Hello everybody! My last post was way back in the fall when I joined the ALE lab as a new Masters student. Things have been going great and I now have a project in the works. I am interested in how landscape composition and management practices affect the natural enemies found in vegetable crops, specifically sweet corn and summer squash. I am also sampling for long-legged flies (a type of predatory fly that is rather ubiquitous) to see if they can be a bioindicator group of the natural enemies in agroecosystems.
A long-legged fly (Charles Ray, Auburn University; Bugwood.org):
And now that summer is here, field work is officially under way! I spent last week deploying traps at 16 field sites throughout northeastern Ohio. The three types of traps I am using are pitfall traps (a cup of water in the ground with soapy water to keep the critters from crawling back out):
.... white pan traps (flies are particularly attracted to white):
... and yellow sticky traps (flying insects are attracted to the yellow card and get stuck in the sticky goo on the surface of the card):
These three traps are clustered together at four plots within the crop:
This week I am going around to my sites again to gather the traps up and see what types of insects I caught. Hopefully I got some interesting stuff; I shall keep everyone posted!
