Month: August 2016

The first part of the week I was busy measuring crayfish. This seemed like it should be a quick task but let me tell you it was not. We collected so many crayfish from week two it was overwhelming. After two days of measuring I was only halfway done.

On Wednesday I went on a field day with Dave downriver of the John Day to Mule Shoe Park and a public access road near Kimberly, OR.  Our goal was to go downriver where the rusty crayfish has been more recently cited indicating that this could be more of an invasive front. We used the same process from the previous collection to capture the crayfish at the two different sites. This time we caught dramatically a lower number. We only caught 14 crayfish. Most of the traps came up empty though all of the caught crayfish where the invasive rusty crayfish. So far we have not caught any native species. I am curious if there is still any native species are left.

Later in the week I decided to take a break from measuring crayfish and finished my week with pinning bees. The bees we were pinning were from week two collection from Boardman.

On Friday Dave showed me the experimental ponds that were set up last year. I have to fill these ponds every week. No experiments will be performed with these but addition of water is necessary to keep the aquatic organism alive for future use. Below is are pictures of these ponds.

  

 

Monday was a relaxing lab day. Lauren taught Keelie and I how to pin bees from last week’s collection. The bees go through quite the beauty regiment. To begin pinning the bees we must wash them and dry them. We do this to remove soap residue that is acquired at capture. To wash the bees we empty the collection bag into a meshed covered glass container filled with clean water and swirl. After they are washed and free of soap, we drain the water out. With the mesh cover over the jar I use a hair dryer to dry the bees.

Once the bees are have forgone their spa day we begin to pin the bees. We keep the bees organized by site and label them with tags. This process is quite time consuming!

The majority of my week was spent measuring morphology of the rusty crayfish captured last week. I measured claw width, length, finger length, palm length, and width. On the body I measured the length and head length.

The pitfalls from Boardman were picked up on Thursday. Picking up pitfall entails removing the containers that where dug into the ground. First you use water and a sieve to rinse the insects and debris of dirt. Once this is complete you put the contents into a whirlpack (fancy plastic bag) with ethanol to preserve all insects. This task can be very messy.

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!

This week was very exciting and tiring. After finishing safety trainings I got to go directly to the field. I went with Sandy Debano to Starky Experimental National Forest outside of La Grande. This was a beautiful place filled with trees and flowers.

Sandy is researching how grazing patterns of animals affect bees. We did this by collecting samples of bees from four different types of pastures that are either grazed by deer, grazed by cattle, grazed by both, or grazed by none. We set out two different set of traps, pan traps and blue vain traps. The pan traps are the three different colored cups in the picture below. These cups are painted florescent blue, yellow, and white to attract bees. Soapy water is used kill the bees. The blue vain traps are also pictured below. The traps concept is the same as the pan traps though are thought to possibly attract different bees.

       

At Starky we also did a floral bloom count to understand percentage of blooming plants and to know what flowers are blooming. This should tell us what bees may be feeding on at the time of capture. There was many beautiful flowers in this area which some of them I learned their scientific name.

After the trip to Starky National Forest the week was filled with literature research and other paper work, as well as a quick tour of HAREC. This literature research consisted of searching on OSU web of science Database on the invasive rusty crayfish. I went back to papers published in 2014. From there I copied the information and the abstract to a word document and organized the papers. Since I will be working with Dave on researching this crayfish this summer having papers to look to will be beneficial.

This week I got to meet one of my awesome co-workers Keelie. I will also be working with Sam who is an intern but she will be starting next month. Needless to say I am excited for this summer.