Love Bugs

These fancy little insects are known as two-lined spittlebugs (Prosapia bicincta) and belong to the family Cercopidae, commonly called the froghoppers or spittlebugs - those frothy masses of bubbles you sometimes see on plants are probably caused by relatives of these guys. I spotted these two mating on a stem of Phragmites australis in our common garden today. The different colours of their lines really stands out well using the Instagram filters, despite only being taken using my Samsung Galaxy S3.

Life Through A Filter

In my last post, I said the lack of updates is about to come to an end. I've decided to link my Instagram account to the blog in order to create more regular (and shorter) postings. For those not in the know, Instagram is a social media app with the main purpose of sharing photos and short videos with those who follow you, and viewing the photos and videos of those users who you choose to follow. The fun feature which makes Instagram so popular is the ability to edit your photos prior to posting by applying colour filters, contrast, frames, and a other well-designed effects. I started an account on Instagram a few months ago and have since started posting photos a bit more regularly, depicting things from the places I visit, wildlife (mostly insects) I encounter, and experiments I'm working on, to the mundane parts of day-to-day life in Baton Rouge. By linking the two accounts, I'll be more regularly updating the blog with (hopefully) aesthetically pleasing, informative, and interesting photos, and maybe even some videos. Below is a sample of some of the photos I've shared since I signed up for an account to give you an idea of what to expect from future posts. I still intend to write lengthier posts on topics of particular interest, but this new approach will lead to more regular brief updates also.

An experiment recently set up to examine interactions between Phragmites and its soil microbes

A field trip in Jim's boat in a bayou near Lake Pontchartrain 

Hyalopterus pruni aphids on Phragmites

A leaf footed bug (Acanthocephala declivis) in Homochitto State Park, Mississippi

Io moth (Automeris io) caterpillars...

...and the resulting female (top) and male

A banded water snake (Nerodia fasciata) spotted while teaching invasive species ecology at Bluebonnet Swamp

Your daily dose of cuteness from the stray neighbourhood kittens

LSU campus with azaleas in full bloom

Teaching the ecology lab on seed dispersal from four stories up

Scottish band Mogwai came to Baton Rouge and put on a mean show

View down the Hooker Valley from my last trip home - I miss NZ every day

Pavlova I made for my friend's BBQ, another great NZ treat

ESA 2013 in Austin, TX

For people who know me well and spend a lot of time with me, they may be continually frustrated by my fascination with insects. I say this because anytime I happen to spot a small critter flying around me or scurrying along the ground I almost always will stop to take a closer look or try to catch it (unless it is of the stinging or biting variety!). The sheer diversity of species, morphology, functions, and adaptations of insects is something I find intriguing, and is why I can see myself using them as my primary study organisms for the rest of my career.

One of the many display cases in the exhibit hall

This past week I was lucky enough to attend the 2013 Meeting of the Entomological Society of America (a conference of insect geeks in plain speak) in Austin, Texas, with my labmate Ganesh and his wife Sara. The main reason we were there was to give a 10 minute presentation of our research to the wider scientific community, and also to attend the talks of other students or researchers which we found to be of interest. There were many interesting talks which I attended, many of which have given me some excellent ideas which I can apply to my own research. There was also an awesome exhibit hall with many companies and organizations presenting. The highlight which everyone was interested in was the Bioquip stall; this had many spectacularly colourful, bizzare, and huge insect specimens for sale (such as the butterflies pictured above), various insect collection devices, and even live hissing cockroaches, scorpions, and tarantulas for sale. As for my own talk, it went pretty well considering it was my first ever presentation at a conference, and I'm looking forward to trying this again. You can see the presentation I gave below:

It was my first time visiting Austin and only my second time in Texas. It definitely seemed like a fun and busy city. It had a lot of restaurants and bars around downtown but also a lot of green space relatively close to the city centre, which was cool. The layout of the city was nice, with the bridge and road of Constitution Ave lining up perfectly with the huge State Capitol, which then backs onto the University of Texas. The campus itself is sprawling, perhaps even larger than LSU's. The football stadium is definitely larger, holding slightly over 100,000 Texas Longhorn fans. We also visited Mount Bonnell, the Austin Botanic Gardens, and Barton Springs pool. It's really just great to be travelling to new places again after a while, as I haven't done it since Alaska.

