Hint on hidden creature

Hi!
Sorry I'm just getting around to this - a few people have asked me what the 4th creature is in the "Hi Science Classes - Tuesday" post.
Here's a hint - if you look closely, you'll see that the tree seems to have a few extra twigs.
The creature is part of the Order Phasmatodea, if you'd like to find out more about him (or her?).

Last day in New Orleans!

Last night we went to see a band called the New Orleans Jazz Vipers. They were incredible! This is such an amazing city, where the people are friendly, the food and music are amazing, and the scenery is beautiful. What a great place!

One of the musicians had a sticker on his music case that said, "Effect change before change affects you." I'm not sure who or where it came from , but isn't that such a wonderful philosophy? First off, I knew Mr. Mac and Mrs. Green would love the saying because it illustrates the meanings of the words "effect" and "affect" really well, but I love how inspirational it is. Being here and working with Rebecca and Mike and my colleagues, I've seen people who are working hard to do something about the changes that are happening to our environment, while so many others are sitting back and just letting it happen. I hope that I can be one of those people who can "effect change."

Today we went to the lab at Tulane and did as much as we could to catalog and care for our caterpillars. It is often really hard to identify what species we've found using the guidebook, and to learn the names of all the plants we've collected as well. I'm sad because several of our caterpillars have died since we collected them. Some of them have parasitoids, which will come out of the caterpillar later, and some of them were sick for other reasons - bacteria or viruses or fungus. But a lot of them are still doing really well, including some of my favorites. Here are some photos of some of our recent finds:

The Harris' Three - Spot

The Baltimore Bomolocha - you can really see his prolegs in this photo

I have had such an amazing experience over the last week and a half! I've learned so much about science, and research, and the New Orleans area, and about myself. I've met really fun, kind, fabulous teachers, and interesting, brilliant, hard-working researchers. It's been a lot of hard work, but a lot of fun. Tomorrow it's time to go home. I'm really sad to be leaving my new friends, and this wonderful place, but I'm also really excited to get back to school and see my students - and see the great work they've been doing while I've been away.

Challenge:
When I videoconferenced with you folks, I pointed out many of the parts of a caterpillar. Please draw a correct sketch of a caterpillar on paper (it can be a simple one, or one of the ones I showed you guys) and label the following parts:
head, thorax, abdomen, true legs, prolegs, spiracles

Then, please define the following words:
proleg, spiracle, molt, instar, pupate

Here's a great place to find this information:
http://animals.howstuffworks.com/insects/caterpillar1.htm

(And if you have extra time, you can explore the other pages there about caterpillars - clicking the "previous" arrow takes you to a video by Mo Rocca about caterpillars!)

Answers to your Questions

Several of you sent in great questions after Friday's videoconference. Thanks so much! I asked Rebecca Hazen, our caterpillar expert, your questions, and got some fascinating answers.

Q: Which type of caterpillar is it that is recently starting to outbreak?
A: One of the caterpillars that is outbreaking is the Buck Moth caterpillar. Around New Orleans, during the springtime, these caterpillars cover all the oak trees and eat enormous amounts of foliage. They also will drop from the trees and sting people, leaving a painful burn. Here is a webpage showing images of the Buck Moth:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/471

Q: Are any caterpillars fatally poisonous?
A: No, there are no caterpillars she knows of who could kill you with their stings. There may be caterpillars that could be very harmful if you ate them. Rebecca used to do research with a scientist who found that horses in Kentucky would get sick after eating Eastern Tent Caterpillars and pregnant females would lose their babies. The small hairs, called setae, on the outside of the caterpillars, harmed the fetus.

Q: Why do some caterpillars curl up when frightened?
A: The Notodontid caterpillars (the ones who lift their rear ends) curl up like that because their tails are often disguised to look like a creature's head. So that way the predator might attack the caterpillar's tail instead of more vital parts.

Q: Can moths and butterflies get parasitoids after they hatch? If no, why not?
A: Parasitoids choose to lay their eggs on caterpillars because caterpillars are basically fat-making machines. The larval stage (caterpillars) spend their time eating and gaining energy and fat that they will use later. This makes them a good target for parasitoids who want their larvae to have lots of food. Moths and butterflies (adults) don't make good hosts for parasitoids because they don't live for very long after coming out of their chrysalis, and don't eat very much. They move faster and spend their time searching for a mate, so a parasitoid would have trouble finding them to lay eggs on them, and the larvae wouldn't have as much food to eat.

Q: Have scientists ever released parasitoids into the wild to control caterpillar populations?
A: Scientists in Costa Rica have had some success with this in coffee and banana plantations, but the research is still being done to figure out if we can use parasitoids to protect crops in other ways and in other places.

Hi Science Classes - Monday

Hi everyone!
I hope you had a fabulous weekend.

Thanks for your thoughts about Friday's challenge. It turns out that there are beaches of sand only on the inside of meanders because the river flows quickest around the outside of each bend, and erodes away the river bank there. It flows slowest around the inside of each bend, and deposits sand and sediment there. This is something I'd never really seen in action until my time here! This image shows it well:
http://www.mrtyrrell.com/Meander.processes.jpg

We worked really hard this weekend. Today we went out to the Honey Island Swamp and analyzed four plots, which took us the whole day! We were really tired when we finished up but we found some really cool caterpillars.

Here's a picture of Rebecca Hazen (our head scientist) holding a really neat caterpillar I found - the Saddled Prominent. He's really cute - he has these big pink spots on his head that make him look like an alien. In this photo you can see him lifting his tail - it has a forked shape on it that looks like antennae, so if a predator sees him, it might go after his tail instead of the more vital parts of his body.
The area we were in today was much more swampy than where we had been before. It was full of cypress trees. These trees are really cool because they have these spikes called knees that stick up from their roots. The knees are probably to allow the roots to take in some air, and to help anchor the tree in the soil. Here's a photo of cypress knees.
In the plots we've been doing, we have been finding a lot of Chinese Tallow, a plant that is an invasive species in Louisiana. The fact that there's so much of it here really concerns the scientists we're working with here.

