Light Trapping and Alligator Grabbing

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited along on an exciting excursion to a little town called Des Allemands, about 45 minutes southwest of New Orleans. My friend Jordan used to work for the insectarium in The Big Easy and had been asked if he wanted to go on an insect collecting trip they were organising. He asked if it was okay to bring a couple of friends and it wasn't a problem, as it's always fun to have company when out collecting. The exciting thing about this particular trip was that we were going light trapping; this is where you set up a mercury vapour lamp beside a big white sheet at sunset, then sit and watch as a great diversity of weird and wonderful bugs accumulate during the next few hours.

For those wondering, the insects are attracted to the very bright light by mistaking it for the moon, which they use to navigate by keeping it at a consistent angle over one wing or the other. As they fly past the much closer lamp, this angle rapidly changes, eventually causing them to spiral ever inwards to the light.

The sheet covered in bugs

This was my second time out light trapping, having done it once before with Lincoln University back home in New Zealand. But here in Louisiana the insects are larger, more colourful, much more diverse, and more exciting due to the dangers of being stung, bitten, or sprayed with some sort of foul-smelling chemical. It was a lot of fun hanging around at the light and collecting whatever insects people were particularly interested in. We also all learnt a lot, thanks to the organizer Zack, who was an encyclopedia, naming many of the insects we saw to genus or species. 

Grabbed this guy right out of the water (photo: E. Baldwin)

As a distraction to the main goal of observing and collecting cool insects, the land owner Gordon was nice enough to take us out in his boat for a tour of the swamp. For 30 minutes we cruised along the bayous, forever reminded of the presence of the many alligators by the red glow of their eyes reflecting the light of our headlamps. Gordon challenged us to pick up a small alligator (1-2 years old) straight out of the water with our bare hands! He taught us that to do this safely you have to grab them right behind the jaws so they can't twist back to bite you. My heart was pounding as I went in for the grab on my alligator, and it almost got me when I grabbed it slightly too far back. Once caught it was easy to hold, and if you turn them upside down they get dizzy, fall asleep, and you can tickle their belly. We also spotted all sorts of other wildlife including creepy spiders, a green tree snake, and a few different frog species. It was a real privilege to hold a baby alligator and get to go on the trip. On top of all that, I also managed to add a number of really cool specimens to my own personal insect collection.

The bounty from the collecting trip; a collection of beetles, moths, bugs, and a mantispid fly