Kayaking for Caterpillars

If you watched the video link from yesterday, you know that we are traveling by kayak to collect caterpillars. We collected from our boats for several hours yesterday. It was beautiful out on the water—a Pileated Woodpecker and Great Egret were swooping down around us, and warblers were calling from the treetops. I quickly had to learn how to navigate around the tupelo and cypress trees in the swirling bayou water and how to stay in one spot long enough to grab the caterpillars off the plant. It was obvious to us that this area is experiencing an outbreak of Forest Tent Caterpillars, which is pretty exciting because it matches the predictions of the research model that Dr. Dyer has been developing.

Some of you have asked what we are doing with the caterpillars once we put them in our zoo. Besides just keeping them alive, and logging in their data, we are also watching for signs of parasitoids. The researchers are looking at TRITROPHIC interactions, studying the relationship between plants, the caterpillars that eat them, and the wasps or flies that parasitize the caterpillars. Dr. Dyer’s research model predicts that high variation in precipitation results in lower parasitoid rates. If there are fewer parasitoids, this means that there may be an outbreak of caterpillars which could lead to more herbivory (plant damage by insects) than usual. His research team was hoping to model variation when Hurricane Katrina hit the New Orleans area, and suddenly they had a natural experiment in the making.

I heard that some of you watched a movie about Katrina in Civics this week and were asking about the status of this area. Some areas around here were not hit very hard at all, like the French Quarter, but some of the low-income housing areas were destroyed, and have not been rebuilt. It was really strange driving by the Six Flags amusement park and the whole thing is still standing, but too damaged to re-open, and too expensive to tear down—it was like a ghost town. We saw all kinds of abandoned boats still mixed in with trash and debris, and there was even a mattress still wedged in the highest tree in the area.

Some people may not care what happens to plants or caterpillars in Louisiana, but hopefully we can take a bigger message away from this study. Climate scientists predict that as global temperatures rise, the intensity and frequency of global storms may increase. CHALLENGE QUESTION: Do you think humans can have a positive impact on the global warming situation? If so, what could we do?

Also, can you please help us identify MYSTERY CATERPILLAR #3? Write its scientific name in your response journal!!! Keep up the awesome comments too. I will post some of my favorites tonight...