Answers to Your Challenge Questions

Hello Everyone,

Today I spent the day in the "lab" cleaning the bags of the 500 or so caterpillars we've collected.

Some caterpillars are pupating (I'll show you pictures). Other caterpillars have been parasitized and the wasp larvae are starting to come out of the caterpillars. This is one of the things the scientists are really interested in, and I must admit, it's really amazing even though it kills the caterpillar. This is a part of nature, after all, and helps to maintain balance and biodiversity in the ecosystem.

Thank you so much for all of your comments and questions. I'm going to take some time to give you the answers to some of the challenge questions. Then I'll tell you about all of the changes we're seeing with the caterpillars we've collected.

Here are some answers to the challenge questions and some new questions to keep you going.
Many of you guessed that this is the definite tussock moth. This guy's scientific name is Orgyia definita.

This is what the above caterpillar now looks like.

Challenge Question: Do you know what stage of the life cycle this is?

We've found some other caterpillars in the same family, lymantriidae. When scientists classify animals, such as caterpillars, they look for similarities between the two organisms.

Challenge Question: What do you think this caterpillar and the yellow one above have in common?
Click here for help.

This caterpillar hides from predators by looking like, you guessed it! bird poop. This caterpillar is in the papillionidae family. These are the swallow-tailed butterflies.

This is what it looks like today. It's now a pupa. I don't think I'll get to see it emerge as a butterfly. Now that I understand how easy it is to rear caterpillars I'd lilke to try this with my students at Sligo Creek.

You also guessed this one! It's not a caterpillar at all.
This is the cryptic frog. It has camouflage that helps it blend in with this tree trunk.

Here's what it looks like on a different branch.

Here's a video of something really interesting I saw in the lab today.

Challenge Question: Watch the video and tell me what you think this is. Have fun!

Can you say mud?

Happy Earth Day!
I hope all of you are learning a lot about studying caterpillars, doing field research, and the natural history of this area of the country (the Louisiana Bayou). One of the reasons I came on this trip is to be able to share with you how facinating exploring the natural world can be. When I was a kid I spent a lot of time outside, in the woods, on the water, looking at interactions in the natural world. I wanted to be able to show you that there are scientists who dedicate their whole lives to studying the way organisms (living things) interact. Earth Day is a celebration of our incredible living planet!

Thank you all for your comments and quesitons! Most of you took on the challenge of identifying frass. Your ideas were really creative and you all included the correct answer. I'm going to wait until Thursday evening to tell you the answers so that other classes have a chance to respond.

Today I went out with another team of teachers, a graduate student from Tulane University and a naturalist/guide who is helping out the team. We went by Kayak and found a site to collect caterpillars. This picture shows what happened when I stepped out of my kayak. All day as we worked collecting and counting the mud sucked our boots into the ground. There was also an awful smell, which I think comes from decaying vegetation in the mud. I did find a cool caterpillar! It's related to the yellow one I showed you a couple of days ago. I post a picture as soon as my camer is recharged!

This was on the ground at the field site today. It's called a crawdad tower. Do you know what a crawdad is?

Challenge: What is another name for a crawdad? What do you think this is?

Thursday I'll be in the lab and spending my morning video conferencing with students at Sligo Creek. These are some of the things we use to help identify the caterpillars and the plants we bring back from the field.

Challenge: What are some of the tools you see and what do you think we use them for?

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.

Working in the Field

Hi everyone,

Remember in my last post I said that it's important for caterpillars to be able to defend themselves from their predators? Well, here's an example of another kind of animal using a certain kind of defense.

Challenge Question: What is the animal in this photo, and what kind of defense is it using to protect itself from predators? Send me your answers!

Yesterday and today I worked in the field with my team mates and the scientists. We collected caterpillars along with the plants they feed on. This is so they have something to eat while we're rearing them in the lab, and so we know what they were eating when we found them. This all gets recorded in the project data base.
Ready for the Field
Yesterday we went on foot into the Honey Island Swanp. We needed a lot of equipment: a bright vest so hunters won't accidentally shoot us, a collecting bag with plastic bags, sharpie markers, and scissors to cut the plants. We also needed lots of water (it's hot here), bug repellent, and sun screen.

Challenge Question: What do you think we need the machete for?

Today we went by kayak to collect caterpillars along the flooded Pearl River. This was great for me because kayaking is one of my favorite things to do. The field sites are all flooded right now so we can't get there by foot. We saw an incredible owl and heard a piliated woodpecker. This area is called a Tupelo Cypress swamp because these are the two dominant trees here.

What's this caterpillar? Use this link to help you identify the caterpillars in the pictures below.

Okay. Now it's time to have some fun. Check out some of the cool cats we've found so far. Use the link below to help you out. If you're working in the media center you can pull this up on a bunch of computers and see who can figure it out first. For each one, send your answer as a comment and I'll post the answers tomorrow. Good Luck!
Challenge Question: What is this caterpillar trying to look like?

