COVER

 

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES & PROJECT GOAL

 Research Objectives 

The research has four core objectives:

1.    Measure biodiversity of bees in a variety of habitats

2.    Create DNA barcode libraries for native plants and pollinators in Southern Utah

3.    Assess the potential for acoustic survey of bumblebees

4.   Construct pollination networks to evaluate the effects of restoration efforts and the potential impacts of human activities, such as commercial honeybee farming

 

PROJECT GOAL

The ultimate goal of this project is to decrease the amount of destructive sampling needed to study pollinators by establishing a genetic and acoustic library of pollinators in southern Utah. These libraries will allow land managers to enact policies that can preserve pollinator networks and essential pollinator habitat. These libraries will also allow researchers and managers to assess how pollinator and plant populations change in response to management options, human use of land, and climate change.

• A secondary aim of this project is to enhance pollinator and wildlife habitat on public lands by working with federal partners to develop seed banks for native plant species.

• The public lands of southern Utah serve a number of different interests, including academia, federal agencies, ranchers, coal miners, and native American communities. The data collected through this expedition will help land managers balance these interests by creating an inventory of bee biodiversity, developing a cutting edge genetic approach to studying pollinators, restoring essential pollinator habitat, and bringing the community together. This project will ultimately help preserve native pollinator diversity, native plants, and Utah’s greatest resource: its public lands.

• To understand the biodiversity of native pollinators and build a genetic sequence library, 

Volunteers will help in five main research tasks:

1.  Bee diversity surveys

2.  Collection of genetic tissue: whole bees, pollen carried by pollinators, plant leaves, and flowers

3.  Collection of plant specimens

4.  Bumblebee acoustic surveys

5.  Collection of seeds from native wildflowers

 

 

THE RESEARCH TEAM

Principal Investigator: Dr. Jacqualine Grant, Assistant Professor of Biology, Southern Utah University

 

 

Botanist: Dr. Matt Ogburn, Associate Professor of Biology, Southern Utah University

 

 

 

SUU Student Interns

Ashlee Harden and Isaac Sorensen

 

 Leeloo Yutuc 

Jackie & Interns with Earthwatch Volunteers

Photo taken from Cabin #1 porch picnic table with Leeloo's cell on a timer. Kate really is not a giant, she is just closer to the camera. The sun is weird also as much of it is blocked by Cabin #1. Isaac and Kira are wearing face masks because they have colds.

Day 1: TRAVEL TO THE RESEARCH SITE & ARRIVAL

Sunday, July 10, 2022 

TRAVEL

Just before I left for this, my fifth Earthwatch Expedition, Jeff and I heard bad news about our Paddy cat. He was diagnosed with diabetes and would need one or two shots a day. We both decided that he was in cat hospice and that if he stopped eating or showed any signs of discomfort, we would have him euthanized rather than put him through the rigorous medical routine. He is 19 years old, deaf, stiff in his hips, and has IBD so requires a special diet and other meds as well. In his old age he has gone from 8+ pounds to a squeak above 5 pounds. Ever since his lifelong pal, Teddy, died, Pad has been a sticktight burr, wanting to be near one or the other of us, and meowing to be picked up and cuddled. We love him and hope the old guy has more months or years.

So, after hugs for Pad and Jeff—who will be batching it with no car—at 7:00 am, Sunday, July 10th, I set off on I-15S for the St George, Utah, airport in the far southwestern corner of the state. Because it was Sunday there was little traffic. I arrived at the airport about six hours later and parked in the long-term open parking lot. No covered parking available at this tiny airport that sits squarely in the high desert sun. I cracked the windows, parked near a small tree, and crossed my fingers that all would be well on my return.

On entering the airport, I saw several with backpacks but no Earthwatch volunteers. However, after exploring a bit, I found Eileen Mershart sitting near a large suitcase and a backpack. She was from Madison, WI, had arrived the day before, and was staying in St George in a Hampton Inn. She had been on a rhino Earthwatch in Africa and on the same Whooping Crane Earthwatch on the Gulf that I had been on—but not the same team/time.

It had cost Eileen $40 to be driven to the airport, so I volunteered to drive her back to the St. George Hampton Inn before taking off for home after the Earthwatch Expedition.

Soon our young Southern Utah University (SUU) interns arrived: Isaac Sorensen, Ashlee Hardin, and Leeloo Yutuc. Then from the Boston area Dorian & Kate Hart with their teen daughters, Elanor and Kira. Then Jeanie Kroon, an upbeat woman from Denver who was suffering from long covid. Soon we seven volunteers and the three interns were gathered. The interns helped us load our baggage into the Earthwatch/SUU van and off we went to Deer Springs Ranch LLC, with Isaac driving. I thought that the ranch was a hop from the airport, but it was three-plus hours away with a bathroom stop and a stop at Walmart to pick up snacks and bug spray etc. along the way.

