Features
Buggy About Insects
Students track, record bugs in Bolivian rainforest
BY ANDREW VOWLES
Too many insects might ruin a trip abroad for many travellers. But U of G students visiting Bolivia this spring went looking for bugs — and they weren't disappointed. Eighteen students who took part in this year's field entomology course returned to Guelph in mid-May with new-found appreciation for tropical diversity and with enough insect photos and videos to fill another sequel to A Bug's Life.
That was something of a surprise for Prof. Steve Marshall, Environmental Biology, who led the first-ever trip to the Amazon rainforest with departmental colleague Prof. Gard Otis. On past expeditions to their usual destination in Virginia, Marshall has used his own photos for a “bug of the day” session each evening. This year was different.
“When we started the evening sessions, I found the students had their own images to project for our daily recaps of interesting finds. They had seen insect behaviours that nobody had filmed before. It was phenomenal.”
Sharpening students' observational skills and helping them learn to identify and study insects and related arthropods is the purpose of the 10-year-old field trip, says Otis.
“You learn and remember so much better when you experience it first-hand.”
Normally, the field trip takes students to the Mountain Lake Biological Station in the Appalachian Mountains. But this year, 16 undergraduates and two graduate students travelled to the Heath River Wildlife Centre on the Peruvian-Bolivian border. (The program was also held once in Ecuador.)
In one entry in her mandatory field-trip diary, student Erin Ipsen wrote: “This first trip into the jungle doing field study changed my outlook on my program and career options for the future.”
Memorable moments for Otis included “observing clear-winged butterflies related to those I studied as a grad student, watching numerous macaws and parrots eat clay from a nearby riverbank, and being mesmerized by the call of the screaming piha bird — the quintessential sound of the Amazon forests.”
The trip took him back to his first visit to the tropics as a Duke University undergrad and research assistant planning to study nesting birds in Panama. Only when he arrived at the field station did he learn that his supervisor's research project had folded. He was asked to collect insects instead, a task that led to his career studying honeybees.
A circle also closed for Marshall, who had collected an undescribed species of an ant-mimicking fly in the small family Syringogastridae during his first-ever trip to Ecuador as a grad student in 1979. This year's venture yielded new photos and specimens of two more new species. He and co-authors will describe and name all three new species as part of a manuscript on this family to be submitted for publication this fall.
Marshall says students had a chance to observe insects as he does in identifying specimens for biodiversity studies. Students also drew on Otis's behavioural ecology skills to design mini-experiments intended to learn more about such things as how hitchhiking “guard” ants protect leafcutter ants from parasitic ant-decapitating flies.