There was an old woman who swallowed a fly..

After a couple of days of blisteringly hot weekend sun, what better way to spend a Monday afternoon than by sampling insects collected from the Plants for Bugs plots!

In a past post, I mentioned that one of our five invertebrate sampling methodologies involves the use of pitfall traps to collect invertebrates active on the ground.  To record those that remain largely on the foliage, we use a Vortis suction sampler.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RHS Senior Entomologist Andy uses a Vortis suction sampler to collect insects on the foliage

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Elephants, donkeys and goldfish

When I was very small (perhaps I should say young as I haven’t grown much since then), my parents and their friends would often liken me to an elephant or a donkey. I wasn’t fat nor was I in possession of a set of protuberant front teeth but instead had a good memory and was very stubborn.

There is a picture of me that my mum keeps in her purse. I’m aged 6, dressed in an awful smock that is adorned with pink and blue snowmen. In the picture, I’m pulling the face my cat does when I’ve put his comedy cat jumper on.  Even now, I recall how tightly the collar pinched my neck and the puff-ball sleeves impeded any normal functioning of my arms. I only wore the dress once and no amount of bribery from my parents would ever make me put it on again.

Over the years, despite my memory becoming less elephantine and more goldfish-like, my stubbornness has remained. This is why, when I mentioned that I was having some difficulty collecting nectar from flowers sampled from Wisley, I was not deterred.

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A bug’s life

Practising nectar sampling using flowers from the garden

 

During the recent spell of gloriously warm weather, my winter wardrobe was hurriedly stashed away in a corner of my cupboard, the summer sandals were dusted off and dinner was only ever a decision between veggie burgers or veggie sausages on the barbeque.

Alas, the warm weather didn’t last and I’ve embarrassingly had to retrieve some woolly, winter essentials a good seven months earlier than planned.

The unseasonably warm weather did, however, mean that there was a flush of new growth and early flowering in the Garden.  Well timed too, as I was due to sample nectar on the Plants for Bugs plots.

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Wedding veil, microcapillary tubes and dry ice

Over the past two years of Plants for Bugs recording, we’ve been sampling all sorts of invertebrates (34, 000 and counting) on our plots – from bees and beetles to spiders and springtails. When the project ends and the results are analysed, we’ll be able to say whether the ‘bugs’ recorded have shown a consistent preference for native or non-native plant assemblages, or whether in fact they’re not too bothered either way…

In order to explain the reasons for any observed preference, we’ve also been recording lots of variables on the plots including numbers of flowers, seed set, vegetation density and canopy cover. But, with a project this big, there’s always more we want to record.

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Using razors for simplicity

It’s weird the things you remember from school.

I remember Occam’s razor: when competing explanations are otherwise equal, the simplest one is often the most likely, until evidence proves it otherwise. I also know that this wise philosophy is often misinterpreted to mean that the simplest solution is often the best.  Also committed to memory are the orders of the first ten elements in the periodic table and of the planets in the Solar system based on their distance from the Sun.  I know that the size of a turning effect or moment is dependent on the size of the force applied and on the perpendicular distance from the pivot, and that it is impossible to fold a piece of paper in half more than 7 times, irrespective of its size or thickness.

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The joys of pitfalls

It’s early morning and it’s cool enough for me to be wearing a good five layers of clothing but not so cold that my car windscreen needs scraping.  So it’s a little odd that I’m lugging a litre bottle of antifreeze around with me.  Stranger still that I’m nowhere near a car- any cars in fact, as I’m walking in a pretty determined fashion through Wisley garden and towards the Plants for Bugs plots.

No need to worry though. I am here for a very good reason.  Today, we’re setting pitfall traps – one of four methods used to regularly sample invertebrates on Plants for Bugs; the RHS research project designed to test whether invertebrate wildlife is at all bothered about the geographic origin of our garden plants.
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Down at the bottom of the garden

A half-eaten box of Roses, a McVitie’s selection box, a dozen Christmas cards and a smattering of Hotel Chocolat chocolates are evidence that Christmas hasn’t quite left our office (yet). So, today, when there are a handful of pink and orange cellophane wrappers littering my desk and I feel the need to walk off one too many strawberry dreams or orange creams (all the best ones are gone), I take a brisk walk in the garden.

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