Eventually we turned off onto a dirt road, and then travelled about 15 miles on dirt roads to dead-end at Deer Springs Ranch Cabins #1, #2, and #3. The van and other vehicles were each backed around to face the exit road, fire danger from lightning strikes in this area necessitating a quick exit. We were told that mid July was “monsoon season.” Sure enough, dark clouds rolled in and it rained for short periods nearly every afternoon and evening, often much of the rain evaporating before it reached the ground. Temperatures were in the high 80s and mid- to high 90s depending on elevation. 

ARRIVAL

The Hart family and I were assigned Cabin #3, which was down a hill and at the bottom of a long set of stairs. The five-bedroom, two-story cabin had a deck which was sheltered by an upstairs balcony and contained a picnic table and grill.

From the deck one could look down the mountain to a distant pasture which, as it turned out, would be our primary research area. (See photo below)

Each day about 10:00 or 10:30 we would be driven down to the Deer Springs Ranch pasture, which generally had longhorn cattle on it. However, in the pasture were two fenced off enclosures ( Jackie called them exclosures) which the cattle could not enter. These were filled with taller grass and several species of flowers. The enclosure we used the most also had a small marshy stream running through it. 

The Harts occupied the upstairs bedrooms. I, thankfully, was assigned the downstairs bedroom, which was only a hop from the bathroom. I could not have easily navigated the stairs in the middle of the night.

My bedroom with bureau and bed made up with ruffled country-style bedspread and pillows. That's me reflected in the mirror taking a photo of myself and the bureau. On the wall on either side of the mirror are two propane lamps with lanternlike mantles.

On this table, the Hart family played bridge each night

Our corner kitchen--propane fridge to the right. The sink spigot was on permanent spray.

The livingroom with the sofa and chairs shifted a bit to allow the front door to be open and access from the stairs to the second story more convenient. I used the living room very little as my room had a comfortable chair. Often the Harts used it to nap or gather in the cooler downstairs air.

Eileen and Jeanie were assigned Cabin #2. Cabin #1 at the top of the hill was headquarters and sleeping rooms for the interns and occasionally our principal investigator, Jacqualine Grant, whom we would meet later that evening. Jackie had a nifty hammock stand and liked to sleep in her hammock outdoors, weather permitting.

There was no electricity in the cabins or wifi in the area. The lights, stove, refrigerator and hot water in the shower and kitchen were all propane. There were several propane lamps on the walls, each containing a lanternlike mantle, but we were asked not to use them or the candles in the cabins, so we read and made our way about using our headlamps. Soon the cabins will all be solar, which will allow fans to help with the heat, particularly in the upstairs bedrooms. Also, Jeanie and others found some wifi a short hike up the road from Cabin #1 at higher elevation. Our cabins were at about 6000‒7000 feet we were told.

Cabin #1 was also the gathering place for our activities and the place where we all ate lunch and dinner, generally in our laps as the dining table was often covered in research materials and dessert boxes. Our delicious vegetarian meals were cooked by Kurt Jacobsen, a former restaurant owner and cook, now the ranch overseer, who managed wonderfully in the tiny cabin kitchen.

Each day, we ate our breakfast in our cabins and then walked to Cabin #1 for a daily 8:00 am orientation session. Each weekday was themed: Sun.: Arrival; Mon.: Introductions and Getting Started; Tue.: Pollinator Communities; Wed.: Floral Associations; Thur.: Professor’s Choice; Fri.: Recreation & Closure; Sat.: Departure Day.

After we had settled into our cabins, we hiked up to Cabin #1 and enjoyed a vegetarian dinner of fajitas, rice and black beans cooked by Kurt, the Deer Springs Ranch Manager and former restaurant owner and cook. Over dinner we met Jacqualine Grant, our PI, who announced weather and work plans for the following day. 

After dinner we gathered on the porch and admired the ranch pastures below and the pink cliffs with their emerging hoodoos in the distance. These cliffs are similar to those in Bryce Canyon National Park, which is just a hop from the cliffs and the ranch, which in places abuts the Dixie National Forest and BLM lands.

Pink cliffs facing the DSR pastures. The pink cliffs are actually the top riser of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

The cover photo was taken looking from the pink cliffs toward the Ranch. These cliffs are really Riser #1 of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.* In the cover photo, one can see the green area where the Ranch pastured its longhorns & where we conducted most of our research.