Downtown Austin

In the botanic gardens

Texas State Capitol

The University of Texas Football Stadium (capacity: 100,000)

On the way to Austin we made a little detour to visit Ganesh’s friend Arjun in Waco, Texas. The city itself was nothing special, but is home to Baylor University, which we went and toured around the morning after arriving. We then drove a couple of hours north to visit Dinosaur Valley State Park which was really cool. There you can see dinosaur footprints probably belonging to the large herbivore Astrodon, and also tracks of the predatory Acrocanthosaurus, a dinosaur similar in function and ferocity to Tyrannasaurus rex. The prints are estimated to be approximately 110 million years old, which is simply amazing! On top of that the area was beautiful, especially because the leaves of trees are changing colour to the browns and reds of autumn. 

Footprint of Acrocanthosaurus

In Dinosaur Valley State Park

Hidden Herbivores

When thinking about plant-herbivore interactions, it is important to remember that not all damage caused to plants by herbivorous insects is immediately obvious. In fact, the majority of herbivory on plants (and the most damaging) is often caused by insects which cannot immediately be seen. Many types of insects live almost their entire lives inside a plant, emerging only as adults in order to find a mate. This can result in entire food chains (also involving predators and parasites) being enclosed within a single stem, leaf, or root, and can make them particularly interesting to study due to the closed nature of the system.

Ganesh collecting galled stems at the native Rappahannock River site

In Phragmites australis, some internally feeding insects induce growth abnormalities in the stem, known as galls. Symptoms of galls are easily recognisable in the field (once you know what to look for), characterised by shortening and swelling of the stem near its tip, and the death of the top leaf (see below). During our summer research trips we collected around 100 stems per site, from a variety of both native and invasive Phragmites sites throughout the United States. We kept these stems on ice and once back at LSU stored the stems in a freezer to preserve the insects inside them.

Galled stems being readied for dissection by removing leaf sheaths

Stems were prepared for dissection by removing leaf sheaths and were then dissected using a splitting tool by cutting the stem from the bottom to the top, examining its inner space for any kind of insect or arthropod species. All organisms found were grouped into a particular recognisable taxonomic unit (RTU - visually distinct species) for each site and stored in vials of 96% ethanol for preservation. We also recorded on a data sheet exactly what we found in each stem and any other relevant information.

The dissection station

So over the course of this past semester, Randee (one of the undergraduate students working our lab) and I dissected a total of 2025 stems. It was a lot of repetitive work and hours under the microscope. Each type of insect we found would be given a funny name for future identification such as "narrow white guy", "claw worm", "orange pupae", "emerging wasp", and "boring brown mite", and we also photographed each new type of insect we found. In total we collected around 240 arthropod samples.

Lipara sp. with inquiline

The organisms which actually cause the galls are fly larvae (immature stage) from a genus called Lipara, of which there are a number of species: Lipara pullitarsis, Lipara rufitarsis, Lipara similis, and Lipara lucens). Three of these are established in the United States. Lipara similis is one of these species, and is easy to identify thanks to the dark colouration at both ends of its body (see picture below). Lipara pullitarsis and Lipara rufitarsis are also established (see picture above), but distinguishing between these two species as larvae is very difficult. Larvae of other insect species can also be found living inside the galls with the Lipara. These are commonly known as inquilines, and while some have no negative effects on the Lipara, some can be predatory or parasitic.

Lipara similis

The next step in this project will be to finalise sorting and identification of all of the insects collected. The identification process will be difficult, as it's notoriously hard to identify immature insects. Once identifications are complete, the data can be used to answer a number of interesting ecological questions. Some of the questions we are interested in is how community composition of the galls differs between invasive and native Phragmites, and also how it may vary with latitude. Results will be forthcoming in the next couple of months, and I'm looking forward to seeing if all our hard work collecting and dissecting stems has paid off. For now, enjoy some of the pictures of the hidden herbivores of Phragmites.