Activity: Use this link to create your own caterpillar. Think about different kinds of defenses that caterpillars use. Print out your caterpillars so I can see them when I get back!

Caterpillars and Climate Change: What's the Connection?

Hi All,

Before I bring you out to join me in the Pearl River Wildlife Mangement Area close to Slidell, Louisiana, where we will be collecting caterpillars, I should probably explain why Dr. Dyer and his graduate students are studying caterpillars here. He is very interested in biodiversity*. For one thing, they want to record the diversity of caterpillars (Lepidoptera- this is the scientific name for the family of butterflies and moths) and parasitoids (in this case wasps-Hymenoptera-and flies-Diptera- who lay their eggs inside the caterpillars or around where they are feeding on a plant). Parasitoids lay their eggs in or near the caterpillar, the eggs hatch, and the larvae eat the caterpillar and kill it. So it's also useful to understand how caterpillars defend themselves against their enemies.

*Biodiversity: bi·o·di·ver·si·ty
(bī'ō-dĭ-vûr'sĭ-tē) n.
1. The number and variety of organisms found within a specified geographic region.
2. The variability among living organisms on the earth, including the variability within and between species and within and between ecosystems.

Challenge Question 1: Can you find Slidell, Louisiana on a map? What bodies of water is it close to?

Caterpillars have many enemies, not just parasites. These baby stink bugs we saw in the field jab their swordlike mouths into the caterpillar and suck out it's insides. What a way to go!

The scientists also want to examine the connection between climate change and the interactions between caterpillars and parasitoids. Some believe that climate change will cause changes in caterpillar populations. Maybe some rare species of butterflies and moths will become extinct, or maybe parasitism will go down and some caterpillar populations will go way up. This could be trouble for the plants caterpillars eat. But one of the main reasons to study caterpillars and their interactions is out of curiosity. Learning about natural history is an important part of understanding the world around us.

Challenge Question 2: What might happen to the caterpillar's host plant (the plant they live on and eat) if the population of caterpillars increases?

Life Cycles

A little background on the life cycles of butterflies and moths will also help you here. Do you all know that caterpillars undergo metamorphosis to become butterflies and moths? Well, before they pupate (form a pupae that will become an adult) they have to grow. They go through several instars (check out this link!). When we collect caterpillars in the field we have to identify which instar they are in. The instar is kind of like their age.

Habitat
One of the places we are looking for caterpillars is called Honey Island Swamp. The habitat here is bottomland hardwood swamp. You find a lot of the same kinds of trees here as we have in Maryland, oak, sweet gum, sycamore, maple. And the caterpillars live on these and other plants like honeysuckle and wild carrots. There are lots of other animals that live in this habitat, too.

Here are a couple we saw today.

Eastern River Cooter. This one was taking in some sun on a log. There are many species of turtles here.

Baby copperhead snake. This one was curled up in the leaves of an oak tree. My colleague reached in to get what she thought was a caterpillar and saw this at the last mintue. She pulled her hand out before the snake knew she was there! The moral of this story is, always use a stick to explore for caterpillars.

Broad-headed skink. We saw many of these amphibians along the path near a wet marshy area. They were quite shy but this one came out for a photo.

In New Orleans

Hi Everyone,

I spent Friday and Saturday in New Orleans, Louisiana. I explored this beautiful old city with the members of my team. They were celebrating the French Quarter Festival with all kinds of music. New Orleans is considered the birthplace of jazz. So we heard lots of brass bands and dixieland jazz at the festival. We also heard a kind of "Cajun" music which comes from from the 18th century songs of the Acadians. These were French speaking people who were expelled form Nova Scotia by the British.




A typical brass band.



These little guys are what's for dinner in New Orleans. Do you know what they are?

We even saw our first caterpillar before we left the city. This one is a buck moth caterpillar. These caterpillars live and feed only on oak trees. We have a lot of oak trees in Maryland. Have you ever seen a caterpillar like this one?

Hi Everyone,

I'll be leaving on Friday for New Orleans. Do you know where that is? Look it up on a map of the United States. What state is it in? Why do you think I'm going there? It has something to do with caterpillars and ecosystems. Check out the bulletin board outside the science lab for more information!

While I'm gone, you will be working with Mrs. Merone and Mrs. Elkins to learn about what I'm doing in the wild areas around New Orleans. I'll be posting pictures, descriptions of my team's fieldwork, and questions for you to think about and answer. You can send your comments to my blog and I'll try to answer your questions. You can also work through the packet I'm attaching here tomorrow. You can print it out and work on it at home with your family, too.

I hope you have fun travelling with me. I'll miss you when I'm gone. I'll have lots of pictures and stories to tell when I return.

Oh, yeah, I'll also be calling some of you with a special computer phone hook-up called Skype. We'll be able to talk about what I'm doing, so do some reading and think of some questions to ask.

Talk to you soon! Ms. Frye