*GSENM is called a staircase for the “series of plateaus that descend from Bryce Canyon south toward the Grand Canyon, marked by vertical drops at the Pink Cliffs, Grey Cliffs, White Cliffs, Vermillion Cliffs and Chocolate Cliffs. The Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument has been eroding and revealing between 275 million and 50 million years, but it is relatively new to us humans: It was the last part of the lower 48 United States to get mapped, and once people started poking around they realized they were dealing with an un-spent wealth of ancient and modern science and culture. In 1996, President Bill Clinton set the Staircase aside as a national monument because its untrammeled significance distinguishes it for researchers and explorers alike. (Internet) 

At the end of the evening, we played a memory game in which we all introduced ourselves and told one thing we liked or were interested in, each person repeating the name and interest of all before. I was near the end of the line and, of course, could barely remember my own name much less eleven other names and each person’s interest. Fun, though, for those who still have their grey cells. A “friend” of mine once told me that all my grey cells had gone to my hair. I am beginning to think that not so funny.

However, we all remembered Leeloo’s burning interest: crocheting. This because Leeloo spent much of her free time crocheting a vest (photo right). She worked very fast and completed the vest on the team’s last day. Look at those long fingers. Excellent for positioning and pinning insects from our traps, also.

 

Day 2: INTROS, SAFETY, & GETTING STARTED

Monday, July 11, 2022

Each morning we ate breakfast in the cabin of provided granolas, fruit, milk and whatever we had brought or bought at Walmart. Then we hiked up to Cabin #1 for our daily orientation to discuss weather and the day’s work plan. On this day, we were introduced to the project: Jacqualine discussed federal agencies, lack of pollinator knowledge needed for pollinator-friendly seeds, and reviewed fire hazards and insect, plant, elevation, and weather hazards in area.

We also repeated the Insect Collector’s Code: “I will treat insects humanely. As a collector, it is within my power to take insect life; I will not take insects that will not be deposited in a natural history collection or otherwise made available for research and education.” 

About 10:00 or 10:30 we were driven to the valley pastures where timed, minimum distance transects were explained and performed by the SUU interns in the enclosures (fenced places in the pasture where plant life was relatively undisturbed by the grazing cattle). The pasture grass was cropped short everywhere but in the enclosures and where iris had bloomed because the cattle avoid iris. We were told that when the iris are in bloom, the pasture is a beautiful vision of purple.

In one enclosure, we volunteers performed butterfly and bee walks: Netting the insects as they landed on flowers. The interns then transferred them to kill jars.

Volunteers walking through salsify seedheads, nets on shoulders. In the background, to the right of the bush is a falling-down settler's log cabin before which we parked the vehicles, face out for safety.

Ashlee and Isaac labeling kill jars and transferring insects

Kira, Dorian, and Elanor Hart sitting on a rolled tarp during a rest and hydration break; note the pink cliffs in the background

A rest and hydration break near the enclosure gate

When clouds and rain cropped up, we returned to Cabin #1 for lunch.

Our research pasture before the pink cliffs. The photo below right shows Ashlee and Leeloo matching the soil to a soil color chart and demonstrating how the flower clipboard is used

This first collection day we were introduced to Dr. Matt Ogburn aka Dr. Mogs, an associate

professor of biology at Southern Utah University. He was our plant and flower person, carried a many-tiered plant press. Matt never seemed to tire of my “What’s this one called?” requests. 

I like to know the names of plants and flowers I encounter—their common names. Matt (I can call him that because I am not his student) sometimes struggled to remember common names but was very familiar with each plant’s scientific name, which I struggled with. So, I took pix of many of the flowers and plants we encountered and when I got home to wifi, the Picture This app helped me identify the flowers and plants whose names I could not remember. A few below.

Salsify seedhead

L to R: Giant Red Indian Paintbrush (Castilleja miniata),
  Blazing Star (Mentzelia laevicaulis), Bull Thistle (Cirsium vulgare) 

L to R: Desert Princesplume aka Golden Desertplume (Stanleya pinnata), Bridge's Pernstemon (Penstemon rostriflorus), Cardoon aka Artichoke Thistle (Cynara cardunulus) 

Wavyleaf Thistle (Cirsium undulatum), Arizona Thistle  (Cirsium arizonicum), Pearl Crescent on Arrowleaf Ragwort (Senecio triangularis )

The wavyleaf thistle has on it three honeybees (nonnatives), a bumblebee, and a sweatbee. The center flower, Arizona thistle, in the row above we found in Lick Wash as we did the desert princesplume and I will admit to slipping in the arrowleaf ragwort with its pearl crescent butterfly. I am not even sure if arrowleaf ragwort is found in So. Utah. I found it at Smith and Morehouse Reservoir in the Uinta Mountains but needed a third flower for this row. Below are a couple of pix of the most profuse flowers in the enclosure.

In the afternoon it got windy and spit rain, so we retreated to Cabin #1 for lunch . . . and a bumblebee presentation by Ashlee. In the free time after lunch, the garbage needed to be taken to HDQ. Those who wanted to connect with wifi—and those like me who were simply curious to see the ranch headquarters—drove dirt roads the six miles to ranch HDQ.