Small gall midge (Microlasioptera flexuosa)

Unidentified larvae and possible predator (top of photo)

Nice looking brown spider

A species of wasp pupating inside the stem

Unidentified larvae

Lipara sp. with inquiline pupae

Back Down South

Following our New Jersey and Delaware sites, we blasted through our three sites in Maryland and Virginia with relative ease. But again I was stung by wasps, twice, at our Virginia site on the Rappahannock River. This time it was by a paper wasp, from the large nest which you can see in the photo below (I took the photo after I was stung). The stings from these hurt nowhere near as much as the one I got the previous day, and look nowhere as bad either. I wish I knew what sort of wasp it was that stung me at Estell Manor, but I only caught a fleeting glimpse of it as it buzzed away!

The paper wasps (Polistes sp.) which stung me!

We had Monday off as Tim, the Park Ranger at Mackay Island Wildlife Refuge, couldn't take us out in the boat until Tuesday. So we decided to go to Kitty Hawk, a small town in North Carolina, famous for being the the town right by the huge sand dunes where the Wright brothers performed the first controlled powered flight. The main attraction there was the memorial to the Wright brothers, which was pretty cool. It was situated on the actual site where they made their first flights, which were marked out by boulders. They made four flights on December 17, 1904; the first three just 37, 53, and 61 metres, respectively, but the final one was really impressive, at a whopping 260 metres! The memorial also had a nice museum with exact replicas of both their glider and plane which made the first flight. We also checked out what is supposedly the largest sand dune on the east coast, which was pretty cool, but had nothing on the dunes at Mason Bay on Stewart Island.

Hangliding off the top of the dune

The next day we were up at 5 am for an early start at Mackay Island, where we have three sites. We had been dreading this day since the start of the trip due to the waist deep marsh water in some places, high humidity and heat, and the strong possibility of close encounters with deadly and agressive cottonmouth snakes. As it turned out it was actually a pretty easy day. We didn't see any snakes, the weather was cool and the forecast thunderstorms stayed away. We stayed in a hotel literally right beside our final site in Georgetown, South Carolina, nailed that site early the next morning and then had a boring thirteen hour drive back home. So the trip was ultimately a success; some useful data was collected for all of our research projects, we arrived back in Baton Rouge two days earlier than planned, and I even managed to add another two states (West Virginia and Pennsylvania) to the list of those I have visited, bring the total now to 21. Classes start back at LSU on August 20, but before then we have our six sites in Louisiana left to do!

Field Work

The research field trip is well and truly underway. Our trip into Canada was fairly uneventful, including both of the dreaded border crossings where we passed through without even having to pull over to have our car searched - quite a contrast to last time! We didn't have a lot of time for anything other than research-related activities, the three days were pretty fully on:
Day 1: Drove north for eight hours, did two hours of field work (one site), then drove three more hours back south to Quebec.
Day 2: A total of six hours driving and six hours of field work (three sites).
Day 3: Four hours of field work (final two sites) followed by an eight hour drive back to Portland.

Big aphid colony with a predatory hoverfly larvae

Thanks to New York City traffic, the seven hour drive from Portland got turned into an eleven hour one, crawling southwards with everyone heading to Atlantic City for the weekend. Sadly we wouldn't be joining them, heading straight to our paired native and exotic Phragmites sites at Estell Manor Park in New Jersey. This is a really picturesque park and would normally be great to work in. However, this time it was littered with debris from recent storms, was hot and humid, and I was stung by a wasp while sweep-netting, my first wasp sting since I was around ten years old. Sadly, as we progress south the weather conditions are only going to become more severe, and we will have more dangerous things to worry about than wasps - chiefly the famed cottonmouth snakes which we will undoubtedly see at Mackay Island...

