Peaks and Troughs

It has been an exciting few days, with lots of highs and now a few lows. On Friday we saw our first moth emerge, who also needed some rescuing. Unfortunately, the next day we found him dead. This was likely due to the trauma of being stuck and also because his wings never unfurled. 

At the same time we found a second moth had emerged on its own!

 

We found him stuck on his back though and its the reason his wings are somewhat crumpled at the edges. Besides this he was doing well. 

The next day our first female emerged! Which was very thrilling, but again we ran into wing problems and hers never unfurled either. Both she and the above male were found dead the next morning. 

Now, I realise this may all sound a bit doom and gloom but looking at the big picture this is all still brilliant progress. 

1) We didn't think we'd be able to break the diapause and get moths emerging in the lab. We've clearly managed to do this!

2) We have successfully learned how to identify sex of the pupae and also how to establish if a pupae is dead or alive before we even put it in the cabinet (separate post to come on this)

3) We still have 10 pupae in the cabinet which are alive. 4 were placed in at the same time as the three which just emerged so we are expecting them to emerge soon and 6 were just placed in the cabinet yesterday so in perhaps 21-ish days we'll hopefully see them. 

An important part of any experiment when something doesn't go quite right is to think about why, to prevent it happening again in the future. We've had a good hard think about what may have gone wrong with these moths and these are the two best theories we've come up with.

First, the cages may not have been set up right to give them the appropriate space to emerge and unfurl their wings. It is possible they weren't finding enough traction or getting stuck in the pupal box. What have we done to fix this? We have removed the pupal boxes and opted to just place the pupae in piles of soil/sand on the bottom of the cage. We have also covered the entire bottom of the cage with soil/sand to provide any emerging moths with good traction. 

Second, in later stages of development, close to emerging, pupae are quite sensitive to sudden changes in environment. On Thursday afternoon, the day before our first moth emerged, there was a fault on the climate cabinet. It shut down and the temperature dropped from 34C to 21C and the humidity from 75% to 0%. There are usually alarms set on the cabinets but it had accidentally been deactivated by technicians earlier in the week so we only discovered this fault Friday morning. Meaning the pupae spent at least 12 hours in low temperatures with no humidity. We believe, as it was so close to their emerging, that this may have impacted on their hormonal system which controls successful emergence and wing unfurling. What have we done to fix this? The cabinet has been triple, quadruple checked to ensure everything is running well, the alarm as been reset, we have inserted a USB based monitor to track the conditions constantly and we are checking the cabinet more frequently. 

Bottom line, we've learned a lot these last few days and are very excited to see what our next set of pupae will do now that we've ironed out some issues. We are also going to be getting a second set of pupae in from Burkina Faso soon for trail #2. Not to mention we are gearing up for field and lab trials in Burkina Faso at the same time! Stay tuned for more :)