The ranch was something right out of a cowboy movie: Pens were filled with longhorn cattle from calves to bulls. These cattle are on leased Deer Springs Ranch land and the owner was there sorting them out. His young son, already an expert, was managing the calves, which were taller than he. The horns on some of the cattle were very long. (See pix from the Ranch website above). There were also pens holding horses, sheep, piglets, chickens, guineafowl, and behind Kurt’s cabin, a pen of ducks. Several peacocks wandered the property, unpenned. There were many outbuildings for tack and equipment, also. It was all fascinating. I wondered how members of the Owners Association—and Kurt, in particular—could manage the vast ranch, its animals, maintain the cabins and their rentals, conduct property sales, etc.

While at the ranch, Kurt came out of his cabin and we were introduced to his dog, a black and white pit-bull-blue-heeler mix. The dog loved to play fetch . . . but he never brought the stick back, just ran about with it. Despite his lineage, he seemed like a happy-go-lucky dog. 

After the ranch visit, I rested a bit at our cabin and then hiked up to Cabin #1 for dinner. Suddenly I did not feel well, so flopped down on one of the cabin’s couches and put a wet cloth on my forehead. Eileen kept re-wetting the cloth so that it was cool. Kurt, who was preparing dinner, took something out of the freezer, wrapped it in a cloth, and placed it on the back of my neck. I rested like this for a bit and when I felt I had the energy, walked back down to our Cabin #3 sans the spinach/tomato pasta and  garlic butter dinner that Kurt had prepared. I was in bed by 9:00 pm.

Day 3: POLLINATOR COMMUNITIES

Tuesday 7-12-2022

In the night I experienced a bout of diarrhea so I cautiously did not go to breakfast or the research site in the am. After seeing a sign  beside the door to Cabin #1-- "Water is not guaranteed safe at all times. Use water at your own risk!! DSROA" --I thought that maybe the ranch water was the root of my problem, but Kurt assured me that the water was fine. Also, no one else experienced the same symptoms. So I soldiered on and was fine for the rest of the day and the rest of the expedition.

In my absence that morning, volunteers and interns returned to the research area and set up pollinator traps, collected environmental data, and performed more 1 km butterfly and bee walks. At noon, they brought their butterfly and bee specimens back to Cabin #1 where they were euthanized as needed and the specimen containers labeled.

After lunch the interns showed us pinned specimens and taught us how to use different types of magnifiers to help in identification, how to pin each specimen on the right side of the thorax, how to glue the tiny specimens on their left sides to the bent tip of a white plastic tab, how to use the pinning block to ensure that each specimen was at the same height on the pin, and how to complete the labeling. (Pics below show pinning tools and  my pinned specimens before they were organized by height & orientation and labeled.)

When finished pinning that day’s specimens, we were free until dinner, which this night, if I remember correctly, was hummus, roasted beets, potatoes, and turnips; pita bread, and a salad of cukes and tomatoes with hot peppers. (Kira suffered dragon mouth after eating one of the peppers). A macadamia cookie served as dessert. 

I think this was the evening when after dinner Dr. Mogs took us on a plant walk up the dirt road, explained why the plants in this hot, dry area had very small leaves, and identified the roadside plants and trees that we encountered. 

Day 4: FLORAL ASSOCIATIONS

Wednesday 7-13-2022

The usual breakfast and orientation and then down to Site #1 to collect the 24-hour specimens from the traps in the transect and reset the traps. Then my favorite activity of this Earthwatch: Floral Visitation Rate studies or FVRs.

Blazing Star (Mentzelia laevicaulis)

We drove up the dirt road a bit to a stretch that had some beautiful blazing star flowers along the road edge. Here we got out three-legged stools, divided into groups of two or three, and recorded the pollinators that visited our flower group over half an hour at 10-minute intervals. Jeanie, Eileen, and I were in one observation group. Isaac sat with our group and helped us with identification. We recorded the numbers of bumblebees, other bees, wasps, butterflies, flies and hover flies, and other pollinators that visited our clump of blazing star. There were ants on the flowers also, but we did not record them as they are not pollinators. We performed three different half-hour FVRs on three different clumps of blazing star.

Then it was lunch, a talk about the geology of the area, a little about the at times conflicting politics among the Deer Springs Ranch Owners Association, the Bureau of Land Management, The National Park Service, Dixie National Forest, private property and roads in these areas.

The ground cup traps—blue, yellow, and white—are filled with soapy water.

On collection, this mixture is strained out through a coffee filter but the collected insects are still wet. So, after lunch and dinner, the interns helped dry and sort our collected specimens. The specimens were placed in a spring-handled tea ball infuser and were dried with a hair drier. Then we volunteers pinned them. Kira was meticulous in her arrangement of the pinned specimens in the specimen boxes.

It may have been this evening that we went on Dr. Mogs’ plant walk. My notes are sketchy at best.