Estell Manor Park

Acadia National Park - Take Two

The start of the Fall semester at LSU is fast approaching, which means it's time for the second and final big research trip of the summer. This time we are doing our North American transect in reverse, starting with our northernmost sites in Maine and Canada and working our way south to Louisiana. For this trip, Jim, Ganesh, and I are joined by Randee, an undergraduate who has worked on the Phragmites project in our lab over the last 18 months. It's great to have an extra person along for the trip, but by the time we put all our luggage and sampling gear into the truck there really isn't a lot of room, especially for a lanky guy like me!

To get to our start point in Maine we covered 3100 km in three days, a total of around 32 hours driving. As Jim flew in to meet us in Portland on the 30th, he was kind enough to let us have a couple of days holiday before he arrived, so we decided to go check out Acadia National Park again, hoping for some better weather than the dense fog Ganesh and I experienced last time. The first morning there we had booked a whale watching trip out into the Gulf of Maine, hoping to see some humpback, fin, or minke whales. The first hour or so of the cruise was spent bird-watching by various islands around the coast. We saw puffins, terns, guillemots, shearwaters, bald eagles, and even a peregrine falcon, along with a couple of seals. We then headed out to the open water to spot some whales. It was drizzling steadily and a little foggy, so our chances weren't particularly good, and we didn't spot any whales for over an hour and a half. Literally just as the captain announced we were heading back to Bar Harbor, a humpback whale surfaced about 50 metres from the boat. While the crowd was busy rushing off to the side of the boat I was lucky enough to see two more humpback whales breaching spectacularly about 200 metres in front of the boat. It was an amazing sight to see a 30-odd tonne animal launching its whole body out of the ocean! I took a video below of one of the whales going for a dive - it's much better than any of the pictures I managed to get.

Thankfully the next day had the near-perfect weather we had been hoping for, and we made the most of it. We started with a trip up Cadillac Mountain, the highest mountain on the East Coast of the USA, where we took in some pretty spectacular views. Then we headed down to Sandy Beach, which was crowded with people - a bit different to the last time when we were the only ones there. I even went for a quick swim. The water was cold, but I've been in much colder back home so it was bearable. We also went for a walk across the sand bar to Bar Island and checked out the Otter Cliffs walkway. Pretty awesome way to start a field trip really, but now for the hard work, starting with a three day trip into Canada!

Bubble Pond

Sandy Beach

View from the summit of Cadillac Mountain (much better than last time)

Looking onto Bar Harbor from Bar Island

View back to Sandy Beach from Otter Point

Home Again

Big Meadow in Shenandoah National Park (click to enlarge)

So, finally after 16 days on the road I'm back in Baton Rouge. The trip saved the best for last with Ganesh and I spending five hours of the penultimate day driving through Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. This park has one of the most famous roads in the US, Skyline Drive. It's 105 miles long and slowly winds its way through the mountains of the national park, with stunning views of nearby mountain ranges and the plains below. It took us so long to drive as we were always stopping to check out the view, because they have overlooks every couple of miles. After a few more hours of highway driving we finally got to our hotel in Knoxville, Tennessee, exhausted and ready to be back home in Baton Rouge. The last day of the trip was spent driving the 11 hours southwest to Louisiana and unpacking the truck, before finally heading home to catch a good and long night's sleep.

Typical view from Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park

In our travels for this field trip we passed through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Tennessee. Florida, Texas, and California can also all be added to that list of states I've now visited, so that's 19 out of 50 that can now be ticked off!

In total we drove about 10,300 kilometres (6,400 miles) and we will do it all again in two months or so for the end of summer census. Using Google Maps I more or less mapped our journey and you can check it out below. The colours represent each different day of driving and where the colours overlap and look strange is from us driving the same highway twice or more. The details of the roads taken aren't particularly accurate, but it definitely shows the huge extent of trip.

My parents are coming to visit during June and I'm incredibly excited to be seeing them for the first time in ten months. I'll be flying up to meet them in Boston and then we'll be roadtripping back down to Baton Rouge over the course of the following ten days or so. Until then I'll be relaxing in Baton Rouge as much as possible, and tidying up loose ends of my research work from the spring.

O Canada!

