Chandra Clarke

Offering Whatever Light I Can

Tracking the cicada

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A project mostly for fun today, especially if you’re a bug lover.

I’ve always liked bugs (well, most bugs — I could do without house centipedes or scutigera coleoptrata), and cicadae in particular have always fascinated me. They spend the majority of their lives underground, emerge in their thousands once a year, molt, and end their days after a very brief period of mating and egg laying. They also make a really cool noise, which always makes me think of summer.

WNYC is equally fascinated by cicadae, and this year, is calling on New York and New Jersey residents to help track the emergence of Magicicada Brood II, a cicada with a 17-year cycle. They want you to build a soil temperature sensor that will be able to report the temperature of the soil roughly 20 centimeters (8 inches) down, and they provide a complete parts list and easy how-to guide to get you going. Apparently this species of cicada typically emerges when the ground temperature is around 17 C (64 F).

Once you have built your sensor, you should get it into the ground by mid-April, and then you can start reporting data by going here. You can also check out their bug blog.

If you’re not handy when it comes to circuit boards or want to save some money, they recommend the following sensor at Amazon (this is not an affiliate link).

Photo by Benoit Gauzere on Unsplash

This project is the bee’s knees

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English: This is a photo of carpenter bees' nest.
A carpenter bees’ nest. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bees have been in the news a lot recently, but the buzz hasn’t been good. Entire bee colonies have been dying, and we’re hard put to figure out why. So-called colony collapse disorder (CCD) is a major problem, because bees are a critical input in our food supply chain: as well as supplying honey, they pollinate many of our crops.

Although Native Buzz doesn’t address CCD directly, it does hope to contribute to the study of bees and wasps in general, and in so doing, find other species of pollinators so that we are less reliant on the handful of bee species that are currently used in agriculture.

If you’re fascinated by bees and wasps, Native Buzz wants you to register and then buy or  build a site for solitary bees and wasps to nest in. Not only will this provide much-needed habitat for these creatures, but you’ll then be able to monitor the nests and upload your data to the project. This will help researchers learn more about species distribution and population health, and create action plans for endangered species. Plus, if you’re a gardener, your plants will benefit too.

Help save the Monarch butterfly

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Photograph of a female Monarch Butterfly en ( ...
Photograph of a female Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus) on a hybrid Milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa en x Asclepias incarnata). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you had to pick a symbol to represent toughness, you could do worse than pick the Monarch butterfly. These fragile creatures migrate from Canada all the way down to Baja, California, or to Mexico in the winter, and then back north again in the summer.

Monarch populations are in decline, however, mainly due to a loss of habitat. Their favourite food is milkweed, and the milkweed has fallen victim to urban development, herbicides containing glyphosate (most notably Roundup®), and roadside management.

MonarchWatch is an organization dedicated to restoring Monarch butterfly populations and you can help, especially if you live along the migratory pathways of the butterfly. Your first option is to create a Monarch waystation. This is a garden that contains three varieties of milkweed, and several nectar plants. You can order a kit that comes with all the seeds you need, as well as detailed instructions for planting. If you already have readily available milkweed in your area, you might try a Monarch rearing kit, which allows you to actually raise Monarchs from the larval stage.

And of course, if these options are a bit beyond your gardening or naturalist abilities, you can always simply donate to the project or buy a t-shirt.

Planet of the ants

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Few insects fascinate us as much as ants do. Perhaps it’s because of their astonishing diversity, or perhaps its because of their social habits; either way, many a budding entomologist got his or her start by watching a swarm of ants in the backyard.

The School of Ants would like us all to become entomologists (or more specifically, myrmecologists) by studying the ants that live in urban areas. To participate, you need to set up your own ant collection kit (a PDF file of instructions is provided) and send in your samples. At the moment, the project is restricted to the US as the postal service is understandably a bit touchy about people mailing bug samples to one another without a permit. However, the project is in the process of expanding, and you may find that there is a local international collaborator in your country.

There’s a handy video explaining how to collect specimens, and you can read about some of the discoveries the project has contributed to already. Meanwhile, if you want a good book about ants that demonstrates their scope and variety, I can recommend Journey to the Ants. It is chock full of photos and has some really cool stories about ant behaviour.

Photo by Maksim Shutov on Unsplash