Into the Swamp

Hi again,

Thanks Ms. DeCelle's class for your answer to my Challenge Question! The animal in the picture is a cryptic frog and the defense mechanism it is using is camouflage. Good Job! Please send me your answers to the challenge questions. I'm anxious to hear what you have to say!

I'm writing this after a very long day of lab work and field work. In the morning, one group of teachers and scientists went out by kayak to collect caterpillars. While they were out, we did "zoo" which means cleaning the frass out of the caterpillar's bags in the lab. We also look at the caterpillars and record important information about them. For example, we write down whether they have pupated (made a chrysalis), died, or show any signs of parasitoids, like larvae on the back of the caterpillar.
Challenge Question: This is the frass we cleaned out of the caterpillar's bags. What is frass?
In the afternoon my group went by kayak to our field site and counted the leaves on all of the different trees in the site. The site is a circle with a diameter of 10 meters. Working with two other teachers, we counted close to 300,000 leaves. Well, actually we estimated the number of leaves.
Challenge Question: What technique do you think we used to estimate the number of leaves?
It's important to identify all of the different kinds of trees and caterpillars because we are studying three levels of the food web.
Challenge Question: What are the three levels of the food web we are studying. (Hint: Look at my blog from yesterday.)

This is what the forest looks like where we are working. We identified 16 species of trees and we're still processing the caterpillars, so we don't know how many different kinds we found. Many of them are new to the researchers so we have to identify them. Sometimes they even find a new species! This is one area of science where new discoveries are being made all of the time.



Here's a caterpillar we found yesterday in the bayou.

Activity: Use this link to learn more about caterpillars to identify these caterpillars. Explore the other caterpillars native to Lousiana.