Hola! Elizabeth, Kayla, and Gio here again with an update on our project!
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| Hiking to the rural site at 6:00 AM (hence the long shadows). |
After dusting and re-releasing our flies yesterday morning, we went back to our sites to re-collect. If anyone was skeptical about the dusting technique, you can see that the recaptured flies did really glow underneath the black light!
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| Urban (Green) Recapture under the microscope. |
We stayed up late into the night collecting flies from both sites. We were visited by some of the same critters that visited the moth group, so that kept our energy up as we aspirated and sorted our samples.
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| Kayla with the frog (he was there three nights in row!). |
After having nightmares about losing fly samples, Kayla woke up at 5:23 AM to get back to work this morning, Gio and Elizabeth woke up at 6:00 AM--guess Kayla was just too eager to get back to her fly-killing ways. When we made it to the site, there were so many flies there! We were sucking them up like crazy.
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| Elizabeth sorting one of our samples. |
The grand total for our recapture was 2,548 flies... And we identified and sexed them all! It took us all day (we didn't even take a siesta!)--needless to say my brain is mush, but alas! We must analyze! We will let you know how the sex ratios turn out!
-Kayla, Gio, and Elizabeth
This is outstanding!
ReplyDeleteThrough your blog, I'm learning about flies too.
And your photography is excellent ... especially the early morning shot with the long shadows.