Day 3: First Day Collecting in the Field

This was our first full day at SRER. I got up at 6 am and went for a run with Farda, Michelle, and Tong. We ran down the drive that leads up to the center and it was beautiful. The golden mountains warming up around us. The first half of the run was easy and mostly all downhill. The second half of the run was really hard! Not only was it uphill but I kept getting kind of dizzy and having shaky vision. I took a bottle of ice water with me to drink during the run, it wasn't dehydration but rather the altitude that was making me feel so overworked. We are at 4000 feet above sea level here.

After breakfast, the group went into the field and we collected caterpillars for Lee. The first thing we did when we got to the site was layout the 10 meter diameter plot. Then we just started to beat every tree and shrub in the area with our beater sticks or as I like to call them tap rods, and beat-sheets. Check out this video, my friend, Michelle made. She introduces the VIDEO but I am the main star explaining how to collect caterpillars using the supplies I just mentioned above.

As I mention in the video, some of the caterpillars are so small. It takes a very focused eye to spot them. We left the field after about 2 hours and headed back to the station for lunch. On our way back our car talked about what science is. In two words all of the teachers in the car had to describe it. I said, inquiry experimentation. The photographer professor, Doug, who asked the question said, I was the closest, he said science is hypothesis testing. Lee added that the word science means “to know.” Which make sense because to be able to know something you have got to test it out.

After lunch we did some processing of the caterpillars. The first thing Farda and I did was go “shopping.” Pretty much you go out and collect leaves (food) from trees that we know the caterpillars will eat. I got distracted while we were doing this with the night light sheet that was hanging up nearby and was looking at the few species that were still on it in the middle of the day, and I suddenly hear this rustling near my right foot. I look down and see a lizard tearing the wing off a moth. The poor moth, wingless, is trying to crawl away, and I am watching the entire scene breathless, I think I slightly moved my head as a mosquito flew by and the lizard reacted. He grabbed that moth with his jaws and took off out of sight. I didn't even know lizards ate moths until then. I thought moths were mainly bird food.

The processing of caterpillars was an extensive activity. We all sat around a big table. Took caterpillars out of the bags they were in that we collected them in the field, put them into little cups with lids and some of their foliage, then wrote the date, genus type, food type, etc. on the cup. It was really annoying when someone put 1,000 times the foliage mass as compared to the caterpillar’s mass. That make finding a caterpillar the size of an eyelash, in a clump of 100 leaves harder than finding a needle in a haystack. 

Right before dinner, Doctor Wagnor, a prominent taxonomist in the caterpillar world, gave us an interesting talk on some adaptions that caterpillars have developed to help them survive. Did you know some caterpillars look like bird poop to deter birds from wanting to eat them/something that looks like their own poop? Some look like twigs, dead leaves, have the same reflection patterns as pine needles, look like flowers, have pointy spines that can sting a predator, throw their poo, or shoot acid out of their heads. I didn't realize it before today, but Caterpillars are AMAZING!