These signs are everywhere in Maine and Canada

DAY EIGHT

My first day in Canada was a pretty awesome experience. Jim and I left Portland at 7 am on a mission to the US/Canada border. Northern Maine is a really unique and beautiful place, and as we moved inland the scenery changed rapidly from that of the more populated northeast to more rugged terrain with much more hardy vegetation like fir and spruce trees. As we passed through all the small villages, we started seeing road signs with pictures of moose, snowmobiles, and quad bikes, a sure sign we were getting closer to Canada. Right before the border I was lucky enough to spot a couple of moose drinking in a roadside ditch, so we did a u-turn back to a small rest area where I spotted another moose just hidden in the trees (you can check him out on the video below). All of a sudden the two moose in the ditch ran out onto the road in front of an SUV which only just stopped in time to avoid hitting them. If you hit a moose you're surely going to total your car and will probably be lucky to survive yourself when the moose comes flying through the windshield. The two moose disappeared into the woods as we watched the young male we had spotted in the rest area. Then the first two (a young mother with a calf as it turned out) emerged from the forest right behind us! It was a really cool experience to see such massive wild animals from about 10 metres away, and the young male especially just wasn't scared of us at all.

Passing through the border into Canada was a different story. The border police took what seemed an immediate disliking to us. They searched our entire car and then we had to be interviewed by an immigration officer. He was Sargeant Hardout and definitely had no sense of humour. He wasn't very satisfied with the idea that we were conducting biological research and demanded to see proof of an "invatation" or "permit" to conduct our research in Canada, as well as wanting details of exactly where we were going and exactly what we were going to do. We of course didn't have any of these as we had been told we didn't need them, so we were becoming very worried that we were heading back to Maine to help out Ganesh! Luckily Jim was able to give Sargeant Hardout the name of a co-collaborator from a university in Quebec (who he had never met or actually talked to), who the officer promptly rung to confirm whether or not we were up to no good. Luckily the Canadian scientist put in the good word for us and we were finally allowed to pass through into Canada after an hour long ordeal. Once in Canada, we could take in the awesome scenery and countryside, from meadows filled with dandelions, lakes surrounded by forest, rolling mountains, rocky cliffs, and no people for miles and miles. It really makes a change from the flat boring roads of the southeast that's for sure.

Typical landscape on the way to Hebertville

On our drive through Canada I soon found that my French is not up to scratch (despite living with a French roommate last semester), as I tried to order McDonalds for lunch. Luckily most French-Canadians can speak English fairly well! Our single Phragmites site for the day was a native one, all the way up in a small, isolated town called Hebertville. The plants themselves were only about 50 cm tall (compared to most which can be over 4 metres), which made for a very fast survey as they tends to be very little in the way of insects on such young plants. It's probably going to be like this for all of the sites in Canada so we should be finished in about three days and back in Maine in time to spend a day at Acadia National Park! It was 30 degrees even all the way up near Hebertville, but on the way back from our site we spotted a few patches of snow, and it's almost the middle of summer! Finally we made it back to our hotel just out of Quebec city, after about 11 hours in total on the road.

DAY NINE

Saint Lawrence River bank

It was a dreary day in Canada, drizzling or raining pretty much all day, but not too bad to work in. We had three sites to do, two situated beside the Saint Lawrence River and one beside a lake in a valley not far away. Because we ended up in Canada before there is any good Phragmites growth, the work has become ridiculously easy. Instead of taking three of us up to two hours to do a site, Jim and I blasted out each of the three sites in around 45 minutes. Other than that the day was pretty uneventful as we made our way to Campbelltown, New Brunswick, driving alongside the picturesque Matapédia River for some of the way. Getting back through the US border is certainly going to be an exercise!

DAY TEN
Getting through the US border actually went very smoothly! It only took about 20 minutes and a few questions about what stuff we were bringing back in (dried leaf material and insects in ethanol) to get through the border. Before that we had finished each of our two sites in around 30 minutes each and the rest of the day was spent uneventfully driving back to Portland to meet back up with Ganesh.

