Cost Effective Window Trap

This summer the ALE lab is working with the Cleveland Metroparks to study insect communities in some of the park's forests. The Metroparks have established 30 plots in beach maple forests throughout their system where they have completed and intensive inventory of plant diversity and relative abundance. Within each of these plots our lab will determine if the insect fauna is influenced by the quality of the plant community found. We are mainly interested in measuring beneficial insects including predators and parasitoids.

When designing this project I thought about several possible types of traps we could use. The understory in this plots is very open and most plots experience significant deer browse. I decided to use window traps to collect dispersing insects moving though each of the plots. Typically you make a window trap out of Plexiglas and suspend it within a frame. Then you place a pan of water underneath. When the insects hit the Plexiglas they fall into the pan of water. We priced out Plexiglas for 30 2 x 2 foot window traps and the price was too high for our budget. At a local hardware we ended up buying plastic sheeting for $1/foot. This is flexible, slightly heavier than a shower curtain material. We stretched the material between two posts and let the trap collect insects for 1 week. We found that this material worked great. It remained in position for the whole week despite several storms. We collected a diversity of flies, wasps and beetles which is what we hope to collect using the trap. If you need to build a large number of window traps and have limited funds this method may work for you.