After a filling breakfast of mixed fruit and yogurt we headed into the field to learn how to collect caterpillars. The two scientists that were in charge, Harold and Lee, started the morning by showing us a few of the different host plants that we would be searching for caterpillars on. They also showed us a few different things to look for on the leaves of the plants to help narrow down our search. If the middle or edge of a leaf was eaten, that was a good plant to search or if the leaves were rolled up together, that was another good plant to look over.
Armed with a little knowledge and a lot of confidence we were let loose into the field to gather as many caterpillars as we could. It was pretty exciting that we finally were able to start looking for the little buggers that we were sent to Ecuador to collect. It didn’t take long to realize that looking for caterpillars is a lot harder that one might think. I think part of that was because most of the caterpillars were less than a 1” long and camouflaged. We also quickly learned that not only do caterpillars like to hide in rolled up leaves, but so spiders. The worst part was (at least if you don’t like spiders) that the spiders would jump on you when we unrolled the leaves.
For the morning I found 3 caterpillars in 3.5 hours, a little slower than I thought. I compared it to new volunteers looking for Sweet Clover back home at Lake Forest Open Lands. It takes a few times out before you are able to pick out the weeds amongst all of the native plants. All in all, as a group we collected 63 caterpillars for the morning.
We were back at Yanayacu for the afternoon to process all of the caterpillars we harvested. Each caterpillar needed to be placed into its own container with food, numbered, photographed and placed on the line. The first caterpillar we documented was the 50,000th for the Biological Station.
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- Learning a few host plants
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- My notes… nerd
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- Score, my first caterpillar.
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- Rolled up leaf
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- I guess he wasn’t expecting company
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- He’s a dandy, too bad I didn’t find it
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- Processing
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- 50,000th caterpillar