Our exotic Phragmites patch just out of Campbelltown - just dead flower stems

Lots of Canadian hay

Still Heading North...

DAY FIVE
We started the day nice and early again, ready to go at about 7:30 am. The great thing about staying in these American hotels is that they all serve breakfast and you can get your fill of cereal, fruit, bagels, waffles, and coffee before the long day of hard work ahead of you. The rooms are also usually pretty nice and the beds comfortable enough to get a good night's sleep.

The first site was on the banks of the Choptank River, about 20 minutes out of Easton, Maryland, where we had spent the night. The site was an abandoned nature preserve and had both native and invasive Phragmites pretty much growing beside each other all along a dodgy boardwalk heading out into the marsh. As with most of the sites we have done around this latitude there have been lots of holes in the marsh where you can sink up your hips. It can be quite tiring slogging through this kind of stuff and you definitely feel you've had a good workout at the end of each sampling effort. However, there is nothing I'd rather be doing than field work, so even while I'm knee deep in the marsh I'm still having the time of my life!

After the Choptank River site, we headed north and into the state of Delaware, to do a native and exotic site by the Appoquinimink River. Once we got there we found that a massive construction site had opened up at the entrance to the native site. When we rang the people in charge we were told we couldn't have access to the river anymore due it voiding their liability insurance...a pretty lame excuse really. In any case  we carried on and did the roadside exotic site which also had knee deep mud, before heading North to New Jersey for the night.

DAY SIX
Got up early again and headed out to do our two sites for the day at Estell Manor Park. The sites were quite nice, located right on the edge of a river. Aphids, other herbivores, and their natural enemies seem to be getting quite scarce as we move into the colder climates further north (except for the colony being tended by ants which are in turn being attacked by the wasp in the photo below), which isn't great for data for any of our projects. Luckily we will be doing the trip again in August, this time sampling from Canada southwards.

Native Phragmites patch at Estell Manor

Big aphid colony with ants and a predatory wasp

After finishing the sites we had a five hour drive through New York to Connecticut. Of course, going through New York we encountered some pretty horrible traffic. I was glad it wasn't my tunr to drive and instead I admired the brief views of the city. I'll definitely have to go there before I leave. However, the highlight of the day was visiting Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.Yale is the third oldest university in the United States (since 1701) and boasts many famous graduates including famous US presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush Snr., George W. Bush Jnr., and Gerald Ford. We were lucky enough to be able to meet up with my friend Victor (the first kiwi I've seen in 9 months!) who is an undergrad at Yale and he gave us a really good tour of the campus. Victor and I had worked together before at Lincoln University on a summer research scholarship and also at Plant and Food Research. It was great to see him again and the Yale campus was incredible, with lots of really impressive buildings and a nice vibe to the place.

Peabody Museum at Yale University

Victor and I in front of the Yale library

DAY SEVEN
Today was almost a repeat of the day before; getting up early, knocking out the census at two sites, and then driving north again to Maine, where we have six sites. Our sites for the day were near Pettipaug Yacht Club in the town of Essex on the Connecticut River. It was a real nice spot to work in and by the looks of it, there were a lot of rich people living there! We finished the native and exotic sites relatively quickly as there were basically no herbivores present, apart from a few aphids. Then we hit the highway towards Portland, Maine. We arrived about 5 pm, giving us a bit of time to look around. So we headed to Fort Williams Park at Cape Elizabeth to check out the coast. It was a really nice place to visit, as you can see below. I had lobster for dinner for the first time, and I didn't really like it! The meat wasn't as tasty as I was expecting, and definitely too chewy; don't think I'll try it again anytime soon.

Cape Elizabeth, Maine

Tomorrow, Jim and I will be leaving Ganesh in Portland and driving nine hours into Quebec, Canada, in our little rental car, making sure we don't get taken out by any rogue moose on the way (a moose burger or bear sausage will be my next meal). Sadly Ganesh didn't manage to get a Canadian visa in time to join us so he will be working on the six sites here in Maine while we smash out the ones in Canada.