Challenge: What is an invasive species and why are they a problem?

A great resource to look at: http://www.nationalatlas.gov/articles/biology/a_invasive.html

p.s. Here's what those spiders I was telling you about look like. There was one hanging right above my part of yesterday's first plot. It made me really nervous!

Video of Banded Tussock Moth

During my colleague Laura's videoconference today, this little guy was really going to town on this leaf. You can't hear it in the video, but we could hear a faint "crunch, crunch, crunch," as he was chewing away.

Have a good weekend!

Hello!

Thank you for your questions and your answers to the last challenge!

For those of you in my classes who were wondering about the food webs project, the idea is that each group member researches 3 or 4 organisms (split them up) and then the whole group makes a poster together at the end. We'll use the poster together in class when I get back. Keep your fact sheets for class as well!

We’ve spent the last few days out in the field looking for caterpillars and taking care of the caterpillars we’ve found already. We keep our caterpillars in the “zoo” on what’s called a “rearing rack.” We took out all the caterpillars we found in the forest, and for each one, used a guide to identify it. We also identified the plants they were eating. We also made sure the caterpillars were healthy by looking for herbivory and frass (caterpillar poop) in the bag.

Here’s a picture of a leaf with herbivory and frass on it.
We’ll keep the caterpillars in their bags to see what happens to them. As they grow, they shed their exoskeleton (called the cuticle) several times. After the 5th time, unless they have a parasitoid, they will pupate, and form a cocoon or chrysalis, and eventually emerge as a butterfly or moth. There has actually been very little research done on caterpillars in the past, so sometimes you don’t know what species you have until it emerges as a moth or butterfly.

We found this adorable little inchworm – a caterpillar from the family Geometridae (isn’t it funny that it’s called an inchworm when it’s got the word “metric” right in it :-)

I also went out in a kayak up the Pearl River to access a more remote area of the forest to do a plot out there. It was just gorgeous out on the river! We went to an area that had been very heavily damaged by Hurricane Gustav. Mike, one of the research assistants on the team, hacked through a bunch of vines with his machete, and we pushed our way through the brush to mark our plot. On the way, we scared 2 water moccasin snakes (they’re poisonous, so I was a little freaked out) in the brush, so we moved forward very carefully. We spent a long time looking, but didn’t find any caterpillars on our plot. It was disappointing, but it shows that when an area is damaged by a storm, the caterpillars move out.

One thing that I noticed as we were floating down the river is that on the inside of each meander, there were piles of sediment (sand and mud), and little beaches, while on the outside of each meander, the forest went right down to the river’s edge like it does in the background of my photo.

Challenge:
Go to this animation:
http://www.cleo.net.uk/resources/displayframe.php?src=309/consultants_resources%2F_files%2Fmeander4.swf

Watch it, and then explain why there would be piles of sand on one side of the river but not on the other.

I'll leave you with this photo I took from my kayak - looking forward to talking with you!!
--Mrs. L-C

Hi Science Classes - Tuesday

How are things back home?

First off, great job with yesterday's challenges!
Here are the answers:
* New Orleans has the mighty Mississippi River to the South and Lake Pontchartrain to the North.
* A meander is a bend in the river
and...
* a parasite doesn't usually kill its host but when a parasitoid's eggs hatch, the larvae kill the host creature.

Today we went out into the Honey Island Swamp for our first caterpillar collecting! We learned some tricks to find caterpillars. One thing to look for is herbivory – partially eaten leaves. Another thing to look for is leaves that are folded in half. A lot of caterpillars fold leaves over, glue the edges shut with silk, and make a little house inside. Here's an example of a blackberry plant that shows herbivory.

I saw lots of signs of herbivory, but didn’t find that many caterpillars. Here’s a picture of one that I did find. Isn’t he (or she) cute? We don’t know exactly what kind of caterpillar it is yet, but it’s in the family Notodontidae. One of the characteristics of this family of caterpillars is they stick their butts up in the air when frightened, just like this little guy is doing.
After learning how to find caterpillars, we marked out plots to study. Rebecca (our fearless leader) measured out tape that is 10 meters long. We then used it to mark a circle in the woods (called a plot) that’s 10 meters in diameter. Here's a picture of our plot. Within our plot, we identified each plant, and estimated how many leaves were on it. It was really frustrating and hard to estimate at first, but it got a lot easier. We also estimated what percentage of the leaves had been eaten by caterpillars or other herbivores. Finally, we collected all the caterpillars we could find in our plot. We put them in plastic bags with enough air and food for awhile, and on the bag we wrote what plant it was found on, the date, where we found it, and what kind of caterpillar we thought it was. My group only found two caterpillars in our plot, so maybe they all were hiding really well.

We saw a lot of other wildlife as well while we were out in the swamp – including a group of 6 or 7 wild boars that ran across the road while we were standing by our van! They looked like smaller, hairier versions of the pigs you’d see at farms near us.

We also saw a bunch of other really neat creatures – but you had to look really carefully to find them. As you can see from the 4 critters below, a lot of them are very well camouflaged!

Hope you guys are having fun! I miss you!

Challenge:

(a quick reminder to my classes - don't forget to put your name - I can't give you credit for a brilliant answer if it doesn't have a name on it!)

1) When we measured out our plot to study, what was the area (in square meters)? What was the circumference?

2) Of the observations we made today, which were qualitative and which were quantitative? List at least 3 of each.

3) What questions do you have for me?