7

Analysis of Select Guilds of Insects from an

Anthropogenic Meadow in the Oxbow Meadows Environmental Park,

Columbus, Georgia

George E. Stanton, PhD

Director, Oxbow Meadows ELC

Professor of Biology, Emeritus

Certifi ed Senior Ecologist, ESA

7

Analysis of Insect Guilds

from Grasslands & Woodlands at

Oxbow MeadowsGeorge E. Stanton, PhD

Director, Oxbow Meadows ELC

Professor of Biology, Emeritus

Certifi ed Senior Ecologist, ESA

Challenges

Do any of your students have restrictions such as allergies to bee or wasp stings? What do you do?

What about objections to killing insects?

What about people who don’t want to be hot, wet, dirty, outside?

Air & Plants: the Net

Aerial & sweeping nets

Make your own net

How to use

Work in Pairs

One jar for field collection

If you are in the sun, it’s a field

One jar for woods collection

If you are in the shade, it’s a woodland

Don’t mix them up

Processing Insect Specimens

Processing the insect specimens

Execution: killing jars or cryodeath

Forceps (newbies call them tweezers)

Pins & pinning block

Spreading Board

Display Box

Death by Killing Jar Plaster or paper

Make your own

Ethyl acetate poison

Chloroform

Cryo-Death

Crumpled paper in jar

What will Mom or Roomates say?

Handling Insect Specimens - Forceps

Featherweight forceps

Pinning forceps

Small insect forceps

Insect Preparation

Adds interest to the exercise if students are asked to pin, spread and label their catch

To do this, the project needs to be scheduled for at least two days.

Will skip this for the sake of time management today

We will make piles.

The Classic Collection: Pins

Special pins

Many sizes

Pinning block for uniformity

Quality Control in Pinning

Spreading Boards

Pinning Lepidoptera

Record Scientific Data

Record Scientific Data

Observation Blocks

Collection Display: Amateur Collection

Collection Display: ProfessionalA tiny portion

Now

Let us go to the meadow

Species Stacking

You do not have to know enough biology to identify the insects beyond order.

Apply what I call “Sesame Street Taxonomy” (Which of these things are not like the others)

Variables Independent

Orders

Lepidoptera (butterflies & Moths)

Orthoptera (grasshoppers & crickets)

Other (everything else)

Taxa

Dependent

Density per Unit Effort

Replications

Collectors

Making the Stack

Class selects a specimen and puts it into a box

Everyone else looks at their specimens and if they find similar looking specimens, add them to the box.

Call this collection “Taxon 1” and each team records how many of taxon one they collected.

Repeat for each kind of insect collected.

Complete data sheet in Excel

Unit Effort

Ideal design would be to collect all insects or all of certain taxa from quadrats of the same size.

That is diffi cult to do.

We shall work with the idea of “catch per unit effort.”

The Unit is a fixed time period of collecting by a single collector.

Collectors are replicated.

Collection Display:We can be unconventional

Insect body bar graph

Questions-1 Describe the frequency

distributions of all taxa

Describe the frequency distributions of all taxa within each order

What are the mean/median/mode of each distribution described?

What are the ranges, confidence intervals of each distribution described?

Questions - 2Did we collect significantly

different numbers of specimens fromEach order?Each taxon?

What about the distribution of collections by individual participants?

END

Questions: Before answering questions, we want to decide how to do so in a scientific manner

Is one order more abundant than the other in the sample from the meadow habitat?

Is there a difference in richness within these two orders?

What was the dominant insect taxon sampled? Was there a dominant taxon within each order?

Within which order was the distribution of taxa most equitable?

Was there a difference between the diversity indices of these two orders

What might the members of the Lepidoptera guild have been doing in this habitat?

What might the member of the Orthoptera guild been doing in this habitat?

Which team was the best at "bug catching?" Were some teams better collectors than others?

If there is a difference in collecting success, is that an important variable?

What conclusions can you draw about these two guilds of insects?

How many of these terms do you know?

What is an insect guild?

What is an insect community?

What is an insect population?

What is an insect taxon?

What is an insect order?

What is an anthropogenic field?

What is community (guild) richness?

What is community (guild) evenness?

What is dominance of a taxon?

What is community (guild) diversity?

Great Teachers

Great Teachers

Unique

A bit of a Rebel

Have some ham

Passionate about subject matter

Enjoys discovery and learning

Evaluate what is important; try not to depend too much on test scores

describing distributions by center, spread, and shape

We can do frequency distributions of some of the most abundant taxa (species).  Plot for normal distribution and look at proximities of mean, median and mode.Middle school doesn't discuss the normal distribution but they do look more informally at the shapes of the data.

understand the difference between measures of center and variation

From the above you (staff) should be able to apply whatever measures of centrality and variation that you wish.Sounds good

display data as dot plots, histograms, and box plots

should be all sorts of opportunities here.  Compare different taxa, different taxa from different orders,...we could go further, but that would probably take too much timeGood fit

using measures of center (mean/median) and variability (interquartile range/mean absolute deviation) to describe patterns and interpret in context

I am sure we would generate suitable data, but I am not familiar with those measures of variability---at least not by those namesWe can have the teachers do that based on what they've learned earlier in the week if they have quantitative data

doing random sampling and using data from random samples to draw inferences about a population with an unknown characteristic of interest drawing informal comparative inferences about two populations

We should have multiple populations.  this, of course, depends upon our collecting success....as all of this does.  There were lots of insects today, but we had to work to get them.  Earlier in the day, when they are not so warmed up, we might do better.That's part of what they need to know about data collection and sampling and how factors like that influence results.

investigate patterns of association in bivariate data and construct linear models in linear situations

Would this be something like correlation.  Not sure what this means.  Are bivariate data multivariate data with only two variables? That is what that is--looking at things as a scatter-plot on an x-y axis.  Middle school pretty much just looks informally at whether there is a positive correlation, negattive, or no correlation.  If there is a linear relationship they use some simple methods for finding a best-fit-line