By William Godwin
Texas A&M Department of Entomology
Blacklight/mercury vapor light:
Seven light sheets were set out in the 27 acre Godwin Woods each night. That is a record array for the department. We were probably visible from the space shuttle. This technique has the potential to produce the greatest quantity of insects by far. However, specimens collected by light lack the specific microhabitat or host information that comes from more specific collecting methods. Here we suspend a white sheet from a clothesline so that the bottom 12 inches or so drape across the ground. Another white sheet is put on the ground. A mercury vapor light and ultra-violet light are suspended from the clothesline so that they hang a few inches away from the sheet. The sheet acts as a big reflector and as a substrate for the attracted insects to land on.
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| We gathered around seven different generator powered UV/mercury vapor lights to collect. | |
Yellow Pan Traps:
Matt Yoder and Matt Buffington put out hundreds of these little yellow plastic bowls in the woods. They were filled with slightly soapy water. Insects were attracted to the yellow color and were drowned. The pans were bought from the paper plate etc. aisle of the grocery store. If you can’t find yellow ones for your picknick then blame a hymenopterist. They hoard them. This technique is usually directed at Hymenoptera, but Coleoptera and Diptera are also collected in abundance. It looks like an easy collecting technique, but putting out 100 pans means you must carry gallons of soapy water with you. You must also remember where the trap line is and service them every day with a fine sifter.
Leaf Litter Sifting:
Ed Riley demonstrated his technique for collecting leaf litter insects. Typically collectors just grab a bag full of moist leaf litter and take it back to the lab to run it through a berlese funnel. Hard core leaf litter specialists have invented field sifters that allow them to shake sample after sample over a hardware cloth screen. This allows them to separate the insects from coarse trash like leaves and sticks. By concentrating the sample like this they can take the equivalent of many more times the amount of leaf litter back to the lab.
Malaise Trap:
We used a two-headed malaise like this one (because all the good ones were spoken for). It worked fine though. This trap was set-up one week before the ENTOBLITZ so that it would have a good sample in the jars by the time we got there. This trap works on the principle that some insects fly or crawl up when they encounter a barrier. In this trap they travel up until they fall into a bottle of alcohol at either end. We used a mixture of ethanol and propylene glycol (antifreeze) because the antifreeze inhibits evaporation of the ethanol. This allows us to leave the trap up for longer periods of time.
Flight Intercept Trap:
This trap is designed to collect insects that drop when they encounter a barrier while flying. It is more suited to Coleoptera than the malaise trap. Notice the screen with subtending pans to drown the intersecting insects. A rain lid is provided to keep the pans from being overflowed in storms.
Pitfall/Dung Trap:
This trap method involves a small plastic cup that is burried up to the rim in the ground so that passing insects may fall in. Place about one inch of fluid in the cup to trap the insects. You may use soapy water or alcohol. To increase your catch and target specific insects you may bait the trap. Use bits of dead meat for carrion beetles. Use malt or rotten fruit for other samples. We used dung placed in a small cup near the rim to survey the area’s dung beetles. The following are scans of thescarabs that were attracted to our dung.
Beetles attracted to dung baited pitfalls
 Deltochilum gibbosum (Fabricius) |
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 Canthon imitator Brown |
 Ateuchus histeroides (Weber) |
 Geotrupes splendens (Fabricius) |
 Phanaeus difformis LeConte |
 Omorgus spp. |
 Onthophagus medorensis Brown |