September 2017 field collection completed

Hello there everyone,

Glad to let you know we, and many beetles, made it well back on September 26th, after completing our final collecting at Dogwood cave and Great Onyx entrance in the morning of Monday September 25th. The probably most notable event of this morning was the collecting of 8 P. hirtus in the twilight zone of Dogwood cave, pretty close to the actual cave opening as the movie in the now complete photo album documents:

 https://photos.app.goo.gl/zBF2w2HoB3Q42otx1 

Next time, we will measure the distance between entrance and P. hirtus sightings. Ideally also ambient light levels.

Dogwood cave also turned out the only place where Kurt Helf's peanut butter traps attracted what they were supposed to attract: P. hirtus.

The last challenge was to transport the animals safely to Detroit despite the unexpectedly day time temperatures close to 90 Fahrenheit. We checked the thermometer in our transportation cooler carefully while on transit.

On Wednesday, Sonya was able to accommodate all the animals in our cold incubators. As a result of this, we now have 5 new P. hirtus population plates. If all of them survived, each plate should have at least 15 animals. Final counts will be possible at the next feeding, in two weeks, once the animals settled down a bit. A lot of them appear to borrow through the sandy soil we collected as well and put them on.

And of course, we have a new species in the house! A first plate with Neaphaenops tellkampfi, which will be treated with flour beetle larvae, which they hopefully accept. And should given previous experiments (Griffith, 1990).

As to experiments, we decided to move 5 P. hirtus from the Dogwood cave twilight zone in to the Drosophila activity monitor under DD to check for possible circadian rhythm entrainment. In addition, their survival or non-survival might inform us whether the previous low survival of animals at DD was caused by a decline in health and robustness of our laboratory cultures. This, we will know soon. Collecting data on the circadian activity of Neaphaenops tellkampfi has to wait for a Trikinetics monitor with larger tube diameters. 10 and 16 mm samples have been sent our way.

 

The research team Katie, Karina, and Sonya in front of Dogwood cave