degraded, native, or restored lands. Lauren is doing research for her PhD here to see how these different lands affect pollinators and spiders.
To capture bees we are using pan traps and for the bees, pitfalls. We used pan traps last week as well. These were the blue, yellow, and white cups filled with soapy water. The bees are attracted to the bright cups and mistake them for flowers. They are a common way to capture bees. Pitfalls are exactly how they sound. They are small containers dug into the ground filled with RV antifreeze (nontoxic) to capture spiders that run across the ground. These pits capture other insects as well, though we do not count these in our data. We do collect one other invertebrate from these traps, wind scorpions. Since they are not well research Lauren has included this into her project. Tuesday we set these traps up and then Thursday we collected the pan traps. We will collect the pitfalls next Thursday.
On Wednesday I worked in the field with Dave. Dave’s internship project is focusing on the rusty crayfish. This crayfish is highly invasive and has established in the John Day River. It is thought that schools have introduced the crayfish into the John Day River once school experiments were complete. We went to the supposed introduction site, Clyde Holiday Park on the John Day River. This location is where the density is the highest. We set crayfish traps here baited with raw chicken. The traps are metal shaped like a football with openings on the side. We set eight traps at this site and waited three hours to retrieve. We captured over 70 rusty crayfish at this site. We individually bagged each one then grouped them by trap number.
With these captured crayfish we are looking at their morphology. We are measuring body length and claw size to determine if their morphology varies from an established site like Clyde holiday compared to the invasive front down river.
This was a great week to dive in and learn just how hard field work is. Next week there will be more field work but I am told that this week was the hardest field work!
