Bugs in Birds Hill

Although I am a botanist by training, over the last six years I developed a real passion for insects. It all started when I planted a wildflower garden in my back yard. I would sit on my patio after work, drink iced tea and watch an amazing variety of insects visit my flowers. When I started working here at the Museum I decided to pursue this interest by studying the pollinating insects in one of Manitoba’s rarest ecosystems, the tall-grass prairie.

For the last two weeks I’ve been sitting quietly on a stool in various places in Birds Hill Provincial Park to record the visitation sequences of pollinating insects. My favourite fly (I don’t imagine too many people can say they have one of those) is a little bee fly called Anastoechus. They look like tiny little pussy willows with wings and I think they’re adorable! They feed on the nectar of Western Silvery Aster and other flowers with their long proboscises, and parasitize grasshoppers by laying their own eggs on grasshopper eggs. The bee fly larvae then hatch and eat the grasshopper larvae. Cool! Gross too!

Rob also identified a strange beetle that I had seen on prairie roses. I was doing field work at Living Prairie Museum when I observed male beetles chewing off all the stamens of rose flowers, which I thought was a bit odd. Later on I saw beetles mating on the emasculated flowers. Rob told me it was a “rose-emasculating beetle” (a pretty fitting name), and that the males trimmed the stamens to make a little “love nest” to attract females. So I guess it’s not just humans that use roses to attract mates.

Much less attractive scents -from our point of view at least- get other beetle species in the mood for love, namely the smell of rotting meat. I was hiking along a trail in the park to get to some of my research plots when I saw a congregation of about 20 mating beetles crawling over what looked like part of a carcass. I hypothesized that they were probably interested in laying eggs in or near the meat. A bit of research led me to conclude that they were likely American Carrion Beetles (Necrophila americana). Turns out that if you’re an American Carrion Beetle, carcasses are the equivalent of night clubs; males hang out there and wait for attractive females to show up. Then when the females arrive, they pounce on them so they can’t meet any other guys! Pretty clever!

This week I became a willing donor of bodily fluids to one of the local Hairstreak (Satyrium) butterflies. It landed on my hand while I was monitoring one of my plots and proceeded to lap up my sweat (given the heat this week there was no lack of it), presumably to get the salts. It licked my hand for about 30 minutes and even continued to do so while I walked to my car. I’ve also, in times past, donated salt to the local sweat bees. For this reason I usually pause before slapping something on my limbs lest I accidentally squish a friendly butterfly or bee instead of a mosquito (I’m not too keen on donating blood since I get horrible itchy welts).

The more I learn about insects through my observations of them, the more fascinated I become. Hopefully some of my fascination has now rubbed off on you. Now get off your computer and go look at some bugs!

I didn’t really understand this quote by Socrates until I started working on my Master’s degree. I soon discovered that no matter how much I learned, there was always much more TO learn. Although it is fair to say that scientists find answers, it is just as accurate to say that we discover questions.

Research sounds pretty simple. You start by asking an interesting question about how the world works, and then formulate an idea regarding what the answer will be based on your knowledge of the subject and a literature review (a hypothesis in scientific speak). If you’ve designed your study well, you should soon have an answer to your question. However, the answer you get usually creates additional questions that you hadn’t even thought to ask. Questions that need to be answered before you can publish your research, and send you to “back to the ol’ drawing board” to write yet another grant proposal. Science is kind of like cutting off the head of the mythical hydra: more heads (questions) keep popping up to replace the ones you’ve already dealt with. Ultimately this isn’t a bad thing as it ensures that good science gets done, but sometimes it can make you feel like you’re running on an unstoppable treadmill.

One of things that can greatly affect the interpretation of data is the weather. One manuscript of mine was rejected because the reviewers deemed that only one year of data was insufficient to make any generalizations about pollinator communities. Collecting another year’s worth of data allowed me to demonstrate that insect and plant communities can vary substantially in terms of their abundance from year to year due to differences in the weather. I was fortunate to be able to compare a relatively cool summer (2004) to one that was more typical (2005). In general, it seems to take at least two field seasons (and ideally more) to detect meaningful patterns in nature due to variability in the weather. I’ve learned that a scientist has to build flexibility and redundancy into his/her research plans to obtain at least some good data and take advantage of serendipitous observations.